The 'Powering Up Britain' action plan launched in early 2023 by the UK government builds on the net zero strategy and sets clear directions for the country's green energy transition. Increased use of renewable energies sources and better energy storage capacities feature prominently in the action plan as key mechanisms to deliver Net Zero. However at the current state of the art, the technologies underpinning this transition (from wind turbines to solar panels and batteries for electric vehicles) are all heavily reliant on a small number of so-called 'critical materials' (typically only produced by a small number of countries and in limited supply). This poses a risk in terms of both availability and affordability, which could potentially compromise the successful transition to a low-carbon economy.

Research into the discovery of new materials and the characterisation of known ones goes back many decades, and has enabled the development of ground-breaking technologies such as solar cells (first developed in the 1880s based on knowledge of selenium and then improved in the 1950s with the understanding of the properties of silicon). In recent years, though, the technical requirements for materials modelling have become much more stringent, making many of the existing computational tools unable to satisfy the users' requirements. Therefore, materials discovery has become an extremely challenging and costly exercise, relying on a combination of inaccurate modelling and expensive experiments.

Through work undertaken in previous projects, Phasecraft has shown that quantum computers could change this paradigm drastically, and that this could be done in the near term (when quantum computers are expected to be small-scale and noisy). Indeed, through the use of proprietary quantum computational techniques and algorithms, Phasecraft has demonstrated how to characterise faster and with (much) greater accuracy materials of interest to industry.

Past work from Phasecraft has focused on selected classes of materials. But Phasecraft's underlying algorithms and quantum software pipeline are readily adaptable to broader classes of materials relevant to the energy sector. The nature of the challenges in the classical simulation is similar across many energy materials, hence the significance of quantum simulation's ability to transform the materials discovery process in this sector. This could ultimately lead to the identification of new materials, or the revisiting of materials that have been overlooked due to approximations made within classical simulation, thus playing an important role in delivering the materials improvements needed to deliver energy security and net zero.