A £3MILLION initiative – the so-called Midlands Energy Graduate School (MEGS) – has been launched in a bid to provide a pipeline of home-grown sustainable energy specialists, including people with practical engineering skills and a grip on new-generation energy technologies now coming forward. The graduate school, not a trace of which can be found on the internet beyond a single news story, will also pilot and develop new methods of training and research collaboration.
MEGS will be run by the Midlands Energy Consortium (MEC) – a flagship collaboration between the University of Birmingham, Loughborough University and the University of Nottingham, which hosts the UK Energy Technologies Institute (ETI).
The money for MEGS has initially come from the Higher Education Funding Council for England.
The new MEGS centre will offer core modules covering the energy system and transferable skills, and specialist modules covering a wide range of energy technologies, including hydrogen and fuel cells; power generation and carbon capture; renewable energy; energy efficiency in the built environment; energy use in transport; electrical infrastructure, and socioeconomic and policy issues.
The graduate school will also seek financial support from industry to help fund specific research projects that could later result in commercialised products.
As for MEC, which has a singularly uninformative website, it has managed to secure more than £10million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to train students in energy technologies through two centres for doctoral training, one focusing on clean fossil fuels and the other on hydrogen and fuel-cell applications.
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