Energy Catalyst Cooperation

About Energy Catalyst

Energy Catalyst accelerates the innovation needed to end energy poverty. Through financial and advisory support, and by building strategic partnerships and uncovering new insights, Energy Catalyst helps bring to market technologies and business models that can improve lives in Africa and Asia.

Energy Catalyst is an Innovate UK programme with co-funding from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Global Challenges Research Fund, the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

It does this through:

1. Collaboration building: Running a series of international brokerage events for organisations to understand the energy access issues in country, and the potential market, as well as meet local businesses that may wish to collaborate on a project
2. Competition: Annual grant competition for any type of organisations from across the world, to collaborate and get funding for early, mid or late-stage projects which look at sustainable energy technology in Sub-Saharan Africa and South/South East Asia
3. Accelerator programme: Business accelerator programme to help those that are successful in the competition to scale their business, not just their technology
4. Post competition support: Helping previous winners to find additional grant or private sector funding to help scale their technology
5. Learning from overseas: Learning and sharing events to disseminate lessons learnt and new technologies to both government and the private sector.

The ARE-Energy Catalyst Cooperation

Events play a pivotal role to the success of the programme at high impact events which have the widest industry reach and on the basis of market presence within the energy access space. 

In recognition of this, Energy Catalyst presented its programme at various high-level panels including:

• ECOWAS Sustainable Energy Forum (24-26 November 2020)
• ARE Technology & Innovation Forum (27-28 January 2021)
• 6th ARE Energy Access Investment Forum (17-18 March 2021)

To enable mutual learning opportunities for UK and other decentralised renewable energy companies, ARE and Energy Catalyst organised an online ‘Rural Electrification Masterclass’ in March 2021.

Project period

February 2020 - March 2021