Human Powered Student Building (2017)
The Uithof campus in Utrecht is facing a shortage of affordable student housing. At the same time, the university wants to make its operation more sustainable. Human Power Plant seized this opportunity and worked out a scenario in which the 22-storey vacant Van Unnik building is transformed into a 750-room student house. The building operates completely independently of fossil fuels - all energy is supplied by the students themselves.
The students reduce their energy consumption by jointly organising household chores and using economical technology. This includes both high-tech (such as LED lighting) and low-tech (such as thermal undergarments). Three floors are occupied by a gym where all students produce electricity and heat for a few hours a day. Human waste and kitchen waste are converted into biogas for cooking.
Dredging Colony Friesland (2018)
For the second scenario, the Human Power Plant headed to Friesland. The debate on energy transition focuses mainly on domestic energy consumption and transport. Industry and infrastructure are barely talked about. In Drachten, we therefore put the dredging industry under the magnifying glass. The Netherlands has been dredged by hand for centuries. Today, this essential maintenance of the landscape is completely dependent on fossil fuels.
We organised an experiment in which 1 m3 of mud was removed from a canal in the traditional way. Based on this, we calculated that about 800 could keep the province of Friesland navigable. As local residents showed no interest, we found dredgers in the asylum seekers' centre. Manual dredging is not financially viable, and so we give asylum seekers a piece of land next to the stretch of canal they maintain.
Human Powered Neighbourhood (2020-23)
Bospolder-Tussendijken has been chosen as one of the testing grounds for energy transition: residents should get rid of gas. At the same time, it is one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Rotterdam and in the Netherlands. High-tech solutions are expensive and therefore not obvious. The Human Power Plant developed a scenario for the neighbourhood in which energy production relies entirely on locally available sources: human power and biomass, supplemented by wind and solar power when weather conditions are favourable.
In the carbon-neutral BoTu, all household chores are organised communally. Neighbourhood squares are equipped with public kitchens, canteens, bathhouses, washrooms and toilets. As more people can now be housed in existing buildings, rents have come down and residents' purchasing power has increased. Food and firewood are produced within the district, minimising the need for imports. Energy consumption has fallen radically, but well-being has increased just as dramatically.
For the fourth scenario, the Human Power Plant investigates the most fundamental sector of the economy, especially in the Netherlands: agriculture. Dutch agriculture wants to be climate neutral by 2035. However, that cannot be achieved with an agricultural system dependent on fossil fuels. An important reason for the fossil fuel dependency of agriculture is mechanisation. Tasks that were performed manually or with pack animals for centuries are increasingly handled by machines and fossil fuels in modern times.
This has led to a major decline of the global labour force in agriculture, which fell from more than 75% at the start of the Industrial revolution to only 27% in 2020, when about 1 billion people worldwide worked on the land. In the Netherlands, only 1.2% of the workforce is employed in agriculture - less than 125,000 people out of a total of about 10 million. What if we turned this around again and start using more human power and fewer machines instead? What will the countryside look like when agriculture returns to human power? And what does that mean for our cities and our diets?