UK’s Crown Estate has launched a £50m ($63.5m) Supply Chain Accelerator program to increase early-stage investment in the country’s offshore wind supply chain.
The Accelerator fund will look to accelerate and de-risk the early-stage development of projects linked to offshore wind and the UK’s domestic supply chain.
An initial £10m round of funding is open for expressions of interest for businesses looking to establish UK projects that could support the development of a new UK supply chain capability for floating offshore wind in the Celtic Sea.
Earlier this year, The Crown Estate published the Celtic Sea Blueprint research which predicted that 5,300 jobs and a £1.4bn economic boost could be generated through deploying the first floating offshore wind capacity in the waters off South Wales and South-West England from the current Leasing Round 5 process.
This research highlighted several opportunities for supply chain development essential for developing floating wind farms including floating platform components, dynamic cables and connections, wet storage infrastructure and facilities, operations and management infrastructure and facilities, and skills transition facilities.
The first £10m funding round will be geared towards projects specifically looking to address some of these opportunities, helping to kick-start projects by providing matched funding of up to £1m for early-stage development expenditure. The application process opens formally in mid-June and closes at the end of July.
Following the deployment of the first £10m round of funding, a further £40m will be deployed to support UK projects that meet the opportunities identified by the Industrial Growth Plan which was launched by RenewableUK last month, setting out the actions required to triple offshore wind manufacturing capacity over the next ten years.
The UK’s offshore wind pipeline grew by 10GW in 2023 to 93GW, with the sector producing 49TWh of electricity last year while some 125GW could be needed by 2050 to meet net zero.
