Solar systems are implemented at increasingly large scale to meet demands for sustainable energy, including placing them on inland waters. SPARKLES unites scientists and stakeholders across domains (energy, ecology, society) to develop nature-positive solutions for floating solar for humans and nature. By putting nature front and center we look for integrative solutions that solve multiple problems in the living environment, rather than creating trade-offs between humans and nature.

WP7 aims to comprehensively examine socio-economic factors influencing hydrogens role in a sustainable energy system. Well assess how economic, legal, policy, and sociocultural aspects may hinder or facilitate hydrogen implementation, identifying strategies to overcome barriers and enhance scalability. Additionally, well evaluate environmental impacts, proposing measures to mitigate negatives. These insights will elucidate hydrogens potential in future energy and material systems. Moreover, we commit to broad communication and dissemination, sharing findings with GroenvermogenNLs WPs, industry, governments, NGOs, and the public, ensuring widespread understanding and application of our research.

The demand for programming skills continues growing. As a result, a large, diverse group of students is now following programming education. These students, however, differ greatly in background, interests, learning pace, preferences for learning methods and time at which programming becomes relevant. In this project, we will develop a new course on programming in R in which students can learn on-demand with individual learning trajectories tailored to their level, interests and learning needs, with gamification increasing their motivation. By doing so, we ensure that students can learn programming skills when and how it suits them best.

Renewable energy technologies are considered essential for climate-change mitigation. However, compared to fossil fuels, their reduced greenhouse gas emissions may come at the cost of increased consumption of water, land and material. So far, these environmental trade-offs have not yet been systematically quantified. Doing so is challenging, because the environmental benefits and impacts of renewable energy installations vary strongly with technological performance as well as spatial and temporal variability in climate. This research aims to quantify the global-scale environmental trade-offs of renewable energy technologies in comparison to their non-renewable counterparts. It includes wind farms, solar power stations, hydropower stations and biomass power stations, thus covering the largest renewable energy sources for electricity production worldwide. The comparison will be based on life-cycle energy use, land use, water consumption, scarce material use, greenhouse gas emissions, and on a more aggregated level, impacts on biodiversity per unit of electricity produced. To account for the influence of variability in technological characteristics and climatic circumstances on the environmental trade offs, the analysis will be done at the level of individual facilities. First, a dataset of well-studied renewable energy facilities will be developed in order to establish environmental scaling relationships that quantify the environmental impacts of renewable energy facilities based on technological characteristics, such as size and technology type. These relationships will then be applied to quantify the environmental impacts of all known present-day facilities as well as planned facilities worldwide. This will be done by using facility-specific information of current and planned renewable energy power stations across the world and long-term, global climate datasets and earth system models. The environmental impacts of the facility-specific renewable power stations will be compared with those of their non-renewable counterparts. Once all the environmental trade-offs are quantified, the distribution of facilities can be planned in a more effective way.