Author: Dr Marcelle McManus, discusses why we’ve launched a Centre for Doctoral Training in Green Industrial Futures
How do we create a better future? This is a question I often ask myself. I can think about it all day long as well, because I work in the area of decarbonisation, and doing this correctly is critical to a better future. But what is “correct”? I’m not sure anyone knows, but one thing I do know – we can’t do it alone. We need teams of people working on this – scientists, engineers, accountants, politicians. You name it, we need them. We also need people from all backgrounds and parts of the world because everyone’s experiences are different and to create things differently in the future, we need diverse input.
In the UK we often talk about a skills gap in science and engineering. This is even more critical in the areas of decarbonisation because we need skilled people who can re-imagine and re-design everything we do. Take the example of heating our homes… we can’t continue to do this with gas boilers – but what do we do instead? The many alternative options are not in competition with each other (although depending on what you read, you might think so!), but we need to know how to create a system to enable the change. That means creating fuel and power, infrastructure, technologies such as boilers or heat pumps, understanding and optimising how it all connects, and understanding human behaviour so we can make appropriate changes.
Everything needs to be more resilient in future. What does this mean? Well, we need to design systems that can cope with an ever-increasing demand but also a changing climate. Our electricity systems are set up for small numbers of large power stations and certainly weren’t designed when we thought we would be electrifying mobility or having distributed systems. Throw in some flooding and excess heat – and we need to design that differently.
Is this a headache, or a challenge we can all rise to? I hope the latter. Working together we can help to solve some of the biggest challenges we currently face. Through projects such as the Industrial Decarbonisation Research and Innovation Centre (IDRIC) and our new Centre for Doctoral Training in Green Industrial Futures, we are doing just that.
If you want to join us we have PhD opportunities for this academic year and next, and we’d love to hear from you.
Respond
