With gas prices soaring, people are experiencing higher energy bills, increasing product prices and unexpected business expenses. It isn’t just rainclouds and thunderstorms in energy land however. Many promising initiatives are being worked on every single day. Even non idealists must acknowledge that the prices of green energy are going down every year while fossil fuel prices are increasingly expensive.

“If you guys handle this like an idiot we will blow the wall out,” Melissa Verhoef student in intelligent devices and sensors says while smiling. When I ask her how likely that actually is she responds “Not likely at all, If you, as I said, don’t do stupid things with it.” One of her co-students does seem a little less comfortable now though “I actually didn’t know that was in the box that I was sitting next to”. All around us are machines for reading out PCB’s, cables in all lengths and types and stickers of Vladimir Putin with its thumb up. The humor, is what you would expect from a group of predominantly men in a workshop. They are working on clean ways of transportation and automation of those vehicles.

“There is some discussion whether or not hydrogen is an effective way of storing energy” Wouter Tollenaar also a student at HVA Business and technology university remarks. Technically you are losing energy twice, once from electricity to hydrogen and then again from hydrogen to energy elsewhere.

Students at the University of applied sciences in Amsterdam are working on sustainable solutions

That might still be better than not being able to use that energy at all. Even though there is high demand for green energy the current energy grid doesn’t allow to use all available green energy. “Solar and wind energy provides direct current which most energy grids are not used too or built on” Robert Willekes sight manager at a brand new solar park says. “We could be providing energy for about 3500 household but we are not allowed to provide more than half of that since the grid cannot handle that much.” Many solar panels and windmills work perfectly fine but rarely operate or are not even connected to the grid.

The transition to green energy is complex, but many smart people are coming up with promising solutions, now we need a grid that can handle it all.

Robert Willekes at a brand new solar park in Den Helder The Netherlands Source:Pepijn Kouwenberg