Plugging in to the EU battery
The UK should be watching closely the development of the EU Net Zero Industry Act as a framework for its own policy and actions.
Earlier this week, we made an unscheduled Green Edge post on Jeremy Hunt’s Spring Budget. We labelled the post a weakly green budget because, quite frankly, that’s what we thought it was.
But over the last 12 months we’ve seen major international interventions in the race to Net Zero, most notably from the EU and the US government. Alongside these, big investment programmes have been developed to boost the tracks towards the 2030 interim targets and to help their economies adjust to a non-carbon world.
Here in the UK it sometimes seems we’re plodding from report to report. Right now we’re awaiting an updated Net Zero Strategy and a response to the Skidmore Review. But elsewhere we see real things happening: in Germany, for instance, we see a bilateral deal being made between the Solar Industry Association and the Indian Skill Council for green jobs. The agreement has put in place the Suryamitra Skill Development Programme (SSDP) to ensure a supply of skilled solar workers via the Indian Ministry of Renewable Energy training young electricians within 3 months to real solar skilled status.
Staying with Germany for a minute; to hit its solar energy targets for the second half of this decade, the Germans will need to install three times the amount of solar each year that it added in 2022 (source: PV Magazine). If we look a little further, the European Strategic Energy Technology Plan calls for 66,000 additional skilled workers for PV solar manufacturing across Europe. And we see big numbers tied other European green energy ambitions, such as the need for 180,000 trained workers, technicians and engineers by 2030 for the emerging fuel cell hydrogen sub-sector.
Indeed, at every level numbers are huge…
Image: TGE adapted from Carbon Credits
In response to the realisation of the challenge these growth rates present, the EU is now proposing its Net Zero Industry Act. We take particular note of Skills as being one of the proposed Act’s seven core drivers for Net Zero technology manufacturing investments:
Image: TGE, from EU Net Zero Industry Act proposal.
The proposal document goes on to tell us of major skills shortages and skills gaps, and to address this the EU has identified a number of strategic net zero technologies, which provide few surprises in their inclusions but perhaps one or two in their exclusions. Solar PV and thermal, onshore and offshore wind, batteries and storage, heat pumps and geothermal energy, electrolysers and fuel cells, biogas and biomethane, CCUS, and grid technologies are all included; nuclear isn’t, although it does get a mention or two elsewhere in the plan.
For skills development and supply, the main plan is to establish a series of European Net Zero Industry Academies. There will be one per sector, educating and training around 100,000 people over the next 3 years. When we look closer, we find that these academies follow the same sort of model as the European Battery Alliance (EBA) Academy, established by the top European battery companies including the sadly defunct (when we last looked, at least) Britishvolt.
Source: EIT InnoEnergy/EBA250 Observator.
The target for the EBA Academy is to meet the needs of the industry: that’s 160,000 skilled workers trained per year for an industry that looks likely to employ between 3 and 4 million people over the coming years. The academy also links with Fraunhofer and the Alliance for Batteries Technology, Training and Skills (ALBATTS) to inform current and future views of the skills and competences needed for the battery industry. We’re intrigued to find that ALBATTS already has 26 occupational ‘skills cards’ for the key roles in the battery industry right now, and no doubt will add to this list in the future as new applications and battery lifecycle roadmaps are further developed1.
So, what can we learn from this in the UK? Well, first and foremost, for anyone working on a skills taxonomy for battery-related occupations, for goodness sake don’t reinvent the wheel. Here is an off-the-shelf set of occupational skillsets tailor-made by the battery industry, for the battery industry. It represents European consensus on battery industry occupational standards in a form that education and training providers should be able to just pick up and run with it. Bish bosh.
Having said, that, we do acknowledge this model is not new to the UK. It’s already well established for offshore wind, nuclear, and the process industries, to name but three. Where we feel this model could be strengthened is by officially adding skills to the remits of the appropriate Catapults. We know that a number of them are already active in roadmapping future skills needs – a good example being the workforce development work being done by the High Value Manufacturing Catapult (HVMC). Extended this to the others – with funding – seems to us to be appropriate.
One of the major lessons, though, is around having clarity on workforce targets for each sector, together with the splits by phase of development and occupational types. Through our work for Cumbria LSIP we’ve seen this type of understanding is already well established for the UK offshore wind sector and we can also draw upon similar work in the US and Europe. Methodologies for reaching these numbers need to be shared, though, and we feel that the approach adopted by ALBATTS could be adopted in other sectors too. When the magnitudes of the workforce challenge (broadly, skills shortages and gaps) are properly understood, then skills development plans should, logically, follow.
And finally, let’s call a spade a spade here: if, like Germany has realised with Suryamitra, immigration needs to play a part, then let’s address it properly in the UK before other countries mop up all the world’s Net Zero workforce.
It’s interesting to note further that the 26 skill cards are divided into two groups: 15 in the higher education category and 11 in the various TVET categories. Already, the skill cards go beyond just batteries and cover e-mobility, battery manufacturing, and stationary battery storage.