Highlands College in Jersey opened its Green Skills Academy on 25 September, a purpose-built renewable technologies training facility delivered by Quantum Group in partnership with the college and Jersey Electricity.
The Academy houses 14 specialist low carbon training bays across the ground and first floors, along with a bespoke mobile ground source heat pump array unit built for the college.
Built around what installers actually meet
Most training facilities are built around a single manufacturer’s equipment. The Academy takes a different approach, covering seven manufacturers across the range of low carbon heating technologies now in use.
Air source heat pumps are represented by Daikin, Vaillant, Grant, Stiebel Eltron and Mitsubishi. There is a fixed Kensa ground source bay alongside the mobile ground array unit. Solar thermal appears both as a standalone bay and combined with an air source system, so students can see a full renewable heating system working together. The facility also includes a Vaillant domestic hot water heat pump, where the heat pump is integrated into the cylinder for hot water only, and an Elnur electric combi boiler.
On an island where an installer is likely to encounter all of these technologies, often in the same week, training on one brand’s version of them is not enough.
Three kinds of bays
The bays have been designed to do three different jobs.
- Demonstration bays are fully operational with no cut-away sections, used to show how a working system looks and behaves.
- Training and familiarisation bays use cut-away sections so students can complete pipework and electrical connections as practice.
- NOCN assessment bays take the same cut-away approach, but are used for formal assessment. These combine air source heat pumps, solar thermal and domestic hot water cylinders from Vaillant, Grant, Stiebel Eltron and Daikin.
That progression matters. Students see a system working, practise on it, then are assessed on it, without ever leaving the building.
A partnership with Highlands College & Jersey Electricity
The Academy was developed with Highlands College and Jersey Electricity, who commissioned the facility. At the opening, representatives from the Government of Jersey and Jersey Electricity spoke about what the Academy will mean for students on the island and the opportunities it creates.
The project builds on Quantum’s work with more than 65 colleges across the UK.
Why we build these facilities
The barrier to scaling low carbon heating is not ambition or technology. It is having enough qualified people to install and maintain it, and that depends on whether colleges have facilities current enough to train on.
Quantum’s mission is to help build the UK’s low carbon workforce, and this is how we do it. The Green Skills Academy gives students in Jersey hands-on experience of the technologies the transition depends on, and a clear route from the classroom into the industry.
