Naud Loomans

When thinking about my future career during my studies I decided that having a meaningful job is amongst the most important aspects of life. I was concerned with climate change and the energy transition for a long time already, so I decided this was the perfect discipline to work in. During my studies on innovation sciences I learned not only about the magnitude of the climate change crisis, but also the complexity of the societal transitions required to solve this crisis. Our entire world is based on a fossil fueled economy, from the institutions that keep it in place to the world views that have come to dominate society. I believe our best shot at dealing with this complexity is breaking it down and structuring it in models. These models must be comprehensive, including not just technological and economic drivers to change, but also psychological factors, societal values and institutional embeddedness. During my master thesis I have explored how such models can help to accelerate the energy transition. By showing some of the basic dynamics of a renewable energy system to policy makers in a dynamic and interactive model, they could experience first hand what some of the effects of the policies they envisioned would be. This gave them a far better understanding of how the system actually works than any ordinary report would. From that point on I decided that improving this models to both, increase my own knowledge, and be able to structure it and break it down for others, would by my way to go. Next to practicing this as an modeler and consultant at Zenmo I can now dive even deeper into the model development during this PhD project.