The Royal Academy of Engineering has awarded a total of £39m to 13 innovators working on a wide range of climate-friendly technologies. The first year of the Academy’s Green Future Fellowship Programme will see each winner receive £3m in funding for projects ranging from new types of data storage to renewable fuels for power generation and new, more efficient batteries. The Green Future Fellowships are funded by a long-term £150m investment from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
The funding packages are intended to help scale these innovators’ ideas into commercially viable technologies capable of making a lasting impact on the climate crisis. The Academy highlighted some of the awardees, including the following:
- Professor Laura Torrente at the University of Cambridge is working on using renewable electricity, water and nitrogen to safely and cleanly produce ammonia. The clean energy is stored in the chemical bonds of this carbon-free ammonia, which can then be used as a fuel and a backup for renewable power generation.
- Dr Rostislav Mikhaylovskiy from Lancaster University is developing a new type of memory that could make data centres more energy efficient. His method makes use of very short bursts of terahertz radiation. These light pulses, which are 1,000 times faster than current technology, switch the direction of tiny magnets that store bits of data, all without producing heat. 40% of the electricity used in data centres – which accounts for around 1.5% of all electricity produced – goes on cooling processes. The heat-free method could therefore lead to much faster, cooler and more energy-efficient data storage in the future.
- Professor Robert House at the University of Oxford is using nano-engineering in work on a new kind of battery that is four times more energy-dense than lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries currently in use. This could have applications in electric or hybrid planes, as they are both lighter and more powerful than existing battery solutions.
Some other innovations involve the use of sound waves to get rid of ‘forever chemicals’ in soil and water, and a technique utilising special microbes to convert carbon dioxide into clean hydrogen using green electricity.
Baroness Brown, Chair of the Green Future Fellowship Steering Group, said: “The Green Future Fellowships support innovators who are pushing engineering boundaries, building bold solutions to climate change mitigation, adaptation and resilience. The inaugural Green Future Fellows are pioneering truly advanced technologies and engineering solutions to protect the world we live in.”
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