Structural Change
The challenge of phasing out coal mining
The energy turnaround calls for a shift away from fossil fuels toward a resource-conserving economy based on renewable energies. This is intended to reduce our German share of man-made global climate change with its manifold consequential damage. The structural change in the Rhenish mining area, which goes hand in hand with the coal phase-out, is a "task of the century". Research wants to take on these challenges and make its contribution twofold: more energy-efficient electronics for the digitalized society and new value creation with jobs in the region.uncoal mining?
Financing via Structural Strengthening Act
Already the two-year first phase of NEUROTEC (11/2019-11/2021) was financed by an emergency program for structural change via the BMBF. The NEUROTEC (II) project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research on the basis of Article 1, Chapter 3 Structural Strengthening Act Coal Regions of August 8, 2020 (BGBl. I p. 1795). Details on the BMBF funding can be found here. Further structural change projects at Forschungszentrum Jülich can be found here.
Regional orientation
In the preliminary phase, the project outline went through a selection procedure within the framework of the SofortprogrammPLUS of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia carried out by the Zukunftsagentur Rheinisches Revier. An overview of all projects can be found here. An important goal of the project is to strengthen the regional economy by transferring research results and knowledge about manufacturing processes to the cooperating companies located in the region.The transformation platform REVIERa of the RWTH, deals with the long-term perspectives of structural change in the Rhenish mining area in a cross-faculty and interdisciplinary way. KI.NRW is the central networking initiative in the field of artificial intelligence for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The goal of the initiative is to bundle, strengthen and further expand competencies in the field of AI, to interlink science and industry and thus to contribute to an efficient and application-oriented technology transfer.
Impact on the economy
In addition to the jobs directly created by the project, a sustainable impact is sought. The regional high technology in plant engineering and measurement technology promoted here in the project will find a global market in the technology of neuromorphic computing in the future. The vision of the project even sees an economic ecosystem emerging in the region along the value chain of this innovative branch of microelectronics. The nucleus is the projects NEUROTEC and the future cluster NeuroSys with the research institutions RWTH Aachen University, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, AMO GmbH and the cooperating, associated as well as in the advisory board of NeuroSys organized companies.
