In its first two years (April 2021 to March 2023) the UK Government spent £146 million through the 23 Ayrton Fund programmes, listed on the Gov.uk website, delivering international clean energy research, development, and demonstration.

The UK Government has committed up to £1 billion for the Ayrton Fund to support the research, development, and demonstration of clean energy innovations for developing countries, between April 2021 and March 2026, delivered via a portfolio managed by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Departments for Energy Security and Net Zero and for Science, Innovation and Technology.

As of 8 November 2023, Ayrton funding of £595 million has been approved and allocated to 29 programmes. The Departments are working on the design of further new and scaled-up programmes, including some expected to be announced at COP28 in December.

Full budgets per country for 2021-22 and a final audited spend for 2020-21 will be published in due course, including in our regular Statistics on International Development and in the FCDO Annual Report and Accounts.

The Ayrton Fund is a commitment that the UK Government has made to spend £1bn on Official Development Assistance (ODA)-funded research, development and demonstration (RD&D) in clean energy technology and business models for developing countries over five years from April 2021. The commitment will address development challenges in low-carbon energy (supply), low-carbon societies (demand), and smart and flexible energy delivery and storage to meet a range of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as Goals 7 and 13. Tangible examples of areas that the Ayrton commitment will seek to impact include:

• providing affordable access to electricity for some of the 1 billion people in ODA-eligible countries who are still off the grid, including through innovative solar technology for their homes
• enhancing large-scale energy technology to replace polluting diesel generators and ensure clean energy can be stored and not lost
• designing clean stoves like electric pressure cookers for some of the 2.7 billion people who still rely on firewood – with the smoke damaging their health as well as the environment
• working with energy-intensive industries and governments to achieve industrial decarbonisation
• supporting the development of technologies and business models for sustainable cooling – residential air conditioning alone is expected to raise global temperatures by 0.5°C in the years ahead
• designing low-emission and electric vehicles to cut pollution and make transport systems cleaner and greener.

The Ayrton Fund will be delivered through a series of expanded and new programmes and platforms, which will be available to all ODA-eligible countries, depending on the specific programme. Since some of these programmes and platforms are still to be developed, and since many will use open competitions to allocate the support, it is not possible to state at this stage exactly how many least developed countries will benefit (although they will all be potentially eligible).