Stefan Olsthoorn

This entire week has been a pressure cooker for knowledge and ideas. For me one of the most valuable moments already took place on the first evening at De Verzamelpost. We were joined by a group of Texelaars and pitched our ideas for the island. The group consisted of people from different layers of society. There were high school students looking for inspiration for their high school thesis

Antoine Maartens from Urgenda Urgenda is a foundation that has been founded in 2007. The mission is to improve and stimulate sustainable development. Antoine is the program manager for sustainable Wadden Islands. The interview was conducted in a semi-structured way. We had prepared some topics which we wanted to know Antoine’s on. This report is therefore not an exact transcript but more an…

For a long time I was convinced that the ever growing world population was the main cause of global warming. I thought that sustainable initiatives were futile as long as the world’s population would keep growing and that this population growth should be the main issue to target when solving global warming. However, the documentary/talk ´Don’t panic’ by Swedish professor of global health Hans…

In this week’s weekly report we reflect on the insights we gained from interviewing Antoine Maartens from Urgenda. Urgenda is a foundation that has been founded in 2007. The mission is to improve and stimulate sustainable development. Antoine is the program manager for sustainable Wadden Islands. The interview was conducted in a semi-structured way. We had prepared some topics which we wanted to…

Last Thursday I was listening to the news on the radio. One of the items  was about how the current fuel prices could influence electric vehicle sales negatively. Oil prices  haven’t been this low (at the moment of writing $57.81 per barrel of crude oil) since 2009. This is something that fuel car owners are starting to notice at the gas station. Maarten Steinbuch, automotive professor at the TU…

In November of this year Dutch newspapers reported on a research conducted by the NLVOW, an organisation that defends the interests of people living in the vicinity of windmills. The research critiqued the fact that a lot of relative young windmills are currently being replaced. The problem is that these windmills are too old to qualify for SDE+ subsidies, although they are still functioning…

The most important technology in the socio-technical subsystem of sustainable mobility, is the ferry connection between Texel and the mainland. This connection is the life-line of the island. The island benefits greatly from the influx of tourists (see figure 2.2.1), and the vast majority of these tourists come by ferry. Moreover, all the services and goods Texel needs to import come by ferry

This week was all about brainstorming on the sustainable future of Texel. In order to design the sustainable mobility future of Texel we have decided to first discuss this solution on the socio-technical regimes level, and later try to zoom in on some technology niches. The first part will be a more ambiguous or intangible approach to the possible solution, while the second provides some tangible…

The topic of my column for this week is maybe not directly related to Texel but a somewhat more personal story.Three years ago I made a trip to Cape Town, South-Africa, to visit a friend who was at that time doing an internship for a NGO in the townships of Cape Town. We went to visit her office in Khayelitsha, which is the largest of the townships in the area. This was a very impressing, but…

Introduction The third meeting for the this course, Engineering for Sustainable Development, took place on the 25th of November in Delft and Rotterdam. The theme for this week was “Transitions made by people”. The meeting had the following outline: 13.45-14.45 Lecture by Gertjan de Werk 14.50-15.30 Bike tour to Rotterdam 15.30-17.00 Lecture by Iris Dijkstra 17.00-18.45 Tour of lighting in…

In this weekly report we will shortly explain the organization of our team. Our team consists of 4 people, Stefan Olsthoorn, Klara Bergman, Niki Nicolaou and Derek van den Berg. With different backgrounds and different personalities in the group it promises to be an interest period and collaboration. A proper organization is key and that is why our group from the first meeting came up with a plan…

The Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde has recently gained a lot of media attention with his smart highway   concept. In this concept he envisions the roads of the future. According to Roosegaarde, future roads should be interactive by using light, energy and road signs.  The first experimental trajectories have already been realised in cooperation with Heijmans N.V. Near Nuenen a bicycle lane has…

When I was asked for my sustainability hero in class, a lot of different people came to mind. I thought of an innovator like Elon Musk from Tesla, or the artist Daan Roosegaarde, who came up with the ‘smart highway’ concept and the ‘smog vacuum cleaner’. I eventually went with Herman Wijffels, of whom I recently attended a Studium Generale talk . In this talk mister Wijffels explained his vision…