The last 10 years have seen a remarkable transformation in the offshore renewable energy sector, and ORE Catapult has been at the very heart of that.
In that time, we’ve seen the cost of offshore wind slashed by about 70% and over 1000 offshore wind turbines installed in UK waters. New innovative technologies, such as floating offshore wind and tidal stream energy have become major players in the race towards net zero and offshore renewable energy has become a key cornerstone of the UK’s energy mix.
ORE Catapult was established in 2013 by the UK Government and is part of a network of Catapults set up by Innovate UK in high growth industries. Our mission is to deliver the UK’s largest clean growth opportunity by accelerating the creation and growth of UK companies in offshore renewable energy. A decade on, we can point towards the significant value and positive impact that we have had on the growth of the sector and in helping the UK tap in to the huge economic potential it offers.
Here are just some of the ways that we have supported one of the UK’s fastest growing, profitable and sustainable industries.
At the heart of any successful industry is a strong and innovative supply chain. Through our support programmes such as Launch Academy, Fit 4 Offshore Renewables and more, we have built strong foundations over the past decade to aid the growing success of the UK offshore renewable energy supply chain and deliver new innovative solutions to market.
Since 2013, we’ve supported over 1350 UK SMEs in their journeys to market.
To deliver a low-carbon future and meet the Net Zero targets by 2050, the UK is going to need new innovative solutions and approaches to challenges, such as how we fully integrate offshore renewable energy into the grid, in order to deliver the volume of production we need.
For the last 10 years, we have been at the heart of over £677m of innovation projects by total value to turn these innovative ideas into reality.
The major growth we have seen in offshore wind has, in large part, been enabled by the extraordinary cost reduction that the industry has delivered in recent years, largely driven by the speed of technology innovation.
Over the last 10 years, our unique facilities, as well as our research and engineering capabilities, have brought together industry and academia, to drive innovation in offshore renewable energy. The role of our research team is to develop and deliver research activity focusing on intellectual property and knowledge creation, in areas such as cost reduction, improved reliability and better modelling for operations. A key part of this is our partnership and collaboration with research and academic institutions at the cutting edge of technical advancements.
Since 2013, we have partnered in over 650 research and development projects and published over 250 research and analysis papers.
Since 2013, it has been our mission to play a key role in delivering the UK’s largest clean growth opportunity, by accelerating the creation and growth of UK companies in the offshore renewable energy sector.
These UK companies are key to the development of the homegrown products and services that will help grow the UK supply chain, and ensure that the country feels the economic benefit from offshore renewable energy.
We have been instrumental in bringing 148 innovative new products and services to market. We have supported game changing technologies such as BladeBUG’s crawling inspection and repair robot; offshore 5G communication network from Jet Connectivity; novel tidal turbine developer Nova Innovation; yacht-racing inspired concept for world’s lightest wind turbine blade from ACT Blade and so many more.
View the heatmap of some of our activities over the last 10 years here.
Over the course of 2023, we will be shining a light on the impact our work has had on the growth and development of the offshore renewable energy sector in the UK, but also, looking forward to the next decade and outlining how we plan to help the UK stay at the cutting edge of the innovations to come. Stay up to date on social media following the hashtag #ORECatapult10.
