SwissCore Annual Event focuses on energy transition

Experts discussed the role of research, innovation, vocational education & training, and Swiss-EU collaboration for sustainable energy production & efficiency.

While the pandemic did not allow for the Annual Event editions 2020 and 2021 to take place, SwissCore’s signature event was back on 28 June 2022. Martina Hirayama, Switzerland’s State Secretary for Education, Research and Innovation highlighted in her opening address that Swiss and EU objectives to tackle climate change are aligned. Switzerland, the European Union, and the EU Member States have ratified the Paris Agreement that strives to keep global warming below 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Switzerland and the EU plan to phase out their greenhouse gas emissions in order to reach carbon-neutrality by 2050 – while gradually transitioning to sustainable energy production and increased efficiency. She stressed, however, that progress is not coming fast enough and more needs to be done. This brings in vocational education and training (VET), research, and innovation: The State Secretary provided an overview on current policies and programmes developed in Switzerland to strengthen VET, research and innovation in order to contribute to the energy transition. This led her to an additional and crucial ingredient for this effort: “I do not think that I need to highlight the important role that European research infrastructures, Horizon Europe and other international initiatives for R&I play in that respect.” In light of the win-win potential of close Swiss-EU collaboration, State Secretary Hirayama reaffirmed Switzerland’s willingness to begin negotiations on association to the Horizon package and Erasmus+.

This introduction set the scene for ETH Professor Aldo Steinfeld’s keynote speech ‘Fuels from Sunlight and Air’. A keynote that took the audience on a fascinating tour, covering the chemical and technological fundamentals of renewable synthetic fuels production, the importance of collaborating together in a consortium with partners from across Europe and explaining how everyone contributes with their crucial expertise – thus building something bigger than what any one university or research organisation could ever achieve alone. Aldo Steinfeld showed the advantage of the new technology that offers a novel way of producing renewable kerosine made from abundant ingredients: CO2, water and sunlight. He mentioned how different funding schemes from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the European Research Council to the EU framework programme’s technology-specific challenges played an important role in bringing the new technology to maturity. Professor Steinfeld’s former doctoral students went on building the spin-off Synhelion that is now working to scale up the technology to produce renewable kerosine at an industrial scale, first in Germany and then in Spain. Other former PhD students created climeworks, a spin-off that filters CO2 from the air – to be used by companies like Synhelion to produce synthetic fuels together with water and sunlight.

The panel, moderated by the Director of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), Angelika Kalt, brought all of the perspectives together: Dragica Vrhovac, VET Teacher and Project Manager at the ‘Polybau’ VET college in Eastern Switzerland, illustrated the advantage of the vocational education and training approach that relies strongly on the private sector for the training of the future workforce. This enables education and training pathways that are constantly exposed to practice and, in turn, profit from this real-life exposure, making VET pathways highly relevant to educate and train the workforce for the energy transition. Polybau is training apprentices for professions like roofers and facade builders that are insulating buildings, hence increase energy efficiency, and installing solar panels to contribute to sustainable energy production.

Professor Bernhard Hoffschmidt, Director of the Institute for Solar Research at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), is a long-time project partner of Aldo Steinfeld. He and his institute are closely involved in the efforts to scale up production of renewable liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Professor Hoffschmidt co-founded the Heliokon company in 2016 as a spin-off of the DLR Institute of Solar Research, which merged last year with Synhelion and changed its name to Synhelion Germany. Aldo Steinfeld and Bernhard Hoffschmidt agree that there is no lack of young scientists in their field – renewable energy technologies attract a lot of young and motivated talent. However, a bigger challenge is to nurture entrepreneurship in scientists, given that turning new technologies into viable business ideas and making them succeed requires a different skill set compared to the research and early development of new technologies. One approach Bernhard Hoffschmidt views as promising, is to bring the scientists in close contact with trailblazers, scientists who became successful entrepreneurs.

Hélène Chraye, Head of the ‘Clean Energy Transition’ Unit at the Directorate-General Research and Innovation of the European Commission (EC), described to the audience the link between policy objectives and the EU’s education, research and innovation programmes. She explained this in the case of the ‘Fit for 55’ package, the set of legislative proposals by the EC that intends to lower carbon emissions by 55% until 2030 compared to 1990 levels, as well as in the case of the objective of more sustainable energy, including lower dependency from Russian gas and oil imports, as set out in the ‘REPowerEU’ plan (see SwissCore article). Programmes like Horizon Europe in particular are the EU’s tools to fund the research, innovation, and education needed to implement the policy objectives on the ground.