Innovation projects secure funding for Beta development

Future energy 11 Jun 2026 - 2 minute read
Worker looking at digital screen

Two groundbreaking innovation projects, FastPress and Network Security in a Quantum Future have been awarded funding to progress to Beta phase development after completing successful alpha phases.  

FastPress

Improved planning can make Great Britain’s (GB) gas system more resilient and help avoid unnecessary costs. As part of our whole-system planning role, NESO and National Gas Transmission (NGT) must understand the impact of maintaining, retiring or repurposing multi-billion-pound assets.

FastPress Alpha + developed an optimisation tool around the pressure solver that automates and standardises the workflow for gas analysts, enabling them to quickly explore a wider range of demand, supply patterns, and network configurations. In Beta, FastPress will deliver a major step forward for NESO and NGT by moving from analysing a single moment in time to fully capturing the time-dependent variations of flows on the gas network. It will also introduce smarter optimisation to plan when assets should be removed or repurposed over the coming years, without compromising system resilience.

Network Security in a Quantum Future  

GB’s electricity grid is changing fast, and our control room relies on trusted data, secure systems and strong encryption shared across many organisations to keep power flowing safely and reliably. To stay resilient and deliver reliable energy to customers, energy networks must address the quantum threat in their cybersecurity strategies.

The Network Security in a Quantum Future project will help prepare the network for future cyber threats from quantum computing. It builds on two tools developed in the Alpha phase, the Quantum Threat Tracker (QTT) and the Quantum-Aware Risk Manager (Q-ARM) and will turn them into minimum viable products. These tools will help the network move to stronger, quantum-safe security in a way that is cost-effective, scalable, and repeatable.

NESO is looking forward to working with Faculty Science and National Gas Transmission to deliver FastPress and Cambridge Consultants,  University of Edinburgh, SP Transmission and National Gas Transmission to deliver Network Security in a Quantum Future. 

These projects are funded through the Strategic Innovation Fund, an Ofgem programme managed in partnership with Innovate UK.