Northern Powerhouse must lead on energy industry collaboration, urges innovation centre boss

The Northern Powerhouse must place itself at the heart of the UK’s energy innovation agenda by becoming the first region to lead on major collaboration in the industry, according the head of the Energy Innovation Centre in Ellesmere Port.

The centre’s MD, Denise Massey, said she believes securing the UK’s future energy supplies is among “the most important issues” on today’s political agenda, with ramifications reaching from the individual householder to the Ministry of Defence.

She explained: “And it is only collaboration between the different sectors making up the energy industry – renewables, oil, gas, nuclear etc – that could meet the challenges of the energy trilemma of energy security, energy access and affordability and lower carbon i.e., environmentally sustainable.”

At present, there appears to be “little appetite” for taking action on developing a collaborative approach nationally, Denise said.

She continued: “The Government is open to new ideas and approaches where things are working well in order to inform the development of the national policy framework, but at the moment, those models are simply not there.

“This is where the Northern Powerhouse could come in. We’ve got an incredible asset base in terms of energy – nuclear, gas, electricity, renewables, offshore – and a comprehensive network of SMEs primed for innovation. It’s all right here in the region.”

The Northern Powerhouse, Denise believes, could provide a framework for how the sector’s various strands might work together. Such a blueprint, she said, could over time be rolled out to other parts of the UK.

Speaking further, the Energy Innovation Centre boss said an appetite for this level of collaboration already exists in the North.

Denise plans to discuss the issue further at the 2017 UK Northern Powerhouse International Conference and Exhibition, which is taking place in Manchester next month.

She said: “Cross-sector collaboration in the industry is challenging and almost too big a task to tackle nationally, but the Northern Powerhouse is ideally placed to start a shift towards a collaborative way of working by “thinking big, acting small.”

The Energy Innovation Centre was founded in 2008 to accelerate energy businesses’ discovery, development and deployment of innovation. In November 2015, the facility partnered with the Energy Systems Catapult.