‘Switching off wind and solar costed Dutch 250 million m2 in extra gas’

By temporarily switching off wind turbines and solar panels, approximately three terawatt hours of green energy was lost last year, three times as much as a year earlier. The Dutch Energy Generation platform (Energieopwek) calculated this in its annual overview for 2024.

The lost sustainable power amounts to about 2.5 percent of the country’s total power consumption. If all that energy could have been saved for a later time, for example, by making hydrogen with it, it could have saved 250 million cubic meters of natural gas.

In other words, the platform’s creators conclude that the Netherlands has let clean energy run away to meet demand later with fossil energy.

Solar panels, wind farms, and heat pumps

Solar panels and wind turbines supply an increasing share of the electricity in the Netherlands. Heat pumps also supply more than 1.5 percent of the total energy requirement.

Therefore, sometimes, the amount of sustainable energy is so high that the power grid becomes overloaded, and installations must be temporarily switched off. In 2024, total renewable energy production grew by 11 percent.