The Netherlands is the first country in the world where all electric trains are. The best of EcoWatch, right in your inbox. That would force other trains to halt. [16], In March 2018 the Dutch government announced that it will build between 2023 and 2030 several new windfarms with a total installed capacity of 7 gigawatt. However, everyone must have a contract to be authorized to draw energy from the grid; otherwise it would be stealing. http://elering.ee/cross-border-physical-flows/ If a energy supply company contracts with a renewable provider ( I am not including nuclear sources) would it be based on the installed power of the wind farms or a capacity factor adjusted power capabilities? If the train line is a busy one, with small gaps between scheduled trains, the electricity produced by one helps to power the very next one that comes along. So pick your choice This page was last edited on 14 January 2023, at 23:49. But its a funny read. More than 12% of the Netherland's electricity is generated from renewable sources, mainly biomass and waste (5% of the total) and wind (7% of the total). France has an even bigger problem with energy poverty even though her supposedly cheaper power. Rod, you must live in Albania E.ON wanted to put my tariff up from 9.79p to 13.87p. NS operates about 5,500 train trips a day. The historical land of windmills is leading the charge in wind energy development. Overall, the Netherlands has over 2,000 wind turbines spread across the country. Earlier this week, one of their national railway companies, Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS), announced that, since 1 st January, every single one of its electric trains have been running on energy. One wind turbine running for an hour can power a train for 120 miles, the companies said. In August 2015, a meme posted to the Google+ group "The Secret Society of Anti-AGW-ACC Cultism," an organization that claims climate change is a hoax, reproduced the words allegedly written by Thomas Homer-Dixon, the Associate Director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation, on the subject of windmills. Only about 2% of Finlands generation mix is wind, and by the time it passes through the Finnish, Swedish and German grids on its way to the Netherlands it will effectively have disappeared. The energy comes from new wind farms in the Netherlands and surrounding countries - and it's a lot. Its worth remembering that data on wind and solar is available here: http://mylly.hopto.me/windineurope/wind_solar_20_countries_raw.zip. Hughes didn't make that statement of all windmills, and he allowed that some could recoup their construction costs in three years or less. According to Eneco, the power used by the carriers comes from newly built wind farms in the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Belgium. The question is: how long must a windmill generate energy before it creates more energy than it took to build it? And no facts will ever get in the way of a true believer . Once stored, this electricity can be sold to the main power grid, helping the city to top up peak demand, and earning the train company money in the process. (End of excerpt). All Dutch electric trains are now powered by wind energy, the national railway company NS has said . Where I post my arguments on various things climate-related, belief that a 100% renewable-powered train can and does exist is ubiquitous. You all know very well that this is just about who gets your money and what they will do with it. So even if this claim were true, it would require exponentially more windmills and/or solar panels to cover any significant portion of the continental United States. This text is selectively excerpted from a chapter written by David Hughes in Carbon Shift (2009), a book I co-edited. The farm consists of 43 Vestas V112 turbines of 3 MW capacity each. But none of this wind power is directly connected to the NS rail system. Its worth noting that it would be pointless to put wind turbines in poor locations, and its trivial, or meaningless, to say that a turbine would never pay back its embedded energy in a poor location. Stations are heated using heat exchangers, green gas or green electricity. remarkably consists of wind turbines with just 2 blades, manufactured by Nedwind, the 18 turbines have a combined nominal power of 18 MW.[30]. What Was It Like When The Universe First Created More Matter Than Antimatter? The Harried Dutch commuters who are travelling on one of the most environmentally friendly rail networks in the whole of Europe, if not the world are being sold a bill of goods. (Although Eneco, NSs wind power procurer, claims that its wind farm portfolio guarantees sufficient capacity to cover such eventualities . An Eneco and NS joint website. Started operation in 2001 and is developing a 6,000kW two blade downwind turbine. When challenged on its claim, NS clarified that only the electrified portion of its system runs completely on wind power. There are ~40 utilities with sharp price competition in NL. I have caught people several times in their lectures saying they are burning biogas on a campus, and they always are sheepish when I call them out on it, because they know they are fibbing. A little more than a tenth of all electricity consumed in the Netherlands comes from wind power, some of which is imported. "Since 1 January, 100% of our trains are running on wind energy," said NS spokesman, Ton . This is the cause of the very bright, blue-white spark you sometimes see near the third rail, as well as flickering carriage lights. Dutch electricity company Eneco won a tender offered by NS two years ago and the two companies signed a 10-year deal setting January 2018 as the date by which all NS trains should run on wind energy. The Dutch Railways Company NS is the world's first railway company that gets 100% of its energy from wind energy. Since 2017 , 100% of Dutch electric trains have been powered by wind energy. Wind power from Finland can be discounted. [5] This will contribute towards the Dutch target of 14% renewable energy use out of total energy use by 2020[10] and 16% by 2023. In this way, the Dutch railways aim to reduce the greatest negative environmental impact caused by CO2 in such a way that its demand actually contributes to the sustainable power generation in the Netherlands and Europe.. When you dont know reality and cant speak German you have to believe what you find on the English writing interwebs . There are very little poor people in Germany. Hinkley C will have a footprint of 165 acres when operational and an equivalent footprint for onshore windturbines would be from 160,000 to 490,000 acres (dependent on power of turbines available) to produce the same power output over a year. When wind power is fed into a grid it becomes inextricably mixed with all the vibrating electrons from other generation sources to the point where there is no way of knowing where any power taken from the grid came from. There are very little poor people in Germany. They arent directly powered by wind. Temporarily, they might even have a surplus to sell. Hughes did write that some windmills might not recoup their energy-construction costs, but he didn't assert, as the meme implied, that no windmills will ever generate as much energy as was invested in building them. http://www.euanmearns.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/interconnectors.png. It seems small compared with our renewables subsidies in the UK, which are of the order fo 150-450 times as big per MWh. The Dutch railways network (NS) started using wind energy generated by the turbines owned by electric company Eneco two years ago when they signed a ten-year agreement. You make one good point here which is that France has cheap electricity but expensive heating. This quote appeared in a book edited by Homer-Dixon, but it was actually written by David Hughes. All Dutch electric trains are now powered by wind energy, the national railway company NS has said . Bolthouse Farms Sued After Smoothie With 100% Fruit Juice Tests Positive for PFAS, EPA Announces $27 Billion Fund to Help Low-Income and Disadvantaged Communities Transition to Renewable Energy, Derailed Train Cars in Ohio Were Not Labeled Hazardous, Wind Turbine Giant Proposes New York Factory That Would Create 420 Jobs and $500M in Local Investments. [10] [11] [12], 2015 [14] A second hand market for turbines also exists, which could grow as older turbines are replaced by larger newer ones. Once its in the network, there are three main options for getting the electricity to the trains themselves: Youve probably noticed at least one of these options on your rail journeys. If there was a utility providing KiteGen power I would sign up with them. As shown in the table below installed capacity is dominantly fossil fuel, with natural gas making up 61% of total installed capacity and coal 15%. Active 2016. Do the claims about Netherlands trains also require further explanation? The Dutch government has set a target of 6,000 MW nameplate capacity of onshore wind power by 2020 (not met, as per the data above) and 4,450 MW of offshore wind power by 2023. And half of Japan, poor devils. With this, offshore wind energy makes an important contribution to achieving the increased climate target of 55% less CO2-emissions. Everybody should buy only 100% RE. You still technically get your power from the electric company, but you pay little to nothing for it because you are supplying them electricity. Even the two Dutch wind farms with which NS contracts directly for wind power, Noordoostpolder and Luchterduinen, are tied generally to the Dutch grid and not tied directly into the NS rail system. As well as the technological problems discussed in this blog can we afford this destruction of our landscapes pursuing this RE dream. , I am told Biogas is not actually allowed in our pipeline system.. They hope to reduce the energy used per passenger by a further 35% by 2020 compared with 2005. [1] [2] [7] The project cost $272 million and is cooperatively owned by Royal Dutch Shell and the Dutch utility company Nuon. Thatd give us a consumption figure for the city of around 1.5 billion kWh. These newer and larger wind farms are making use of some of the largest wind turbines available, in particular in the case of Noordoostpolder the Enercon E-126 7500kW wind turbine, the largest onshore turbine available at that time. When "green" energy is generated the producer can sell a Guarantee of Origin certificate for the amount generated. However, the government wants 40% of the total electricity used in 2030 in the Netherlands to be supplied by wind. The Netherlands currently has a total of 2,200 wind turbines across the country, according to DutchNews.nl. The clip is in Dutch so set the captions to translate if you do not speak the language. The Dutch government is looking to ramp up the nation's share of renewable energy from 4 percent in 2014 to 16 percent in 2023. NO. Just whatever serves your agenda. New wind farm deployment is based on the SER agreement that describes a plan for five years of tendering 700 MW per year. "Carbon Shift: How Peak Oil and the Climate Crisis Will Change Canada (and Our Lives) Paperback." The real electricity they use is of course no more or less green than other companies on the same grid use. The concept of net energy must be applied to renewable sources of energy, such as windmills and photovoltaics. You may opt-out by. That would power a large proportion of all of the households in Amsterdam**. . The fun would be that trains would soon be blocking the lines as power production fell. I guess I could have found something cheaper still if Id looked hard enough. 2015 was a record year for new installations in the Netherlands with 586 MW added of which 180 MW were offshore. Their goal was to operate all NS trains on electricity produced by wind turbines by January 2018. The headline: Netherlands Trains Now Running on 100% Wind Power. But you seem happy to gloss over the fact that Germanys cheap power comes from coal, nuclear and Russian gas. 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