Climate-KIC: will Euro millions deliver low carbon future?

Matthew Rhodes runs Encraft, an independent engineering consultancy based in the Midlands that specialises in onsite renewables and low carbon buildings. He’s had some first-hand experience of publicly funded projects and, for the most part, prefers to steer clear of them. But he was straight on the phone to his regional development agency, Advantage West Midlands (AWM), this week when he found out it had successfully bid to be part of a new €750 million (£652 million) programme set up to help transform Europe into a low carbon society.

The European Institute of Innovation and Technology’s 'Climate-KIC’ – which stands for Climate Knowledge and Innovation Community – has an impressive budget and a mission statement to match. "Climate-KIC will provide the vision, technologies, people and partnerships required for Europe to make a step-change in it ability to mitigate and adapt to the challenges of climate change", it states on its website.

Launched in December, Climate-KIC is a consortium made up of Europe’s top universities, including Imperial College in London. Companies, such as CISCO, Shell and Thales, are also partners. The West Midlands, meanwhile, is one of six European regions selected to test, develop and facilitate the innovations pioneered through Climate-KIC.

Last week, José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, described these regions as "innovation hotspots" that would attract "the brightest talents from Europe and beyond.

"They should develop into the 'places to be’ for those students, researchers, and entrepreneurs who want to work together in areas of high relevance for our common future."

Creating low carbon jobs

West Midlands Minister, Ian Austin, said it presented "a unique opportunity to create low carbon jobs that will help us build our way out of the current recession."

Rhodes is certainly interested in any project that can help do that. His company, which is based in Leamington Spa and has been around since 2002, is as he puts it "committed to a low carbon economy". It is currently behind a major retrofit project that is creating jobs in the West Midlands, the Birmingham Green New Deal. The £40 million pilot project, across four areas of the city, aims to retrofit over 5000 homes, save over 4000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, and create 150 jobs.

But while he’s creating jobs, filling those skilled positions is not so easy. What made Rhodes get onto the phone to AWM this week is the fact that through the Climate-KIC project, the regional development agency is trying to address the sort of skills shortages Encraft is facing.

The West Midlands is to be a test bed for new research and innovation programmes on the themes of climate science, low carbon cities, zero carbon production systems and integrated water management.

According to Aled Thomas, European Policy director at AWM, the programmes will create new companies and spin-outs and help develop markets for existing low carbon companies, including "smaller, more entrepreneurial companies," but it will also offer advanced training and new skills.

Green skills placement programme

"The West Midlands is already working on low carbon projects, such as electric urban mobility, so we have launched a placement programme that will allow people to go and work on such projects.

"People that go on the placements will have experience of working in related industries, such as the automotive industry or in a transport department in the public sector, but they won’t have yet fully understood how to transfer their skills to a low carbon [environment]. Our programme will allow them to do this."

For Rhodes, this is good news as he can see how such a scheme could benefit his company. "We have projects that we need people for," he says. "This seems to me to be the right way to invest the money."

He’s also impressed by the fact that Climate-KIC is a European-wide programme. "There is an awful lot the UK can learn from the rest of Europe when it comes to low carbon innovation," says Rhodes. "Knowledge transfer is very important and the fact that this programme addresses this is encouraging."

Climate- KIC: listening to business

But Rhodes would like to see something else come out of Climate-KIC – or rather not. For him getting the UK and Europe onto a low carbon footing is not about spending more money on research projects, but about investing in the deployment of existing technologies.

"We have the green technologies," he says. "Really the money needs to go into businesses, but a lot of the money goes into academia. That model is flawed though and it has to change."

The Climate-KIC programme is certainly focused on research, but Thomas says it is addressing the gap between academia and the commercial world. "The EIT wants to do things differently, so rather than funding research [in isolation], we are going to shorten that process and our job will be to test out some of those ideas. The research needs to be informed about what is practical on the ground," he says.

Climate-KIC is expected to run over the next seven to 15 years, but the £652 million will be spent over the next four years. Of that money the EIT will put up £104 million, with the rest of partners contributing five times that amount.

Rhodes says the jury is still out on how effectively the money will be spent, but so far he’s been encouraged by what he’s heard. "I have been quite critical of these projects in past," he says, "But the good thing about this one is that it looks like they are listening to some of what we’ve been saying."

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Related Sites:
www.climate-kic-proposal.org