DURING its 17th-century golden age, the Netherlands was the world’s most enthusiastic exploiter of wind technology. Over 10,000 windmills dotted the landscape; the city walls of Amsterdam were crowned with a row of them. Today many Dutch find the stereotype of their country as the land of windmills irritating—and inaccurate. Wind turbines supplied just 5.2% of the Netherlands’ electricity in 2014, far behind Germany, Spain or Denmark. Renewable sources as a whole make up 4.2% of the country’s energy mix, putting the Netherlands 26th in the European Union, ahead only of Malta and Luxembourg.
That leaves the government in a fix. It has five years to meet an EU-wide mandate to generate 14% of energy from renewable sources. Among other things, it plans to build a lot of new wind turbines. This, however, runs up against the reason why the Netherlands has so few of them: a severe case of not-in-my-backyard syndrome. Almost everywhere new turbines are mooted, locals howl that they will be ugly and noisy. One proposed wind park prompted a group calling itself the Don Quixote Foundation to block a drawbridge on the 32km dike connecting North...
from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1JBji55
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