Cleantech Investor

First published in Cleantech magazine, January/February 2010. Copyright Cleantech Investor 2010

University research departments are a fruitful source of new and innovative clean technologies (see Cleantech IP from Universities: Leeds, the first in a series of features focusing on cleantech intellectual property emerging from universities). Educational institutions must also equip the workforce of the future with the relevant skills.

by Jon Mainwaring

There is a consensus amongst world leaders that large sums of money should be invested in developing renewable energy and other cleantech industries and projects in order to guarantee energy security and fight climate change. But while politicians dream of seeing their economies rejuvenated by a new industrial revolution driven by clean technology, much still needs to be done to educate and train the workforce that will be required to bring about this revolution.

While there is much relevant research taking place within the various departments of universities around the world, engineering faculties that focus exclusively on renewable energy and low carbon technologies are few and far between. Countries that already generate a high percentage of their energy requirements from renewable sources are leading the way in terms of renewable energy engineering education. In Iceland, for example, where 77% of primary energy comes from renewable sources, the School for Renewable Energy Science (RES) was established in 2006 in partnership with two Icelandic universities. RES offers Masters degrees in Renewable Energy Science with five optional specialist subjects of study: geothermal energy; fuel cell systems and hydrogen; biofuels and bioenergy; energy systems; and hydropower.

In New Zealand, the geothermal industry has long benefited from the geothermal training and research carried out at a specialist faculty at the University of Auckland. The Geothermal Institute was the centre of excellence in geothermal science and technology in New Zealand since its founding in 1978 until 2005, when it was absorbed into Auckland’s newly-created Institute of Earth Science and Engineering.

Both Iceland and New Zealand are small countries in terms of economy and population, making the task of leveraging educational resources to improve energy infrastructure more straightforward than it will be for nations with large populations like the US – or even the UK.

Both Barack Obama and Gordon Brown have stated that strong, domestic cleantech industries need to be created in order not only to significantly increase the amount of energy that comes from renewable sources but also to create jobs to replace those lost in declining industries. Meanwhile, the UK is keen to develop nuclear energy as a way to reduce carbon emissions.

The UK has many high-quality engineering courses at universities around the country and these usually teach traditional engineering subjects such as mechanical, civil and electrical engineering. But while these courses have in the past tended to take a general approach towards engineering theory, there are some signs that undergraduate engineering degrees are being influenced by the need to prepare engineers for the energy industry. “Anecdotally, there is now much more interest in energy, and specifically nuclear topics, at undergraduate level,” says Dr Sue Ion, vice-president at the Royal Academy of Engineers. “For example, Imperial College and Manchester now both run [nuclear] modules within their mainstream undergraduate engineering and science courses, which are oversubscribed.”

More specialised courses are beginning to emerge in the UK as well. These tend to be aimed at training research-level graduate engineers and scientists in new energy disciplines. For instance, the University of Sheffield was recently awarded £7 million by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to set up its E-Futures Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) for energy research. The E-Futures DTC brings together world-class research from 13 academic departments at the university to offer industry-focused training across a broad range of energy-related topics. The aim is to channel these diverse areas of expertise to train engineers and scientists in the skills and knowledge required to tackle evolving issues regarding energy generation, management and supply. Sheffield aims to take on 20 PhD students at its E-Futures DTC this year.

Another DTC, focused on low carbon technologies, has been established at Leeds University, while a consortium of universities (Birmingham, Loughborough and Nottingham) has set up a DTC specialising in efficient power from fossil energy and carbon capture technologies.

DTCs are aimed at PhD-level students, and each student is expected to complete a PhD as part of his or her programme at the DTC. However, there is an emphasis on developing transferable skills, so that DTC PhD graduates possess problem-solving and leadership expertise well beyond that provided by a conventional PhD programme. One of the ultimate aims of DTCs is to supply “cutting-edge knowledge and highly-trained personnel into all sectors of the industry”.

Also in England, and as far back as 1993, the Anthony Marmont Sustainable Energy Technology Centre (AMSET) and the Centre for Renewable Energy Systems Technology (CREST) were established at De Montfort University and Loughborough University respectively, using funds made available by Professor Tony Marmont (who has more recently helped to develop a Masters programme incorporating renewable energy and architecture at the Institute of Building Technology, University of Nottingham).

The CREST MSc programme in Renewable Energy Systems Technology is now well established at Loughborough and is involved in projects such as the SUPERGEN Wind Energy Technologies Consortium, which was established in 2006 and is led by Strathclyde and Durham Universities and has support from ten industrial partners.

The University of Nottingham offers an MSc degree in Electrical Technology for Sustainable and Renewable Energy Systems, which is designed to provide training in the equipment and systems used to interface and control renewable and sustainable energy systems.

Masters degrees in renewable energy are also offered by the University of Dundee in Scotland and the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. Ulster became the first university in the UK or Ireland to offer a dedicated Clean Technology BEng Hons in 2009. The four year Bachelors degree course is based at the Nanotechnology and Integrated BioEngineering Centre (NIBEC) in the School of Engineering at Ulster’s Jordonstown campus.  The focus of the course will be advanced materials and nanotechnology – making smarter, stronger, lighter and cheaper materials to support developments in clean technology.
Meanwhile, the University of Birmingham offers an MSc degree on the physics and technology of nuclear reactors. This degree is described by the UK’s Nuclear Industry Association as being “unique in the UK in providing training specifically for careers in the nuclear industry”.

The major issue in the UK is not a lack of availability of courses to train engineers for careers in low carbon industries. Rather, the concern is that too few indigenous students are embarking on engineering courses in the first place. The Royal Academy of Engineering’s Dr Ion points out that, while UK engineering courses currently enjoy strong attendance by students from developing countries such as China and India, many of these students will not be working in the UK after they graduate. “We have a problem in the UK in terms of the number of domestic students willing to study engineering,” says Dr Ion.

This is also the view from the cleantech industry itself. “Science and engineering are not where students go these days because they are hard subjects. We’ve failed to make engineering interesting to our kids,” says Allan MacAskill, business development director at Scottish renewable energy company SeaEnergy, which is developing offshore wind projects around the coast of the UK.

EngineeringUK, a not-for-profit body that monitors trends within engineering, believes engineering employers, the UK Government and the education sector have a duty to enthuse, educate and train the future UK engineering workforce if the country is going to meet challenges such as the establishment of a low carbon economy. However, a recent report from the organisation found that higher education applications for courses in manufacturing engineering – a key discipline for the cleantech industry – continue to fall (by 17% in 2009). This follows previous reports from EngineeringUK which found that between 1997 and 2006 the total number of registered engineers and technicians in the UK fell by 8%.

That is a worrying statistic, since sectors that will play a vital role in transforming the UK into a low carbon economy may end up without the personnel they require. The nuclear industry, for instance, needs to recruit an additional 10,000 staff over the next decade. This is in addition to the people who will need to be replaced from the existing 50,000-strong workforce, 80% of which is older than 50. (source: National Skills Academy for Nuclear).

Across the Atlantic, the US’s leading technical universities are very strong in terms of cleantech research, particularly when it comes to solar energy technologies. Like their UK counterparts, their engineering degrees tend to be broad based. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology does have a course focused on ‘civil and environmental engineering’ and the University of California at Berkeley offers a degree in ‘environmental engineering science’.

Elsewhere in the US, four universities in Ohio – the University of Dayton, Wright State University, Central State University and the Air Force Institute of Technology – are collaborating to offer a Masters degree programme in renewable energy. The newly launched programme will operate within the University of Dayton's mechanical and aerospace engineering department and Wright State University’s mechanical and materials engineering department.

As in the UK, however, most engineers in US cleantech industries get their training on the job. “There is not a specific curriculum (historically) for renewable energy education, although programmes are being developed that have some emphasis on renewables,” says Dr Lisa Shevenell, director of the Great Basin Center for Geothermal Energy at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR). “We have a renewable energy minor at UNR that began approximately a year ago.  It is interdisciplinary among undergraduates in several colleges.”

Shevenell says that there is not yet a course devoted exclusively to her area of expertise: geothermal energy. “However, we are in the process of negotiating a contract with the Department of Energy to fund a national geothermal training institute to be located in Reno.  The institute will be comprised of a consortium of universities that have traditionally been involved with geothermal education, primarily through graduate education.”

The state of Nevada, of course, is a special case in that, like Iceland and New Zealand, it has an abundance of geothermal energy resources. But as other US states and countries begin to identify their cleantech strengths, similar training institutes focused on key cleantech sectors should also emerge.

The European Master of Science in Renewable Energy was established in 2002 by the European Renewable Energy Research Centres (EUREC) Agency (which was founded as a European Economic Interest Grouping in 1991 and incorporates over 40 research and development groups from all over Europe). The EUREC MSc offers five tracks including:

•     Bioenergy
•     Hybrid systems
•     Photovoltaics
•     Energy conservation in buildings
•     Wind energy.

Universities involved include Loughborough and Northumbria in the UK; Ecole Des Mines de Paris in France; the University of Zaragoza, Spain; the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany; the Kassel University, Germany; the National Technical University of Athens, Greece; and the Technical University of Delft, Netherlands (see box - Partner institutions in the EUREC MSc).

Elsewhere in Europe, a Masters degree in renewable energy is offered by the University of Jyväskylä in Finland.

Educating and training the cleantech workforce is not just about producing degree-educated engineers. There is also the need for cleantech technicians, and moves are already being made to equip blue-collar workers with cleantech skills.

In the UK, Aberdeen-based OPITO – an academy that trains apprentices and other personnel for the oil industry – has been working with the British Wind Energy Association to offer accredited training to employees in the wind energy industry.

And in the US, technical colleges are also waking up to the demand for workers with cleantech-specific skills. Back in Reno, Nevada, for example, Truckee Meadows Community College secured funding from the US Department of Energy in 2009 to develop a renewable emphasis in its construction technologies course. The college says that the programme will prepare its students for a variety of cleantech jobs such as solar installers, home energy auditors and geothermal plant operators.

Industry itself recognises the need for workers with the appropriate skills to build and implement next generation technologies, and it is not always prepared to leave the task to the universities and technical training colleges.

Take the nuclear sector, for example. The UK Government wants it to build several new nuclear power plants, but for reasons outlined above it is going to have a tough time finding the personnel required to meet its targets.

So, step forward Balfour Beatty. The UK engineering company signed a deal last year with French nuclear plant builder Areva to help it identify the skills and resources required to deliver a fleet of next-generation Evolutionary Power Reactors and to put an effective supply chain in place so that Areva will be ready to begin construction of its first plant (which could be as early as 2013). Creating the nuclear supply chain will involve training personnel from the firms that form each link in the chain, so Balfour is now running workshops to achieve this aim.

Finally, a surefire way of getting the right engineers and technicians required to build cleantech projects is to poach personnel with transferable skills from non-cleantech industries.

In the UK, offshore wind energy is an important plank in the Government’s strategy for reducing carbon emissions. The Government wants to build 33GW of offshore wind power by 2020 – a huge task in terms of logistics and the skilled personnel needed.

But as oil and gas production activity around the seas off the UK winds down, there should become available people with skills that can be transferred to the burgeoning offshore wind industry. “Training for offshore wind is as much about logistics and project management as it is about turbine technology,” says the RAE’s Dr Ion. “Challenges are akin to those faced by the oil and gas sector when deploying oil rigs in the aggressive environments of the North Sea.”

SeaEnergy’s Allan MacAskill has his doubts about this, however, arguing that skills within the oil and gas industry itself are on the decline. “The oil and gas industry stopped recruiting in large numbers during the 1980s, so it failed to build up a pool to replace the current technical people as they retire during the next 15 years,” he says.

Similarly, land-based oil and gas exploration employs plenty of people who would be useful in the geothermal industry, since the geological knowhow and drilling techniques required to develop an oil or gas well are almost the same as those required to locate a geothermal energy resource and develop it. However, such transferability of skills can also be a disadvantage for cleantech companies trying to recruit and retain a workforce with the right talent. “We have seen instances where graduate students we have been training in geothermal have gone to work for the petroleum industry because it was paying higher salaries at the time,” says UNR’s Dr Shevenell. This may be a short lived phenomenon, however, as the cleantech sector matures and as cleantech and traditional industries merge; there is already evidence of the latter, with oil giant Chevron ranking as a leading developer of geothermal energy projects.

Cleantech Management Training

Aside from engineering skills, cleantech managers will also be needed. There are early signs that business schools are starting to address the special needs of the industry – typically with funding from external sources.

Babson College of Wellesley, Massachusetts, US, which offers a highly ranked MBA programme in entrepreneurship, appointed a Clean Technology Entrepreneur-in-Residence in 2008. Mark T. Donohue, founder of Expansion Capital Partners and a Babson alumnus, was appointed to help design and teach Babson’s clean technology, sustainability and social entrepreneurship programmes.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the Chair for Management of Renewable Energies at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland was created with support from venture capital firm Good Energies. The chair is the first of its kind at a leading European business school.

Partner institutions in the EUREC MSc

•  The Centre for Renewable Energy Systems Technology (CREST) at Loughborough University, UK

- Focuses on research into electricity generation from wind and solar energy and the integration of renewable energy into networks and systems and offers its own MSc programme in Renewable Energy Systems Technology.

• The Centre for Energy and Processes (CEP) of the Ecole Des Mines de Paris, France

- Focuses on the decentralised production of electricity through systems based on thermal and photovoltaic conversion of solar energy and wind energy.

• The Centro de Investigación de Recursos y Consumos Energéticos (CIRCE), at the University of Zaragoza, Spain

- Established by the University of Zaragoza, the ENDESA Group and the Diputacíon General de Aragón in 1993, CIRCE’s objectives include the promotion of innovative solutions in the fields of energy and sustainable resources management. CIRCE also offers its own Masters in Renewable Energy, separately from the European MSc. The University provides the bioenergy specialisation of the EUREC MSc and is involved in ongoing projects in bioenergy.

• The Energy and Semiconductor Research Laboratory (EHF) at Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany

- An international postgraduate programme on renewable energy (PPRE) was established in Oldenberg as far back as 1987.

• The ‘Rationelle Energiewandlung’ (Efficient Energy Conversion, IEE-RE) department at Kassel University, Germany

- Responsible for the hybrid system specialisation course in collaboration with other Kassel University departments, in particular with the ‘Institut für Solare Energieversorgungstechnik’ (ISET), one of the major German renewable energy research institutes.

• The Renewable Energy Sources Unit (RENES) and the Mechanical Engineering Department of the National Technical University of Athens, Greece

- Works with visiting professors from the Technical University of Delft, Netherlands.

• Northumbria Photovoltaics Application Centre (NPAC) of Northumbria University, UK

-  NPAC is equipped with a Photovoltaic Cell Test Facility, which includes two Class A terrestrial solar simulators.