This year, 28 windmills with a tip height of 210 meters will be built in the fields and meadows along the A16 between Hazeldonk and the Moerdijk Bridge. The Brabant landscape is changing, more and more windmills are being added. “A new landscape that radiates sustainability”, says Joep Mol. He is an architect and chairman of the cooperative association Bossche Windmolen West.
“I don’t want to leave my children a world with imminent dangers. We need electricity, we no longer want to generate it with coal or gas because of the greenhouse gases. Then we have to make the choice for wind turbines.”
Bosschenaar Joep Mol is an architect and chairman of the cooperative association Bossche Windmolen West. Together with more than five hundred fellow citizens, he built a large windmill on De Rietvelden. The electricity from the mill goes to the members, the rest they sell to Pure Energie.
Windmills: for or against
The construction of windmills is also a subject of much discussion in Brabant. Emotions often run high in the debates between supporters and opponents. In Oss, a party that is strongly against windmills will participate in the upcoming elections. But the question is whether local parties can fulfill such a promise now that the central government and the province consider new mills so important. Omroep Brabant summarizes the arguments.
In the fight against climate change, the Netherlands is opting for wind turbines, both at sea and on land. The government wants to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030; by 2050, emissions should be almost completely zero. These are agreements from the Paris Climate Agreement signed by the Netherlands.
War puts extra pressure on the kettle
The war in Ukraine is putting extra pressure on the kettle. A Netherlands that does not want to import Russian gas has to get the energy from somewhere else. The two nuclear power plants that the cabinet wants to build are still a long way off. During a visit to Oss, Minister Rob Jetten (D66) said on 7 March that he wants to complete objection procedures more quickly. These procedures often cause delays in the construction of wind turbines for years to come.
Brabant promised the government that there will still be more than 470 megawatts of wind turbine capacity in the province this year. Onshore windmills have a capacity of 3 to 4 megawatts; about 150 windmills are therefore needed for the Brabant goal for 2022. But the plans go further than 2022. Brabant also wants to generate almost all energy in a climate-neutral way by 2050.
Brabant gets dozens more mills
The Netherlands has more than 2700 windmills. Rik Harmsen of the Dutch Wind Energy Association does not expect the number of wind turbines in the Netherlands to rise much further. “There are plans for new construction, but many older mills are already being demolished.” Incidentally, this does not apply to Brabant, where until recently there were relatively few mills because the wind does not blow as hard as in Friesland or in the Flevopolder. Brabant will get dozens more mills.
Thirty regions in the Netherlands have written their own RES, a regional energy strategy. Brabant has four of those regions. The plans were all in The Hague in mid-2021, approved by the municipal councils. It has been determined for each municipality how much climate-neutral energy must be generated with wind turbines or solar parks. Few voters in Brabant know the abbreviation RES, but the agreements in all those plans are decisive for the coming years.
“We should not leave the energy transition to the market,” says Joep Mol. Of the four windmills on De Rietvelden, one is from his cooperative. The others supply electricity to Heineken, which wants to make the production process more sustainable. Joep refers to De Heerenboeren, an initiative of citizens who grow their own vegetables. “We want that with energy. It is great that as citizens we can build such a mill together. Sometimes people suffer from it. But that is less painful than if we do nothing against climate change.”