Ring out the old, ring in the new: Dutch windmills are big news again, all of The Netherland’s airports, including Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, which over some 62 million passengers transit every year, will soon be powered entirely by wind power.
On January 1, 2018, all Dutch air terminals switch to wind power for electricity; Dutch wind farms will supply the country’s air terminals with a total of 200-gigawatt hours (GWh) of clean power. That’s enough juice to electrify 60,000 Dutch households—the present population of Delft, the hometown of the immortal Renaissance painter Vermeer.
The Dutch are abandoning petroleum-based fuels at speed: last January, the Netherlands’ train network announced it was running entirely on wind, a year ahead of schedule. In 2015, well before Dieselgate, the VW emissions scandal, Dutch lawmakers banned the sale of diesel-fueled automobiles by 2025. the sale of diesel-fueled automobiles by 2025.
The airports’ adoption of clean energy adds impetus to the Dutch quest to reach the 20-20-20 goal for 2020: a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels, a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency and procuring 20 percent of its energy from renewable fuel sources.
The Dutch aren’t perfect; in a recent voluntary disclosure to the UN, The Netherlands admits a deep dependence on fossil fuels and production of serious volumes of greenhouse gases; despite all the headway, Dutch renewables within its overall energy portfolio still lags compared to other European Union countries.
Hint: the Danes are leading the EU.
