DHC Academy - Green and Digital Skills for Smart District Heating and Cooling Networks

This is a proposal for a comprehensive and long-lasting educational platform, the DHC Academy, in response to the emerging demand for new and enhanced skills and competencies associated to the transition and decarbonisation of the European heating and cooling sector. The proposal brings forth an integrated alliance with a skills and practitioner competencies dimension and a higher education and academic competencies dimension. Together these dimensions constitute the fundamental pillars of the proposed academy. The overall vision of the initiative is to provide an easily accessible, market-demand responsive, and digitally agile platform for the provision of educational content, interactive opportunities, and concrete support to foster wide-spread distribution of sectoral and cross-sectoral expertise and know- how under a cross-border European Union scope. The proposal aims at overcoming some of the limitations due to the vertical characteristics of existing curricula that seldom approach the cross-sectorial peculiarity of DHC. The DHC Academy represents a long-term plan for the possible establishment of continued activities post project life-time, where, for example, the here conceived higher educational course catalogue could be further developed into a full two-year international Master Program on the DHC theme. Notably, the initiative assembles current and unique European expertise within the heating and cooling sector in one coherent context, into which experiences and learnings from several past and current EU-funded research projects in the field will be integrated. In conclusion, we submit this proposal as a conceptual plan for a dedicated future educational platform in the area of district heating and cooling that we would like to test and explore.