This report relates to the Horizon 2020 project entitled ‘Making City’. The report was conducted by the Hanze University of Applied Sciences to the benefit of the Municipality of Groningen and other consortium partners in the Making City project and addresses the legal impediments that may arise when …

Background Refrigerated containers or 'reefers' are essential for transporting fresh fruit and vegetables in transnational supply chains. By refrigeration, they ensure that food quality is better preserved and food losses are reduced. Countries that produce fresh produce also unlock new markets for export …

The built environment requires energy-flexible buildings to reduce energy peak loads and to maximize the use of (decentralized) renewable energy sources. The challenge is to arrive at smart control strategies that respond to the increasing variations in both the energy demand as well as the variable …

In Europe, green hydrogen and biogas/green gas are considered important renewable energy carriers, besides renewable electricity and heat. Still, incentives proceed slowly, and the feasibility of local green gas is questioned. A supply chain of decentralised green hydrogen production from locally generated …

Self-organized industrial symbiosis (IS) starts with one actor's decision to invest in a waste recovery plant and the other actors' decision to buy the recovered flow. Technical and institutional conditions of the cluster influence actors' decisions. This paper explores the emergence of IS collaborations …

Measurement methodologies are increasingly being deployed to monitor energy poverty or energy access, and to provide insights for policy development, both in the South and more recently also in the North. However, care should be taken with interpretation and use of the data, particularly if a gender …

The ITEM annual conference in Groningen focused on the impact of border regions on safety, health and the energy supply for residents of Europe's internal borders.

Decentralised renewable energy production in the form of fuels or electricity can have large scale deployment in future energy systems, but the feasibility needs to be assessed. The novelty of this paper is in the design and implementation of a mixed integer linear programming optimisation model to minimise …

In Vlissingen, the municipality wants to make a selected neighbourhood natural gas-free. In order to support this, they have been granted a subsidy. There are many important stakeholders in this project such as the housing corporation l’Escaut which owns most of the houses in the neighbourhood. All of …

Psychologically it is very difficult to give in to inactivity or relaxation after continuously trying to achieve efficiency. For example, if you have driven your car through the busy traffic as economically as possible, it is difficult to relax immediately after arrival. A common response then is to …