Renewable energy Netherlands

Netherlands, the place where I live. As I commute by train, I see huge wind turbines and I have often wondered how well is Netherlands faring on its renewable energy promises. As I dug further, it is very clear to me that despite its best effort at policy changes, Netherlands is 21st among all EU countries in its share of energy from renewable sources in 2023 [Eurostat]. While the Netherlands is on its way to meet the binding target of 42.5% by 2030, I was curious to see how and where exactly is Netherlands going to achieve that.

Admittedly, the Netherlands has managed to purely increase its renewable energy sources by increasing infrastructure and making friendly policy changes. It shows as they never purchased renewable energy except for the year 2020 (which was definitely an exceptional year), even though it is allowed under EU Directive to meet the country’s requirement.

“A statistical transfer is the administrative purchase by one European member state of a quantity of renewable energy from another member state that has achieved its target and has a surplus. Such a transfer does not involve any physical flow of renewable energy. The principle of statistical transfers was already agreed in 2009 in the first version of the EU Renewable Energy Directive due to its flexibility and cost efficiency potential.”

-Central Bureau of Statistics Netherlands

Where is the Netherlands increasing its share of renewable energy? 

Clearly, those wind turbines I keep seeing are a major area of increase in the share of renewable energy. Now, what new changes happened there?

According to the Dutch Offshore Wind Market Report 2023,  “the capacity of individual Dutch offshore wind farms increased seven fold, up from 110 MW for Egmond aan Zee in 2007 to 760 MW for Hollandse Kust (noord)” due to reduced pre-bid costs, reduced connection costs and years. So, the Dutch government implemented a one-stop shop approach which reduces the roles and responsibilities of the developers and divides it among many governmental agencies. This, of course, leads to costs savings as companies then bid for lower subsidies, which is how, they have the first zero-subsidy wind farm. From WindEurope.org, Netherlands is one of the top 10 off-shore wind energy generators.  

But surprisingly, geothermal energy is also increasing in share. Currently, the overall deep geothermal energy generated in the Netherlands is about 6.8 PJ and the goal is to reach 50 PJ by 2030 with over 100 projects in the pipeline [Geothermie Netherlands]. This is expected to replace the central natural gas boiling systems in most Dutch houses.

Solar, everyone knows about and yes, it is also increasing but that is nothing new.

Now where exactly most of the energy is going towards? The three major applications are electricity, transport and heat. Most of the renewable energy electricity comes from solar and the off-shore wind turbines. For heat, however, a large chuck of energy is still coming from biomass possibly due to older heating systems in the Dutch housings. With the increasing costs of importing energy and inflation, it might be possible that people in general use less energy for heat but it seems like the heat being produced from renewable sources has been constant over the past couple of years or in the more dire case, no direction has been taken to cover the share with renewable sources. Transportation is also a similar trend with saturation over the past few years. 

With all the encouragement, we definitely do see renewable energies occupy some of the market previously occupied by non-renewable sources.  (The figure does not show transport data for non-renewable sources.)

Thus, it is a work in progress with bright future ahead.