Energy — The energy transition is now an innovation problem
Energy

The energy transition is now an innovation problem.

The world is not short of clean technologies. It is short of the engineering, materials science, systems integration, and process innovation needed to connect, store, deliver, and apply them at the scale and speed the transition demands.

Talk to our team Download the 2026 Energy Innovation Report

The constraint has moved

Generation cost is no longer the binding problem. Everything downstream is.

For two decades, the question was whether clean energy could compete on cost. That question is settled. Solar PV alone added 452 GW of new capacity in 2024, lithium-ion battery costs have fallen 93% since 2010, and global renewables now make up 46.4% of installed power capacity.

The constraint has moved everywhere downstream of generation:

  • Grids built for centralised fossil generation cannot absorb distributed renewables fast enough. Over 2,300 GW of projects sit stranded in US interconnection queues. Germany’s solar curtailment jumped 97% in 2024.

  • Long-duration storage beyond four hours remains technically immature, leaving grids exposed as variable renewables grow past 50% penetration.

  • Heavy industry decarbonisation is blocked by green hydrogen at $4.9/kg against a $2.50 competitiveness target, and cement carbon-capture costs of $144–215 per tonne.

  • Heavy-duty transport, shipping, and aviation require step-changes in battery energy density, megawatt charging, and sustainable fuel synthesis.

  • AI data centres are growing electricity demand four times faster than any other sector, with US AI power demand projected to exceed 50 GW by 2030.

Closing these gaps is not a single-company problem. It is a systems problem – and it is the work Wazoku exists to support.

Across the full energy value chain — and the sectors it touches.

Energy innovation is no longer confined to the energy industry. Wazoku supports internal and open innovation programs across every domain where the transition creates new technical problems.

Generation & Networks

Solar, wind (onshore and offshore), nuclear and SMRs, fusion, grid architecture and modernization, HVDC, smart inverters, DER integration, interconnection.

Storage & Flexibility

Lithium-ion at scale, long-duration chemistries (iron-air, flow, compressed air, gravity, thermal, hydrogen), V2G, demand-side flexibility.

Critical Minerals

Direct lithium extraction, refining, recycling, battery passports, materials substitution and design-for-disassembly.

Hard-to-Abate Industry

Green steel, low-carbon cement, green ammonia, electrochemical synthesis, carbon capture and utilization.

Transport

Heavy-duty road, marine fuels, sustainable aviation fuel, megawatt charging infrastructure, V2G integration.

Buildings, Water & Food

Deep retrofit, heat pumps, embodied carbon, energy-efficient desalination, fertilizer, and the cold chain.

Digital Infrastructure

Data-center cooling, compute efficiency, on-site generation, load flexibility, AI for grid operations.

Workforce & Resilience

Skills programs, grid resilience, methane abatement, climate adaptation, OT cybersecurity.

One platform across all of your innovation.

Most energy organizations run innovation in silos: an internal ideation program here, a startup-scouting team there, a managed crowd challenge somewhere else, university partnerships in a third place. The data sits in different systems, the value never gets totalled, and the same problem gets re-solved three times.

Wazoku unifies all of it.

Wazoku.ai

Capture, develop, and deliver internal ideas at enterprise scale. Our patent-pending xV algorithm scores expected value in real time, so you kill expensive failures early and back the projects that move the needle.

Innocentive Crowd

The world’s leading open innovation crowd. 1M+ solvers across 195 countries, $60m+ awarded to date, and twenty years of proven results on the technical challenges energy companies cannot solve alone.

Startup Scounting & Cohort Building

Surface startups, university IP, ready-made solutions, and subject-matter experts from the Innocentive Marketplace. Powered by Jen, our agentic AI trained on 20+ years of proprietary problem-to-solution data.

Ecosystem Intelligence

Manage your full external network of partners, suppliers, accelerators, and universities in one place – with AI-powered matching and live enrichment from your preferred third-party data sources.

Validation & Willingness to Pay

Pressure-test concepts before you commit. Structured willingness-to-pay studies prove demand exists before you invest engineering time and capital.

Twenty years of energy challenges, with the operators who run the system.

Through the Innocentive Crowd, we have run hundreds of energy challenges for some of the world’s largest operators, utilities, and government bodies – across upstream oil and gas, renewables, transmission, distribution, end-use efficiency, and the materials that underpin all of them.

A2A — Italy

Italy’s largest multi-utility used the Innocentive community to redesign its underground secondary substations, overcoming long-standing constraints on space, access, overheating, and flooding. The resulting design has been productised as a turnkey device with potential application across European distribution networks.

Enel

Enel has run 50+ open innovation challenges with Wazoku, spanning biodiversity at renewable sites, smart-city solutions, and operational improvements across its global generation portfolio.

Aviation Climate Taskforce

Ten of the world’s largest airlines used the Innocentive crowdsourcing methodologies to accelerate breakthroughs in sustainable jet fuel production, targeting cycle-time compression of a decade or more on routes to commercial-scale SAF.

Defence and government

The US Department of Defense, Department of Energy, EPA, NASA, DHS and others have used the Innocentive Crowd to find or create solutions to technical problems that no single agency could solve alone.

See more energy case studies

A worked example

The interconnection queue: a technical problem hiding inside a procedural one.

Consider one specific innovation challenge from our 2026 Energy Innovation Report.

Approximately 10,300 projects representing 2,300 GW are waiting for grid connection in the United States alone. Only 13% of projects that entered queues between 2000 and 2019 reached commercial operation. A significant component of the delay is technical: each new connection requires bespoke engineering studies of grid stability impacts that are slow, manually intensive, and inconsistently applied.

Three innovation pathways could compress timelines without compromising safety:

  • 1

    Automated power-systems modelling that runs interconnection studies in hours rather than months.

  • 2

    Probabilistic grid impact assessment tools that evaluate cumulative effects of multiple connections simultaneously.

  • 3

    Standardised modular interconnection designs that eliminate bespoke engineering for common configurations.

Each is a problem that benefits from a structured open-innovation approach: a clearly defined technical brief, exposure to a global community of power-systems engineers, software developers, and AI researchers, and a managed evaluation process that converts ideas into deployable engineering. This is precisely the kind of work the Wazoku platform and the Innocentive crowd were built for.

The same logic applies to every challenge in the report – from solid-state transformer manufacturing to perovskite encapsulation, electrolyser durability, methane super-emitter detection, and AI-data-centre demand response.

The 2026 Energy Innovation Report

Download the full innovation map.

We have mapped the specific innovation challenges defining the global energy transition into a single 19-page report, drawing on 2024–2025 data and structured into two parts:

Download the report (PDF, 19 pages)

Part I

Innovation challenges within the energy sector itself

Grid architecture, energy storage, renewable generation, critical minerals, and workforce capability.

Part II

Cross-sector innovation challenges

Heavy industry, transport, buildings, agriculture and the food-energy-water nexus, AI and data centres, energy access, and climate adaptation and resilience.

In each section, the focus is not on what is politically or socially difficult, but on what is technically unsolved, economically unviable at scale, or systemically unintegrated – the problems where structured innovation makes the largest difference.

Innovation as delivery, not ideation.

For too long, innovation meant collecting ideas and hoping for the best. Thousands of suggestions, hundreds of pilots, and no clear answer to which of them actually created value.

Wazoku changed the game. We are your Innovation Delivery Partner – ensuring every idea has a value, every challenge has a global solver, and every decision has robust data behind it.

In energy, that translates into three things:

Speed to clarity

With xV scoring on internal ideas and Jen AI on external scouting, you stop spending six months deciding which of forty pilots deserves funding.

Reach to expertise you do not have in-house

The Innocentive Crowd brings PhDs in electrochemistry, retired grid operators, university research groups, and adjacent-industry specialists to bear on problems your team has been stuck on for years.

A measurable return

Customers report 10x faster decisions and 3x partnership value, with the largest enterprise programs generating £100m+ in measurable benefits.

Talk to us.

Whether you are a utility wrestling with grid modernization, a heavy industrial planning a hydrogen transition, a hyperscaler designing a flexible-load data centre, or a government department running a sector-wide program — we would like to talk.

Book a call with our energy team Download the 2026 Energy Innovation Report