National energy week

The week of 14 to 20 October is national energy week in the Netherlands. This is aimed at government and business stakeholders and has 4 different trade shows throughout the country on the topic, and promotes the energy transition. 

Our Dutch climate agreement has as aim to cut CO2 emissions in half by 2030 (compared to 1990) by 5 goals:

• Built environment: by 2050 7 million houses and 1 million buildings should be disconnected from gas
• Mobility (traffic and transport): by 2050 there are no emissions
• Industry: circular by 2050 and close to no GHG
• Agriculture and land use: climate neutral by 2050
• Electricity: by 2030 all electricity comes from renewable sources

A lot of this agreement focuses on energy related technologies. But there are still technologies costing energy that we don't think about too much in our daily lives. Starting from using less, here are some things we could consider.

Email and attachments: 20 mails a day (no attachments) is the equivalent of driving 1000 km a year. The mails are stored on a server and only if you delete them from your trash, will they stop costing server space and thereby energy (and water for cooling). A 1MB attachment in an email supposedly costs 15g CO2 emissions. So it is better to send a link to a shared file than the attachment itself. As example, if you would send 25 MB per week, you could save over 19 kg.

Email signatures: "An average email signature that features a profile picture and company logo" could be 0.08 MB, which doesn't seem a lot. Depending on how many mails you send, it could add up quickly. According to this link it could become e.g. 10 emails per day * 1.2 grams CO2 * 255 working days = over 3 kg of CO2 emissions. So it is good to reconsider if you need to send the company logo to everyone you mail, or any other text/links in every mail. Does the recipient already know you? Best leave it out.

Saving files on a drive/dropbbox/other online server/cloud: Again, the data centers require energy and water to maintain access to your files. The larger the files, the more resources required. While it is not much, cumulative it becomes a lot and it is good practice to remove files you no longer need, also for security reasons. In 2021 3.7 TWh electricity was provided to data centers, 3.3% of total Dutch electricity use. 

According to milieucentraal an average Dutch household emits 18,500 kg CO2 per year. Yes, it is not much to save around 1/1000th of your annual emissions, or 1/500th, assuming there are 2 people in the household that might reduce these emissions. But times all households in the Netherlands, this becomes a much larger share once more. As these are mostly automated steps that cost little time to set up or adjust, it is an easy change to implement, and all small bits help.

new project to compare the performance of solar panels with and without green roofs

This is a translation of the summary of our proposal to study the performance of solar panels with and without green roofs. It is a project initiated by VU Amsterdam and conducted at the TU Delft Green Village and involved 4 small/medium enterprises as implementation partners. 

The Netherlands has more and more roofs. Those roofs get hot, which causes energy consumption and heat stress. But roofs also offer enormous opportunities, for example for generating renewable energy, and biodiversity. In this project we lay the building blocks for market creation for, and transition to, integrally sustainable roofs. We focus on integral sustainable roofs with indigenous (rather than non-indigenous) greenery (planting), in combination with circular solar panels. We focus on native greenery because it requires less maintenance, water, and fertilization, and because it increases biodiversity. We focus on circular solar panels because they are easier to reuse, and therefore create less waste. This project consists of three activities: measurement, collaboration, and knowledge dissemination. These activities lead to knowledge, partnerships, and shared support, three building blocks for market creation for, and a transition to, integrally sustainable roofs. We measure whether a native green roof cools the solar panels, the roof, and the building in the summer, and keeps the roof and building warm in the winter. 

We also measure the yield of solar panels on a green roof, and whether it is greater (due to cooling) than the yield of solar panels on a black roof (without greenery). In collaboration with various practical partners and knowledge institutions, we explore the financial feasibility and scalability of integrally sustainable roofs, gather what needs there are in education, and see what knowledge and skills for integrally sustainable roofs are lacking. We disseminate this knowledge to education, research and practice. The insights are translated into three educational modules (business administration, policy, built environment) and one educational method (nature-inclusive education). The knowledge questions serve as the basis for new practice-based research that uses citizen science. We share the results with practical organizations that can stimulate an integrally sustainable roof market, such as governments, project developers and building owners. This way we create a shared support for an integrally sustainable roof landscape.