Manufacturing businesses invited to bid for share of £5m to support modernisation

Manufacturing businesses are being invited to benefit from a share of £5m funding, to help improve power electronics machines and drives (PEMD) manufacturing supply chains throughout the UK.

The ‘PEMD scale-up competition’ has been launched by Innovate UK and is part of the Driving the Electric Revolution challenge, and aims to support and highlight the need to invest in PEMD manufacturing in the UK.

Funding is broken down into two different strands, creating opportunity for a variation of projects within PEMD manufacturing in the UK, as well as supporting the UK supply chain to enable technologies critical to help to achieve the government’s net zero goals.

Driving the Electric Revolution challenge director, Professor Will Drury, commented: “Drivers such as climate change, supply chain resilience and the cost of energy mean that there is a growing need to invest in UK manufacturing, particularly across the PEMD value chain.

“This new funding allows us to bring in manufacturers from outside the PEMD industry to help us develop a strong, cross-sector, UK supply chain for these technologies vital for reaching net zero.”

There are two strands of funding that can be applied for:

• ‘Adopting manufacturing best practice’: Strand one aims to fund feasibility studies supporting the transfer of knowledge, solutions, technologies and best practice from other manufacturing sectors, that demonstrate the impact of these innovations on the PEMD supply chain.
• ‘Manufacturing process development’: Strand two aims to fund innovative process development projects that impact manufacturing costs, capability and efficiency to grow resilient manufacturing PEMD supply chains.

UK businesses of any size in the PEMD supply chain can apply to access the funding and are invited to explore the Driving the Electric Revolution Industrialisation Centre partner network which has open-access design, manufacturing and testing facilities which demonstrate the technology and innovations that could be accessed by winning applicants.

Strand one projects can request grants of up to £400k while strand two projects can request grants of up to £800k. Up to 70 per cent of the applicants’ project costs can be covered, depending on the size of the business.

By Matthew Neville – Correspondent, Bdaily

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