Due to their interdisciplinary work in research, innovation, education and training, universities are core stakeholders in Europe's energy transition towards a low carbon society. They also are important change agents that will be instrumental in responding to the above mentioned challenges.

In order that European universities contribute fully to the objectives of the Energy Union and to the SET Plan^[1] they need to cooperate further with innovative businesses and offer appropriate curricula/programmes^[2]. To do so silos need to be broken between energy technologies and interdisciplinarity that is conducive to addressing the challenges of the whole energy system needs to be fostered. The appropriate skills for tackling the energy transition, going beyond separate technologies and incorporating social, entrepreneurial/managerial and market aspects of the energy system, need to be developed.

In addition, solutions need to be clearly targeted, oriented to meet skills needs quickly, easily replicable in other domains and scalable to other European universities/institutions. For this purpose it is crucial to have active networks in place among universities and between universities and business.

Scope:

Proposals will cover one or more of the following fields:

• Renewable energy,
• Energy storage,
• Smart and flexible energy systems,
• Carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS).

Proposals will combine the relevant scientific and technological elements of these fields with relevant social sciences and humanities in a way that is balanced and provides an interdisciplinary approach (e.g. involving SSH scientists as partners; including SSH scientific subjects as parts of interdisciplinarity, developing special SSH curricula or similar).

Proposals will deliver all the following, addressing the specific needs of the SET Plan objectives and its Implementation Plans:

• Efficient and effective cooperation networks both among European universities and between European universities and business;
• Challenge and case-based modules that are linked to European university programmes (at least three per programme) to teach students about operational problems combining the social, technological and industrial dimensions;
• At least three innovative (such as using digitisation) and short (3-4 months) university tools/programmes in the chosen field or fields, which are replicable and scalable in Europe, and respond rapidly to urgent European industry needs and the rapidly evolving European energy landscape;
• Opportunities for student mobility between the academia and industry.

The networks will also address needs for training the trainers. However, except for piloting, the actual teaching or training the trainer activities remain outside the scope of this topic. Modules and programmes will only be developed in English.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU in the range of EUR 2 to 4 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Please visit the official call page for more details