We began the day early with a lecture on wind energy. He began with the history of the Netherlands and their reliance on windmills, then moved onto the technical side of wind energy. An interesting topic he discussed was wind energy security: essentially, because fossil fuels are very important and there’s a lot of politics and trade surrounding them, they create conditions for war. Renewable energy such as wind energy, however, is localized, and as a result doesn’t create these conditions for war.

Afterwards, we took a sustainability tour of the campus, where we learned about the efforts the university has taken to reduce their environmental impacts. Something that stood out to me the most are that they have permeable pavements so that rainwater can infiltrate the ground, thus preventing flooding. Additionally, there’s over 3000 solar panels around campus, however this surprisingly only contributes to about 3.2% of the energy supply.

After taking a quick lunch break, we went to a wind farm called Windpark Groen. They explained the process in which they get the energy from wind turbines: energy produced is stored in batteries, which then can be released to the grid when needed. It was really cool to be so up close to a wind turbine, because I was able to see the intricacies of them and their airfoil shape.

We left the wind farm and spent the rest of the day in Elburg, and small medieval town with a rich history. We learned about how the town has transformed throughout the years as well as how it was affected by World War II. This was such a beautiful town, and I loved walking around and exploring. I thought it was interesting to learn about the town’s historical preservation: when rebuilding homes after World War II, they built the homes in the same style and spent time ensuring it was accurate.