As part of the UK prime ministers ten point plan for a green industrial revolution we continue to see grants being made available for energy efficiency and deep carbonisation projects or innovations. In the past week I have seen at least two grants aimed at the adoption of new technologies that specifically mentioned data centres as the target for those grants. These are:
Industrial Energy Transformation Fund (IETF)
The fund is designed to help businesses with high energy use (such as data centres) to cut their energy bills and carbon emissions through investing in energy efficiency and low carbon technologies. The budget for this fund is high with overall £315M allocated over several phases until 2025. There is significant funding available for companies to explore the adoption or for implementation of new, carbon saving technologies. Word of warning: this fund is not for the development of innovations!
The IETF has now opened the second phase and applications close on 6 December 2021. It provides up to £60 million of grant funding for the following project types:
- studies – feasibility and engineering studies to enable companies to investigate identified energy efficiency and decarbonisation projects prior to making an investment decision
- energy efficiency – deployment of technologies to reduce industrial energy consumption
- deep decarbonisation – deployment of technologies to achieve industrial emissions savings
BEIS Industrial Energy Efficiency Accelerator (IEEA)
The Accelerator funds commercial scale demonstrations of novel technology with the potential to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions. It is designed to support partnerships between developers of energy/resource efficient technologies and industrial companies (this includes Data Centres) willing to demonstrate the technologies on-site.
The programme is open to projects from all UK industry sectors that can demonstrate either a novel technology (targeting Technology Readiness Level 5-8), or the use of an established technology in a novel way.
Phase 3 is currently open and is managed by the Carbon Trust and will close on 31 January. The expected grant awards will be in the range £150k to £1m and the overall budget is £8m.
