Backstage tour
Our backstage tour at The Green Village takes you to The Green Village, the inhabited open-air laboratory of TU Delft. Here, knowledge and educational institutions, entrepreneurs, governments and residents of the Netherlands research, experiment and demonstrate their sustainable innovations together. A low-regulation testing ground on TU Delft Campus with real residents!
This field lab at the TU Delft Campus focuses on the urban environment where you can test on neighbourhood-, street- and building level. By paying attention to technical, corporate, social and policy-based challenges, we help innovative parties accelerate from theory to practice.
Meant for?
This tour is intended for individuals, not for companies. Our enthusiastic student guides will show you around at The Green Village. If you would like specific information, in-depth knowledge transfer or possible cooperation with The Green Village, please visit the portal of The Green Village.
Three themes
Every day, researchers, students, start-ups, entrepreneurs and government bodies work at The Green Village to solve the innovation challenges of today and the future. The focus lies on three themes.
- Sustainable building and renovation
- Future energy system
- Climate adaptive city
Below are a few examples of current projects within the themes.
This tour is intended for individuals and the tour takes place outside. For companies click here.
The tour starts:
1. DreamHûs
Dreamhûs consists of three houses, which are exact replicas of 70’s houses, that come with poor insulation, single glazing and old floors. There are an estimated three million houses like these in the Netherlands. The three houses are inhabited and a real-life situation has been created in which various innovative parties aim to make the houses as sustainable as possible. This way, the involved parties can realize their dream to speed up the process of making the existing housing in our country more sustainable.
Heat recovery installations to save money, a ventilation unit to improve air quality: these are just two examples of smart solutions that are being tested here.
2. 24/7 Energy Lab and HydrogenStreet
Just imagine every neighbourhood having its own local energy system, with no CO2 emissions and without putting pressure on the national energy network. That would be a real sustainable solution.
The main goal of this project is to generate green energy from solar and wind when possible, and to store excess energy in hydrogen. When the cold period arrives, you can use that stored energy. The HydrogenStreet with a working hydrogen installation is created by three network operators to conduct practical research and to share knowledge with each other. Hydrogen is one of the sustainable alternatives to natural gas, but since it’s quite new there is still a lot of research to be done and a lot to be learned. The aim is to achieve CO2-neutral, autonomous energy provision, carefully calibrated to match energy demand and supply, at acceptable costs and suitable within the existing living environment. A solution that in time will scale up from The Green Village to a neighbourhood, to a whole district.
3. WaterStreet and HeatSquare
Flooding, drought, heat: like many other countries the Netherlands is also increasingly confronted with more extreme weather. How do we keep neighborhoods, streets and buildings livable and habitable? On the WaterStreet innovations are being tested that could help us manage the flooding of the city’s.
If you're standing on the WaterStreet, just look down and you will see several possible solutions: underground water reservoirs, concrete blocks that can drain or buffer rainwater and smart rain barrels. Now look around, do you see that big square? That is the HeatSquare! There entrepreneurs and innovators are working on different sustainable solutions for heat stress and extended drought. Think of tiles that absorb water and evaporate it when it is hot. But also water reuse and water buffering to combat extended drought.