Innovate UK committed £27m to offshore-wind innovation on Tuesday 16 June, money aimed squarely outside London1. The package runs to a £10m innovation programme with winners due later in 2026, a £5m Wind Innovation Hub, and £12m for a Large Structures Innovation Centre (LSIC) at the National Composites Centre (NCC) on the Isle of Wight. Vestas, the Danish turbine maker, has signed on as the first industry partner to work on blade innovation.
A shared, open-access site for testing very large composite structures gives small suppliers access to machinery they could never justify buying alone, which is the mechanism by which a manufacturing cluster can form around a single anchor tenant rather than dispersing. Locate that facility on the Isle of Wight and the cluster grows on the coast, where the turbines are assembled and shipped, rather than in the capital.
The siting follows a wider regional instinct in how the state now spends. The same reflex sent £500m of innovation grants to seven city-region mayors, with the first £23.7m going to Liverpool, cutting Whitehall out of the allocation chain. Innovate UK has not yet named the startup-competition winners, the part of this package to watch, since that is where the £10m turns into companies rather than concrete.
