Why take a moment to reflect on 5 years of impact?
Petra and I founded TransitionHERO in 2019 to make a real impact on the planet. We decided to dedicate our engineering knowledge and experience towards projects that are sustainable and making sure these projects become reality. To celebrate our 5th anniversary, we wanted to get a clear picture of our impact so far. To make our impact visible encourages me and our team: this is what we have achieved together in the past 5 years!
How did you define your impact?
Sustainable projects can have many types of impact: CO2 emissions, energy efficiency, circularity, renewable resources and water use, to name a few. To clearly visualize our impact over the last 5 years, we calculated the CO2 emissions saved with each project. This allowed for easy comparison. For energy-related projects, we converted the amount of gas saved per year to CO2. For circular projects, the CO2 saved per product was calculated and multiplied by the amount produced per year.
In total, we have saved more than 515,000 tons of CO2 emissions! This is comparable to the amount of CO2 23 million trees capture per year (1), or the energy consumed by 28k Dutch households in a year (2). When we look into our crystal ball, we can make a rough estimate of the projects that still need to be implemented. If they are realized, they will save almost 2 million tons of CO2 in total. We are happy with the impact, and in the next 5 years I want it to be in the millions!
What challenges do you face?
One big concrete challenge at the moment, is the lack of capacity for electricity for many of our clients: the problem of grid congestion. If you want to get rid of gas, you need to phase in electricity to eventually replace it with green electricity. Currently, the Dutch electricity grid is not built for that. This challenge stimulates our team to come up with solutions to reduce or avoid the grid congestion problem entirely.
In the circular economy area, we see a challenge for companies to find funding to scale up from pilot to demo scale. At the moment we are in discussion with relevant stakeholders in the Dutch start-up scene how to bridge this funding gap.
What can also be challenging is the rapidly changing nature of our industry due to developing technologies. When I started my career in 2006, biomass was all the rage – but after a big lobby in 2015, biomass disappeared. Another example is electric heat pumps, which were sufficiently developed for commercial use only 6 years ago and are now being used in many industrial projects. The industry is changing rapidly, and our team is motivated to follow the development of new green technologies.
What is your dream for TransitionHERO?
To keep on growing in the same direction. I am happy with our impact on the planet, but I am also proud of our growth as a company. I am proud of growing our team from 2 to 20, and improving our organization every day, to work more pleasantly, fairly and efficiently. My dream is to build a team that can deliver impact and build an ecosystem with like-minded companies in the Netherlands.
I’m also proud of our global reach: over 60 clients across 5 continents: we enjoy working on so many different projects. Once TransitionHERO has grown enough in the Netherlands, I can see us expanding to other countries. As we grow more, we can also invest in circular startups, and the further development of our own smart engineering software or green technologies. As you can see, we are dreaming big and invested in our future growth. Despite the challenges, I am motivated by our mission to help transition to a more sustainable industry, and excited to see TransitionHERO thrive as we work towards this goal. People can say, “Stef, you’re dreaming”, but you never know what’s going to happen, you can’t see into the future, and I am optimistic!