Hydrogen Systems and Enabling Technologies

ongoing

Hydrogen (H2) can play a substantial role in alleviating emissions in the coming decades and being part of the mosaic of solutions for the mitigation of the climate change. Particularly, green H2 can serve as the crucial element to decarbonize hard to abate sectors such as selected transport and industrial segments, while helping the integration of large amounts of variable renewable energy sources to offer flexibility in the power sector. The EU has been encouraging a clean H2 economy by 2030, and the strategy to achieve its 2050 decarbonisation goals foresees 24% of H2 contributing to the total energy demand by 2050, 560 Mt CO2 abatement per year, 820 bn euro annual revenue generation, and a 15% reduction in local emission. The rapid development of the European Hydrogen Value Chain is expected to create approximately 1 million highly skilled jobs by 2030, and up to 5.4 million by 2050. Developing appropriate trainings is of utmost importance for the deployment of the sector, and ensuring the requested skills for the H2 sector is a central concern for companies. In this regard, we believe that there is a substantial need of education and teaching programs fully dedicated to H2 technologies in the study cycles, and that this specific education has to be driven by research-oriented higher educational institutes together with the technological and economic inputs coming from the companies most involved in the energy transition towards decarbonization. In this regard, 5 HEIs in cooperation with 5 “top-H2” EU industries feel the need to create “Hydrogen Systems and Enabling Technologies” (HySET), a JM program fully dedicated to the H2 area. The aim of HySET is to educate well-trained and enthusiastic professionals with an extensive multidisciplinary knowledge of hydrogen technologies and systems; their training occurs in an international, multicultural environment to stimulate global collaboration to cope with the complex challenges of the energy transition.