As the fuel cell and hydrogen technologies (FCHT) industry gradually emerges into the markets, the need for trained staff becomes more pressing. Up to the year 2030, it is estimated, around 200,000 trained staff will be required, made up of trained workers, technicians, engineers, and scientists. It can be expected that many university and college graduates will chose employment in this growing industry, but many already employed staff will need to be re-trained, too. Nevertheless, currently very few educational programmes exist in Europe that would be able to train this human resource.
The vast majority of training programmes today is delivered in classrooms and in theory, and/or limited to very specialised knowledge, digging deep into scientific detail. There is a notorious lack of practical education that will supply hands-on experience of pupils, students and professionals of actual processes around production of hydrogen, its safe handling and its electrochemical conversion to electric power.
The Interreg NEW project Green SKHy is tackling this deficit by offering a series of practical training events in which participants are introduced to very basic experiments and inspections of electrochemical production of hydrogen and the conversion of hydrogen and methanol to electricity, as well as basics of safety. Participants can follow very practical verifications of foundational scientific relationships they well know but have never seen realised in a practical hands-on experiment.
The project has established a network of laboratories that will host such courses, with a set of mobile experimental equipment that is packaged in boxes easily transported to training sites in a light vehicle. Following three successful prototype courses in Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland in 2025, another series of events will be conducted in 2026.
The ‘mobile laboratory’ concept will be further expanded to entail a full laboratory set up in a trailer. This implementation of a mobile training laboratory will allow us to bring the laboratory to any training site, run demonstrations, and local industry training events using the same basic teaching equipment alongside fully functional small scale fuel cell and electrolysis units, demonstration models, and commercial fuel cells. The curriculum also includes training on fuel cell and electrolyser materials that is unique in its content and not offered by training courses anywhere else in the world.
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