WP3 · Fieldwork
The call makes energy the mandatory sectoral focus. But making energy, turning energy into matter, and standing an energy system down are not the same competence — and are not learned, unlearned or relearned the same way. GreenPulse scopes the field in three moments, and selects every site against them.
Primary energy enters the system
Nuclear, wind, hydro, solar — and the grid that moves them. New build draws new entrants into trades that did not exist locally a decade ago, on safety-critical, slow-clock timescales the taxonomies capture poorly.
Energy and matter change places, in both directions
Energy → matter: the four material pillars of modern civilisation — cement, steel, plastics and ammonia (Smil, 2022) — none of which anyone yet makes at scale without fossil energy. Matter → energy: batteries, hydrogen, e-fuels, thermal storage. Both are energy held in matter. Here the worker is neither replaced nor made redundant, but asked to run a recognisably similar process on a different physical principle.
A system is stood down and what it holds is reclaimed
Coal and lignite exit, peat cutting, refinery closure, decommissioning — and the demand side: retrofit, efficiency, circularity. The competence question inverts: what is worth carrying out of a closing industry, and who decides?
The triad maps one-to-one onto the project’s acquire / relearn / unlearn triptych, so the sectoral scope and the competence model are the same structure seen twice. Moment II is the one that resists naming, because two opposite flows run through it: energy spent to make the material substrate of modern life — cement, steel, plastics, ammonia — and matter manufactured to store and carry energy. Both are energy held in matter.
A strand is not a site. It is a comparison the portfolio is built to support — the same competence observed in different directions of travel, across skill-formation regimes.
Building up and winding down, inside the same regimes
Nuclear is the EU's most strategically exposed energy competence and its most awkward one: safety-critical, slow-clock, credential-gated, and impossible to hire quickly. The portfolio holds it as a contrast rather than a case — France builds a reactor pair at Gravelines while dismantling one at Fessenheim under the same national skills plan; Belgium re-tasks teams recruited to decommission back onto restart after the phase-out law was repealed; Poland builds a first-of-a-kind with no domestic fleet to draw on. Three skill-formation regimes, one competence, three directions of travel.
Sites carrying this strand
Hydrogen-based green steel and H₂ storage on Europe's largest mining heritage, hydro-fed.
Battery hub, green chemistry and automotive conversion; port-linked to NO/DK/DE.
EPR2 pair, Verkor gigafactory and ArcelorMittal EAF — alongside 608 confirmed redundancies and a suspended 200 MW electrolyser. All three moments in one employment basin.
The world's largest identified white-hydrogen deposit, at Folschviller, on coal, steel, chemicals and textile heritage.
FRF is NUTS-1, not NUTS-2 — French grandes régions became NUTS-1 in the 2016 revision.
Forty-three years of nuclear identity being dismantled: decommissioning decree May 2026, operations opened 7 July 2026, running to 2048 at €1.4bn. The counterpart to Gravelines within one national regime and one national skills plan — France recruits 100,000 for nuclear by 2035 while this workforce learns to take a reactor apart.
Offshore wind cluster, Princess Elisabeth energy island, hydrogen import terminal.
The whiplash case: teams recruited to decommission, re-tasked to restart after the 2003 phase-out law was repealed in May 2025.
Doel is a deelgemeente of Beveren, in Oost-Vlaanderen — not Antwerpen. The Antwerp port complex straddles two NUTS-2 provinces.
SCK CEN and MYRRHA, with 25 years of institutionalised worker and resident co-decision on waste.
ELWIND offshore zone; port and fishing communities in post-industrial towns.
Recoded in NUTS 2024: Kurzeme was LV003 until 31 Dec 2023.
Laflora: 108.8 MW built on worked-out peat extraction fields — peat cutters reconverting to wind construction and O&M on the same ground.
Keeping a Soviet strategic asset alive after removing its Russian rationale; now a LV/EE/LT/FI regional hub.
Pierīga (LV007) was abolished in NUTS 2024 and merged into LV00A Rīga.
Lignite exit already under way; JTF showcase region — only 55% of the workforce reaches retirement by 2030.
“Wielkopolska Wschodnia” has no NUTS code — it is a Just Transition Fund territory and a strict subset of PL414.
Poland's first nuclear plant — construction licence filed 03/2026, first concrete 2028.
Baltic Power O&M base — ~60 technicians over 30 years; fishing and tourism communities absorbing an in-migrating skills economy.
Choczewo and Łeba sit in different NUTS-3 units despite being treated as one corridor.
Blast furnace to electric arc furnace: 2,800 redundancies against 5,000 retained, reskilling negotiated with unions. The purest conversion case on the map.
ONS revised ITL in January 2025, breaking the old 1:1 NUTS mirror. UKL17 time series are not comparable to TLL44.
Heat-pump installers, RMI SMEs and VET providers — the network built by ECI's 2025 CITB sector-skills study. Dispersed sole traders rather than large-plant employment; carries the New European Bauhaus bridge.
North Sea decline — 191k to 121k jobs 2016–23 — against the Great British Energy HQ. The live UK just-transition controversy.
Europe's smallest coal mono-region negotiating a 2041 exit, under UNDP-brokered social dialogue.
Montenegro is a single statistical region at all three levels. MONSTAT places Pljevlja in the Northern Region; that tier carries no Eurostat code.
Hydro and steel town taking the new build — Gvozd wind, Perućica A8.
Proposed gap-filler. Cement is the pillar with no substitute and no mature decarbonisation route. Brocēni sits inside the NUTS-3 unit already covered for ELWIND — a hard-to-abate incumbent against an offshore-wind entrant in one region.
Proposed gap-filler. The fourth pillar, and the clearest case of an energy price signal propagating straight into industrial employment — Grupa Azoty curtailed production in 2022 when gas made it uneconomic. Natural landing point for green hydrogen.