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> Despite the historic usage of wind power to drain water and grind grain, the Netherlands today lags 21 of the 26 other member states of the European Union in
by piva00 2y ago
> Despite the historic usage of wind power to drain water and grind grain, the Netherlands today lags 21 of the 26 other member states of the European Union in the consumption of energy from renewable sources.
With how windy the whole Netherlands is I'd have expected it to be doing much better in wind power generation, seems like the oil lobby from Shell is eating the whole country's energy future...
Edit: quite unexpected to get downvotes, is it the mention of Shell causing some issue? Because I believe it's a big reason for a massive off-shore wind potential to go untapped until around 2020.
- pjc50 2y agoI suspect it's a land usage problem as well. But they've not kept up with Denmark in offshore wind, and I'm sure they could do more with rooftop solar (like most places). Being an entirely flat country is very bad for hydropower.
- wkat4242 2y agoRooftop solar is huge in Holland because they still allow the users to detract their delivered kWhs from their bill. Regardless of the price at that time. It's called "salderen". This makes deploying solar panels highly cost effective but it basically makes daytime summer power so ubiquitous that they're having a hard time using it up. And on a global scale it's a waste of resources because Holland doesn't get an awful lot of sun. Meanwhile in Spain almost nobody has panels because they only get the momentary value which is not worth it during sunny tints unless you use it to run your own AC.