Organisatie voor Duurzame Energie
As I described a few days ago, Saturday, October 23rd, the fall excursion and general assembly of the Organisatie voor Duurzame Energie (Organisation for Sustainable Energy ) (
) were held. It was a fun and interesting day. The day began early in the morning with finding a fully charged Tazzari Zero in front of our house (I’ll write an extensive article about my experiences with this electric car later). I drove the Zero to Bussum, to the beautiful sustainable office building near the water tower. When I arrived there I parked in the parking garage under the building, which even had a charging point (normal outdoor wall socket). Although the battery was still nearly full I plugged it in anyway, much to the delight of the people from the office building. Apparently this was the first electric car ever to charge there 
The general assembly was nice, there were some changes in the board and we had to vote about that. After the general assembly we were given a tour through the building, which has many technical measures to reduce the energy consumption. There’s a vertical wind turbine on top of the water toweer, about twenty solar panels on the roof of the office building (not as many as I had expected), a heat pump for building heating and cooling and the drinking water is recycled locally by passing the waste-water past water plants which filter out any pollutants. This water is re-used to flush the toilets. Very interesting to see.
After the general election and the building tour the three sections of ODE each had their own meetings, and the section Bouw (Built Environment) had their meting at our house. This was fun to organise and gave me the opportunity to show our solar panels and the Plugwise monitoring system. Especially the Plugwise system drew much attention. It was also interesting to notice that many people had different opinions about what sustainability is; many people had a technical background but quite a few other people had very different backgrounds. That led to very interesting discussions. I dropped a few people off at the train station with the Zero, allowing me to give several other people their first taste of an electric car. Without exception, all reactions were positive.
When every one had left my wife and I made a tour around Hilversum, through Soest, Baarn and Lage Vuursche. Despite the horrible weather we had great fun, the Zero draws attention everywhere.
All in all a very succesful day.
It’s the end of the month, so time to update the statistics (
). Except for electricity al values are normal for the time of the year. The natural gas consumption is already on the rise with 49 m³, the heating system has been running for some time now. Electricity is quite high with 112 kWh. For the most part this because I charged the Tazzari Zero (
