The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) has announced that it awarded more than €20 million in Government funding to 34 new national energy research awards under the SEAI National Energy Funding Programme in 2025.
This comprises of 25 Research, Development and Demonstration (RD&D) projects and nine Energise Fellowships.
The RD&D projects funded by SEAI span small, medium, and large-scale initiatives across critical energy areas including offshore wind, bioenergy, district heating, green hydrogen, sustainable transport, forecasting, smart buildings, carbon capture, and environmental and climate targets.
The Energise Fellowships Programme supports early-career and mid-career researchers, building national research capacity, strengthening the Irish energy research ecosystem, bridging the research to policy gap and accelerating the development of future research leaders.
The 2025 Energise Fellowships are supporting research across areas including energy poverty alleviation, offshore renewable energy, carbon capture, energy efficient buildings, biofuels, and green hydrogen.
In 2025, SEAI collaborated with three co-funding partners in the RD&D call, each supporting strategically important research themes:
Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine – co-funding research on sustainable feedstocks for anaerobic digestion.
Climate Change Advisory Council – co-funding the development of low-emission and equitable transport strategies.
Met Éireann – co-funding a project on renewable energy forecasting in Ireland’s changing climate.
SEAI acknowledges the value of these partnerships in scaling up national research impact and supporting evidence-based climate and energy policy.
The 2025 SEAI National Energy Funding Programme awarded grants to project leads in several of Ireland’s leading universities, technological institutions, and public and private research organisations nationwide.
The programme will benefit a broad selection of organisations across all projects and fellowships with 16 receiving funding as leads or partners and 29 as collaborators.