Olga Kyselova
The SMAGRINET competence hub - called POWER ON - addressing the area of smart and flexible energy systems with interrelations renewable energy and energy storage aims to enhance the capacity of the European universities to engage with industry and key societal actors and to respond to the challenges of the energy transition. It acts as a pool of expertise and source of wide-scale networking opportunities for the project activities.
As a measure to bring together expertise of the smart grid area beyond the traditional networks of the consortium members, POWER ON is an extra source of expertise as well as collaboration and knowledge sharing opportunities. It creates synergies needed in preparing the capacity building programmes where expertise from different sectors and academic disciplines needs to be merged and wide replication is expected.
The main goal of the POWER ON hub is to enhance the capacities of the European universities in energy research, innovation and education and engaging with industry, cities, regions and other key societal actors.
The main task of POWER ON is networking and collaboration within academia and between academia and business, to identify and validate urgent and emerging knowledge, skills and competences needs, pool capacities and allow rapid and wide replication.
All 27 EU member states and associated countries are represented in the hub - at least one university from each country is included. The hub involves stakeholders from different sectors and disciplines to enhance the collaboration among and between academia, industry, societal stakeholders (incl. cities and regions) and across the disciplines.
The stakeholders of POWER ON act as a main pool of expertise in advising the preparation of the capacity building modules and programmes. Input from the hub is actively gathered to integrate the recommendations to the development of the capacity building modules and short-term programmes. The capacity building programmes are driven by the needs of the industry and consider target groups within and beyond engineering. Industry-academia collaboration is additionally integrated to the international mobility programmes at enterprises.
The hub will be enlarged through network building end experience exchange activities constantly during the lifetime of the project.
