Without humankind’s ability to harness energy, life as we know it today would not exist. Indeed, this does gives us a lot to be thankful for, but the traditional way of harnessing energy has led to the destruction of our own environment and the depletion of the already limited resources. Thanks to the ingenuity of us humans, there are alternatives to this; ways to generate cleaner energy to power our energy-hungry world, by using renewable sources.
Several sources, such as wind, sunlight, biomass and geothermal heat are readily available to us and are not going to run out any time soon. FrieslandCampina, the largest dairy company in The Netherlands, realises this and is eager to contribute to the Dutch energy transition. The space available on FrieslandCampina’s 14,000 dairy farms presents itself as a wonderful opportunity to implement technologies that can harness energy from these renewable sources.
To enable this opportunity, we will perform detailed calculations of the energy that could potentially be generated from these sources, for each of their farms individually by making use of various databases. Using a subset of their farms located in Amstelland, we will draft a business case study for FrieslandCampina to follow in order to implement technologies that can harness renewable energy, given a farms’ potential. During this process, we will take into account various other factors such as the interest of the farmer, financing options and feasibility of the different technologies available. In doing so, we hope to add value to the dairy farmers of FrieslandCampina by making them energy farmers as well and help FrieslandCampina contribute to the transition towards renewable energy.
Daan Kinsbergen
Sara Hollander
