Our first full day at the Univeristy of Twente began with a quiant sustainabilty tour all throughout the campus, showing off the different architecture, engineering, and policies to ensure sustainable practices are prioritized all throughout their school. Some of these things included a man made pond used to cool the campus’s buildings, permeable stone used to store rainwater as groundwater, natural reseviors to hold excess groundwater, and easily sortable garbage all throughout campus. The tour guide explained how knowledge and use of these things is promoted by different student government boards through incentives, posters, and presentions. I thought that many of the ideas were very smart and made sense for their campus, but would be difficult to implement on a campus like Pitt’s because of how integrated into the arboreal environment they were.
Following the tour, we got a little taste of being a UTwnete student during a lecture about the physics of wind power and windmills, with a bit of history sprinkled in to show why this power is such a neccesity for the Netherlands. I thought the lecture was really interesting and it was super cool to get an idea of what I’ll be learning back home at Pitt in the near future. The professor, Arne van Garrel, explained how laminar (orderly) and turbulent (chaotic) flow from the wind are used in tandem to create opposing positive and negative pressures, creating a lift that pushes the wind turbine blades up. This technology was incredibly important for Dutch development and innovation as we learned the first time we saw them in Zaandijk Zaanse Schan, but now they generate a large poriton of the country’s power that is used to maintain their complex water drainage system and flood defenses. I wish I could’ve understood a bit of the physics better, but I’m really looking forward to when it comes up in class again :]
After our lecture we got to see everything we just learned put into practice at the Pure Energie wind farm. Our lecture had very briefly mentioned that an argument against the implementation of windmills is the noise pollution they create, so I was very surprised to find the one we were directly under was completely silent. The workers there told us that newer windmills have a very slight serrated edge, and this is enough to completely nullify the noise of the blade. They also have the ability to shut down the windmills individually, so should any repairs or inspections need to be made they can do them one windmill at a time and keep the power grid on. If they still need extra power, they can use massive 30 mega watt batteries to supply the grid in the meantime. The same batteries can be used during emergencies too, such as a catastrophic faliure (which, luckily, rarely happens with windmills) or a natural diasaster/storm. I thought that the visit must’ve have been really fun for electrical engineers to learn about how all the power was collected, managed, stored, and used, but I was having more fun myself trying to figure out the mechanical physics of the blades and motors used in the windmill worked. I did, though, think it was really impressive how much of the country’s power is generated by wind power and sustainable energy, especially when compared to the US. I suppose it may be easier when the Netherlands is a much smaller country, but I don’t think that is good enough of an excuse for the US to favor fossil fuels over green energy with the fervor it does now.
After the windmill farm visit, we took a trip to the old medieval town of Elburg. The town was gorgeous, and as we came to learn, extremely well preserved. Our tour guide took us through an extensive history of the city, from when it first began as a poor farming town, to its destruction during a great fire, and finally to the reconstructed and historial town it is now. She walked us through several landmarks of the town, such as the walls that started as a tool for defense, but quickly doubled as a home for people who built up against it; the runes built all throughout the white stone gravel paths; and the church that started the city destroying fire.
It was very interesting to learn about a place that has such deep, rich, and well-documented history, espeically when coming from the United States which is only a few hundred years old compared to Elburg’s near thousand. I also enjoyed learning about the architecture and design of the town – the tour guide taught me that what I originally thought were more of the aformentioned runes in the walls were actually stakes marking where the second floor of a home was and were crucial to the structual integrity of the second floor and the walls. The town was littered with so many more interesting bits of design and history, and I loved learning about things outisde of my usual realm of study.
We ended our visit to Elburg with a large dinner shared with students from the Univeristy of Twente (who, unbeknowst to me, had been traveling with us since the wind farm visit). It was really nice getting to sit down with them all and share college and cultural experiences across countries. We had met some UTwente students the yesterday, but it was in a much busier environment so we weren’t able to share and have in depth conversations in the same way we could at dinner. I hope to see them again should anyone of us travel abroad more!
