Municipalities will not be able to generate as much sustainable energy in 2030 as they set themselves the target. Projects for wind farms or solar panels have been delayed or cancelled, permit processes are proving more cumbersome than anticipated and the energy grid is sometimes too full to connect new, sustainable energy to it.
This is evident from an annual interim report of the Regional Energy Strategies (RES) presented on Thursday. Municipalities in those 30 regions work together to make the Netherlands more sustainable. They thus implement part of the Climate Agreement concluded in 2019. It stipulated that by 2030 the Netherlands had to obtain 70 percent of its energy from sustainable sources, which amounted to 35 terawatt hours of sustainable generation on land, through wind turbines or solar panels. That goal will probably be achieved.
But municipalities themselves are more ambitious. They want to generate 55 terawatt hours of sustainable energy by 2030, an ambition that they elaborate in regional sustainability plans, wind farms and solar meadows (a plot or meadow with solar panels). Because energy demand in the Netherlands is growing, failure to realize these ambitions means that more fossil fuels will be used for longer.
Nitrogen problem
Exactly how far municipalities will fall from their own climate ambitions will only become clear at the end of this year, when the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency has calculated all the new regional updates. An inventory NRC of the 21 available, new regional reports show that many regions have not yet achieved half of their intended sustainable generation. In addition, their current plans are often insufficient to meet the goal, or even come close to it. In the national interim report, half of the regions indicate that they expect to achieve their own targets; the other half expects not.
This means that what already threatened last year will happen: the implementation of climate ambitions has stagnated. Pieces of the spatial puzzle that the Netherlands is trying to put together (housing, nitrogen, climate targets, agriculture) are becoming less and less compatible. There are many reasons for this, according to the separate interim reports from the regions. Planned projects for wind farms, for example, are canceled because the land turned out to be unavailable, permits failed to come through or local resistance turned out to be unruly. The lack of national environmental standards for the construction of wind turbines also plays a role. Moreover, the nitrogen problem slows down the development of new energy sources.
However, the ‘low-hanging fruit’ has now been picked; many of the locations where it was relatively easy to install solar panels or wind turbines have been filled.
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99 wind turbines
The scope of the remaining tasks differs strongly per region. Regions such as the Hoeksche Waard, Groningen and Amersfoort seem to be achieving their goals. Those who started earlier and worked more intensively on sustainability are better off than regions that were less ambitious and started later, the interim report concludes. For example, the realized and planned generation of, for example, the South Limburg region is far from the target that it set itself.
The remaining assignments can also be made very concrete. For example, Midden-Holland, the RES region around Gouda, should fill another two hundred football fields with solar panels. And to reach just the ‘bottom’ of its own ambitions, the Rotterdam-The Hague region must build at least 99 wind turbines, according to its report, or cover a piece of land the size of Delft with solar panels.
Also read this article: The government is playing an unusually dominant role in the greening of the Dutch energy system