Inaugural Axelle Viré - Bringing wind energy to Dutch schools

Do you want to support our mission to bring wind energy to schools in Delft? We need more (young) people working in the sector to speed up the energy transition. We want to contribute to this cause by targeting schools and making learning materials and inspiring stories accessible to all children. 

You can contribute to this mission with your donations. With the donations, we will be able to send schools a package for their library containing:

• A copy of the book “When I grow up” translated in their school language (https://whenigrowupstories.org/the-book/). 
• A copy of the book “Let the wind blow” in their school language (http://www.letthewindblow.org)
• Unlimited digital copies of all materials

We will start the dissemination with primary and secondary schools in Delft and broaden the region to other cities until donations run out. We hope to be able to provide all 59 schools in the Delft region with a package for their libraries and then move to the 218 schools in Den Haag and 295 schools in Rotterdam. But our true ambition is to reach all the 7253 schools in the Netherlands and then move abroad! Can you make this happen?

Inauguration Prof. Axelle Viré
This fundraising campaign is organized to celebrate the inauguration of Prof. Axelle Viré at TU Delft. Donating to this fund is the best gift you can give Axelle. Every donation counts, no matter how small it is. The fund will be entirely used for the mission described above and will help make an impact for a better society with our younger generation.

Background:
Offshore and floating offshore wind turbines are important technologies to speed up our transition to a carbon-neutral economy in the coming decades. But the task ahead of us is huge. The installed capacity of offshore wind energy needs to reach 2000 GW by 2050, which is about 30 times more than what we have today. 

Conservative estimations predict that we will need about 6000 jobs per GigaWatt installed and grid-connected offshore [1]. At the same time, we still lack diversity in STEM fields (i.e. Scientific, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). As an example, in the Netherlands, only about 19% of technical jobs were held by women in 2022 [2]. So, we need more people working in the field of wind energy, independently of their education levels, genders, or backgrounds.

Research shows that building long-term teacher-scientist partnerships throughout the school curriculum is much more effective in increasing the enrolment of minorities in STEM [3]. We are already working on this with our partners by conducting outreach activities and building long-term learning communities across education levels. But we want to do more. We want to bring wind energy to every possible school and provide teachers and students with continuous access to wind energy resources. We also want to show that wind energy is not only about technology but also about people. We want to share portraits of inspiring people who work in this field to create role models for school children.

Thanks a lot for your support!

[1] Shannon Foynes Port Company - Vision 2041 Strategic Review (2022)
[2] Techniekpact, Platform Bèta Techniek en de Rijksoverheid (2023)
[3] Encouraging science outreach. Nat Neurosci 12, 665 (2009)