What a day we had on 5/8! For us in the Netherlands cohort, we started the day with a very informative lecture on the mechanics of wind power from one of University Twente’s own mechanical engineering professors. Then, we all boarded a bus and drove out to see a modern windfarm ourselves that’s managed by the Pure Energie company.
This windfarm was stared as a collective of smaller ones that wanted to get together to be able to help meet the demand for energy here in the Netherlands. They built on farmland which is still used to grow crops, which is very efficient with the limited amount of space in the Netherlands. The soil used to be the seafloor, but the water was later polder-ed out specifically for the purpose of creating more farmland. According to the engineers on the windfarm, the soil is incredibly mineral rich and does not frequently need supplements to grow healthy plants and nutritionally complete produce. This is good for sustainability because fertilizers can sometimes require complex and energy-intensive manufacturing processes, and applying them to crops can create runoff which tampers with the ecological balance of surrounding waterways. By farming in naturally mineral-rich soil and taking care of it, this practice is avoided and crops can be grown in the surrounding area for years to come.
As for the windfarm itself, the wind turbines create a renewable source of energy for the local community, which means that residents and businesses do not have to rely on local fossil fuel plants for their power. Less of these limited resources need to be extracted and consumed to power the area, and less pollutants enter the air when wind power is added to supplement the grid. In addition, the towers of the turbines are made of a highly-recyclable form of steel. They can be easily melted down and repurposed into other objects that society needs (the propellor blades are not able to be recycled/repurposed easily because they are made of carbon-fiber, but the bulk of the turbin’es weight is the steel tower). In addition, they do not leech harmful chemicals into the soil which could impact local farming activities. Not even the 30 meter deep concrete pillars that root them to the sandy soil below do this. This means that the physical presense of the wind farm is sustainable because it does not impact the resources able to be extracted form the surrounding land. The towers themselves from an LCA point of view are therefore highly sustainable because they do not impact other resources by their existence and are able to be partially re-purposed at the end of their working life.
As for Dutch culture, the existence of this windfarm tells a beautiful story of Dutch innovation and cooperation. Pure Energie manages a collective of wind farms that have all come together to form this collective. Years ago when the stakeholders decided they wanted to do this, there was no way to connect the power they could produce to the Dutch electrical grid. The Netherlands government was willing to build one, but that would take years and market conditions were right and the clean power was needed as soon as possible. So much potential energy and economic and environmental benefit would have been wasted on waiting for a grid connection, so the stakeholders got together and managed to build their own. Only through cooperation, perseverance, and creativity was Pure Energie able to meet the needs of the local area in a timely fashion.
Overall the windfarm was a very cool place to visit and we all learned so many interesting things!