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Comment by seper8 | Hacker News Reader

Like a snake eating its own tail, here in the Netherlands we also have areas where companies are asked to reduce energy usage. There's even cases of companies or entire new neighbourhoods not being able to be attached to the grid.

Thats one way to achieve "net zero"...

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Yeah, that is what chronic under-investment of the grid combined with a labor shortage will get you. I sincerely hope our government will be able to resolve these matters.

> 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.

I 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.

Rooftop 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.

Yeah, we turn into cavemen, and let china, russia, iran, etc become greater than us because they won't restrict their power usage. The "green" strategy #self-destruction

Sea level rise is also self-destruction, especially for the Netherlands.

The Netherlands is the opposite of "self-destruction", a large part of it is self-created and has coped with what the sea throws at it for centuries. Sometimes the sea wins and a new wetland preserve like the Biesbosch is created but mostly the Dutch win. The trend of ca. 18-30 cm of sea level rise per century (between 1.8 and 2.9 mm/year in a near straight line since measurements began in 1890 with a slight increase since 2000) lies well within what Dutch sea defences can manage.

Do you think the next century will see a sea level rise of 18-30 cm?

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