Establishing international links to foster the development of power engineering skills in Africa: EPPEI and SELECT Masters’ programmes

摘要

During the last decades, the European Union (EU) has been leading the worldwide policies to mitigate climate change tending towards transition to low-carbon economy. This has led to the development of renewable energy technologies that are presently being widely implemented all over the world including South Africa. In the EU as in some other parts of the world, the power sectors are moving away from the traditional model of centralised power generation for which the European Institute of Technology (EIT) and its Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KIC) centre are providing research and development support as well as business leadership to accompany these changes (see Suwala, Wyrwa and All, 2013). The KIC programme supported the development and facilitated the operation of a number of Master’s and PhD programmes including SELECT and SENSE that have been identified of potential interest for South Africa. On the other hand and as previously presented at POWER-GEN Africa, Eskom has launched its Eskom Power Plant Engineering Institute (EPPEI) to bridge the high level engineer skills gap for the power industry. While adressing the engineering training needs, EPPEI also intends to facilitate the development of a localised power industry to cover the tremendous power needs of the region in all business dimensions of power generation, transmission and distribution. This paper presents two masters’ programmes which have been launched at the beginning of the 2010s, i.e. the South African Eskom Power Plant Engineering Institute (EPPEI) and the SELECT Programme in Europe. Both programmes link universities and industrial partners working on teaching and researching on all aspects of energy transition activities towards more sustainable energy. The paper also presents the preliminary steps that have been carried out to put in place co-operation between these two programmes to foster the relationships between the universities and industry on both continents. The aim is to contribute to the development of highly skilled engineers that will be able to handle the complex situations of these energy systems in transition. This co-operation should enable sharing courses, exchanging students and lecturers while carrying out co-operative research with innovative envirometric solutions to the power industry and enhancing the enterpreneurial skills of engineers.