The former Ruien (Oudenaarde) power plant is being transformed into a business park. The province of East Flanders aims to turn it into an energy hub in line with the eHUBt vision developed some time earlier.
The challenge in this assignment was to develop a site that would be economically meaningful, sustainable and socially acceptable at the same time. Not an easy task in a place that already suffers from a labour shortage, is only moderately accessible by land and where the local community had strong ties with the defunct power plant. In addition, the client had expressed the wish to also specifically approach the local residents and other external parties and include them in the concept of an eHUBt.
Throughout the project, Transition Stories and Sweco worked through various scenarios for the development into an eHUBt and the route of a cooperative energy company was worked out. The result formed the starting point for the Provincial Spatial Implementation Plan (PRUP) for Ruien. In parallel, POM East Flanders set to work with stakeholders to further shape the cooperation projects introduced. Transition Stories’ role consisted of drawing up/roughly calculating the business cases for each scenario, developing the concept of a cooperative energy company and supervising the stakeholder meetings.