This year, Gasunie provided the case for the eleventh edition of the WCM Summer School. A case consisting of several layers and questions, explains Scholte Strikwerda. “It is a challenging mega-case, in which the overriding question is how we can properly manage the imbalance in energy demand in time and place within the Netherlands as a whole.”

As part of the energy transition, Gasunie’s entire transport network must be converted and/or renewed. This is an investment running into billions, which is subject to time pressure, involves many uncertainties and has to deal with changing frameworks. “The situation in Ukraine is of course a shining example. Developments are exceptionally fast these days, also in technology. It is all less predictable than before. You want to look far ahead, but within that you have to be as flexible as possible”, Strikwerda explains.

This year’s WCM Summer School is dedicated to ‘Doorstroming als een Service’ (DaeS). Former Summer School participant Bianca Coolen from Heijmans Infra talks about the case and her experiences with the Summer School. “We are looking for technical-substantive advice and tips on working together between organisations with different interests,” she says.

“DaeS is new, new, new; it is new in the way of cooperation, in the form of contract, in the contract period of twenty years, and also the techniques we want to apply are new. We are trying to apply techniques that will not get in the way of future developments. For example, we are laying a glass fibre network with more fibres than are currently required. Because who knows how much data we will be sending in twenty years’ time,” says Coolen.

18 August 2020

Performance Based Contracting Royal Netherlands Army and Scania

The ninth edition of the WCM Summer School also took place this year at the military base in Stroe. Because of COVID-19, it remained exciting for a long time whether and how the Summer School would take place. Summer School-director Jan Braaksma: “Foreign students could not travel to us this year and the turnout of the earlier large numbers of students would not go with all the corona measures. The choice fell on a hybrid study week, partly live and partly online.

Henk Akkermans, WCM Director and Professor Tilburg University: “The world around us is in transition. The continuation of the Summer School is a great opportunity to meet all societal challenges and to continue to work on maintenance innovation”.