OZEV ElIGIBILITY ONBOARD OFFICE FOR ZERO EMISSION VEHICLES CALLS FOR PROPOSALS RANGE EXTENDERS FUNDING COMPETITION GRANTS FEASIBILITY STUDY STUDIES

OZEV ELIGIBILITY (ONBOARD)

OZEV FEASIBILITY STUDIES RANGE SUSTAINABILITY EXTENDERS FOR VANS AND TRUCKS

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Fuel Cells and Hydrogen

Transitioning towards Zero Emission Vehicles: feasibility studies - onboard

Under this scheme, UK registered businesses can apply for a share of up to £7million to develop on-vehicle solutions that address challenges associated with the transition to zero emission vehicles. Funding is from the Office of Zero Emission Vehicles (OZEV).

Competition opens: Monday 15 March 2021
Competition closes: Wednesday 21 April 2021 11:00am

SUMMARY - ELIGIBILITY - SCOPE - HOW TO APPLY - SUPPORTING INFORMATION

CALL (COMPETITION) ELIGIBILITY RULES - WHO CAN APPLY

Your project must:

- have total eligible costs between £300,000 and £600,000
- start by 1 Aug 2021
- end by 31 March 2022
- last up to 8 months

Innovate UK will not approve project extensions beyond 31 March 2022.

You can only claim funding for project costs incurred up to 31 March 2022.

If your project’s total eligible costs fall outside of our eligibility criteria, you must provide justification by email to support@innovateuk.ukri.org at least 10 working days before the competition closes. We will decide whether to approve your request. 0300 321 4357

Lead organisation

To lead a project or work alone your organisation must:

- be a UK registered business of any size
- carry out its project work in the UK
- intend to exploit the results from or in the UK

For more information on company sizes, please refer to the company accounts guidance. This is a change from the EU definition unless you are applying under State aid.

Academic institutions and RTOs cannot lead or work alone.

Project team

To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must:

- be a UK registered business, academic institution, charity, not-for-profit, public sector organisation or research and technology organisation (RTO)

- carry out its project work in the UK

- intend to exploit the results from or in the UK

Academic institutions must have their research team ready to start at the beginning of the project.

The maximum number of organisations allowed in a consortium in this competition is 3, including the lead. This maximum number includes non-grant claiming partners, but not subcontractors.

For collaborations, the lead and at least one other organisation must claim funding by entering their costs during the application.

Each partner organisation must be invited into the Innovation Funding Service by the lead to collaborate on a project. Once accepted, partners will be asked to login or to create an account and enter their own project costs into the Innovation Funding Service.

Your project can include partners that do not receive any of this competition’s funding, for example non-UK businesses. Their costs will count towards the total eligible project costs.

Subcontractors

Subcontractors are allowed in this competition.

Subcontractors can be from anywhere in the UK or European Economic Area (EEA) and must be selected through a participant’s normal procurement process.

If a subcontractor is selected from outside the UK or EEA, a case must be made in question 5 as to why no UK or EEA based subcontractor can be used including a detailed rationale, evidence of UK and EEA companies that have been approached and reasons why they were unable to do so.

We expect subcontractor costs to be justified and appropriate to the total eligible project costs. A cheaper cost is not deemed as a sufficient reason to use a subcontractor outside of the stated locations.

Subcontractors costs are limited to 30% of the total eligible project costs. If your consortium is using more than one subcontractor, this maximum is shared between them.

Number of applications

Any UK registered business, can lead and collaborate in any number of applications. Should you be successful in multiple projects we would expect you to provide evidence on your capability to fund and manage your projects.

Academic institutions, charities, not-for-profits, public sector organisations and RTOs can collaborate on any number of applications.

PREVIOUS APPLICATIONS

You can use a previously submitted application to apply for this competition.

We will not award you funding if you have:

- failed to exploit a previously funded project
- an overdue independent accountant’s report
- failed to comply with grant terms and conditions

ELIGIBILITY OVERVIEW

This is a new way of showing you eligibility. Your feedback will help us to improve it.
Eligibility overview - Transitioning to zero emissions FS.pdf (opens in a new window)

SUBSIDY CONTROL (and State aid where applicable)

This competition provides funding in line with the UK's obligations and commitments to Subsidy Control. Further information about the UK Subsidy Control requirements can be found within the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation agreement and the subsequent guidance from the department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).

Innovate UK is unable to award organisations that are considered to be in financial difficulty. We will conduct financial viability and eligibility tests to confirm this is not the case following the application stage.

WARNING

Be careful here, what the State appears to be saying is that you are wasting your time applying unless you have a trading track record, or significant sums in the bank.

Hence, do not start up a company or start any business (as an SME), to be able to make an application without at least £90,000 - 180,000 deposited, depending on the total cost of any project proposal. Or you will fall at this hurdle. Your time making any application will thus be wasted - and time is money!

We'd suggest seeking clarification in writing.

Your best bet might be to make a patent application using the fast track process allowed for potential climate solutions. Having lodged your patent, such that you own the technology, you might then offer your solution to other companies by way of a development partnership, to those who are likely to benefit, where those established concerns with an R&D budget, or investment fund, have the money to pass the Viability and Eligibility Tests in Subsidy Control.

Obviously, OEMs may resist taking on board technology they have not developed, and may even seek to undo the rights the State grant to you. But this is an urgent matter, where such competitive norms may be waived. You may get lucky.

We consider that Innovate UK should have mentioned this upfront - in any marketing campaign - to save hopefuls with good ideas from wasting their time reading these application rules - where up-front clarification is needed to comply with SDG16.

Unfortunately, patents are expensive to apply for and time limited as to protection offered (20 years). You'd probably need world cover, but there is a way around that, where if you secure a patent in the UK, USA or European Country with zero carbon aspirations, nobody could make and sell vehicles with your innovation/system onboard, in the applicable geographical region, without first negotiating a royalty.

Okay, so having protection in one country might not seem like much, but it is a way of getting your foot in the door, to generate an income for future development.

The other snag, is that where a country is seeking such transitional acceleration, that if patent protection is only secured in their region, export potential is lost forever. This is so, because, once published in the UK (or wherever) there is only 12 months to file in other regions. At the rate of policy making and with UK and other EU banks not recognising the value of intellectual property as collateral, entrepreneurs in Britain and Europe stand little chance against other countries.

You can expect the Asian giants to reverse engineer your IP, where they will escape the need to pay royalties on sales in their geographical regions. But crunch time will come if they seek to earn export dollars with goods made that would be illegal if sold in any country where you may have a valid patent.

The good news is that they may further improve the concept, and decide to agree to pay a licence fee to be able to sell range extended EVs without challenge in Europe (for example). This is because of confiscation orders extending to products and profits.

European Commission State aid

You must apply under European Commission State aid rules if you are an applicant who is conducting activities that will affect trade of goods and electricity between Northern Ireland and the EU as envisaged by Article 10 of the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland in the EU Withdrawal Agreement.

In certain limited circumstances, the European Commission State aid rules may also apply if you are an organisation located in England, Wales, or Scotland and conduct activities that affect the trade of goods and electricity between Northern Ireland and the EU. For further information, please see section 7 of the BEIS technical guidance.

For further information see the general guidance on state aid and BEIS guidance on the Northern Ireland Protocol.

For applicants subject to the European Commission State aid rules, applicants will be required to prove that they were not an “Undertaking in Difficulty” on the date of 31 December 2019 but became a UID between 1 January 2020 and 30 June 2021. We will ask for evidence of this.

Further Information

If you are unsure about your obligations under the UK Subsidy Control regime or the State aid rules, please take independent legal advice.

You must make sure at all times that the funding awarded to you is compliant with all current Subsidy Control legislation applicable in the United Kingdom.

This aims to regulate any advantage granted by a public sector body which threatens to or actually distorts competition in the United Kingdom or any other country or countries.

If there are any changes to the above requirements that mean we need to change the terms of this competition, we will tell you as soon as possible.

FUNDING

The OZEV have allocated up to £7 million to fund innovation projects in this competition.

This competition includes 2 strands:

- feasibility studies (this strand)
- collaborative R&D

For feasibility studies, up to £1 million has been allocated. Innovate UK will use a portfolio approach and reserves the right to move some of this funding to the collaborative R&D strand 2.

If your organisation’s work on the project is mostly commercial or economic, your funding request must not exceed the limits below. These limits apply even if your organisation normally acts non-economically.

For feasibility studies, you could get funding for your eligible project costs of:

up to 70% if you are a micro or small organisation
up to 60% if you are a medium-sized organisation
up to 50% if you are a large organisation

The research organisations undertaking non-economic activity as part of the project can share up to 30% of the total eligible project costs. If your consortium contains more than one research organisation undertaking non-economic activity, this maximum is shared between them.

MORE ON ELIGIBILITY TESTS & PREVIOUS PROJECTS

Before you start your application you must make sure that any previous projects have been completed fully.

If you applied to a previous competition as the lead or sole organisation and were awarded funding by Innovate UK or UK Research and Innovation, but did not make a substantial effort to exploit that award, we will award no more funding to you, in this or any other competition. You will not be able to contest our decision.

The OZEVs will:

- assess your efforts in the previous competition against your exploitation plan for that project

- review the monitoring officers’ reports and any other relevant sources for evidence

- document our decision, which will be made by 3 team members, and communicate it to you in writing

Under the terms of Innovate UK funding, you must submit an independent accountant’s report (IAR) with your final claim. If you or any organisation in your consortium failed to submit an IAR on a previous project, we will not award funding to you in any other competition until we have received the documents.

Do not forget to include accounting costs in your proposal to be able to pay for your IAR.

Your application

The OZEVs will not send your application for assessment:

if you:

- deliberately increase word count using punctuation
- use unprofessional, aggressive or threatening language
- submit with a notable lack of content
- apply with no clear innovation

if the application:

- is the same as, or very similar to, a project that has received public funds previously
- is the same as, or very similar to, another application
- has already been submitted for assessment in 2 other competitions

if the competition does not allow a previously submitted application

You can submit an application that was unsuccessful in one previous competition. You can improve your application based on the assessors’ feedback and the scope of the competition.

If you submit a new application this time you can only submit the updated application into one future competition that allows this.

LINKS & REFERENCE

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-for-zero-emission-vehicles

https://apply-for-innovation-funding.service.gov.uk/competition/870/overview?_ga=2.62674792.599942321.1615457464-224646731.1615457464
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/innovation-apply-for-a-funding-award#applying-for-a-competition-on-the-innovation-funding-service
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/20-million-fund-fuels-search-for-electric-vehicle-innovations
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-for-zero-emission-vehicles
https://apply-for-innovation-funding.service.gov.uk/competition/873/overview#summary

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-for-zero-emission-vehicles

DUAL FUEL - Service stations like that above, are not needed for the proposed onboard range extending kits for trucks and vans, but in the longer term such off-board facilities could provide the infrastructure solution to comply with the Automated and Electric Vehicles Act 2018.

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