A Little Bit of Honesty, by Irina Slav
About two weeks ago, Reuters enthusiastically informed us that the Netherlands had become the transition equivalent of Employee of the Month by generating a massive amount of electricity from non-hydr
About two weeks ago, Reuters enthusiastically informed us that the Netherlands had become the transition equivalent of Employee of the Month by generating a massive amount of electricity from non-hydrocarbon sources in 2023.
But if you think it’s a success story of wind power, it’s not. Somewhat surprisingly, at least to me, the status of “shining” transitioner was attributed by the author of the report to… solar.
Citing data from Ember, the Reuters report said the Netherlands had generated 20.63 TWh of electricity from solar installations. Again, I was a bit surprised. Sunshine is not exactly what the Netherlands is famous for. Yet the data looked so very professionally organised in neat little charts showing a veritable surge. So I headed to the Ember website to learn a bit about their methodology.
Here’s what I found: “2023 data is an estimate of gross generation, based on net generation gathered from monthly data. This estimate is calculated by applying absolute changes in net generation to the most recent gross baseline.” Well, that’s all right then, and the Netherlands is doing better than Spain in solar.
Honesty is not the strong suit of the climate crusaders. In fact, it is among their weakest points. Easy – and tempting – as it is to mock this, there comes a time when mocking is not enough. Because a lot of people are being literally deceived into believing untruths and paying for it. Through the nose. For obvious reasons, this is not a state of affairs that is, not to put too fine a point on it, sustainable.
Before we dive into the photon-rich cesspool of today’s rant, here are two fun facts about solar and the Netherlands.
Fun fact 1, courtesy of Reuters: “Massive imports of solar panels and components from China have been the main driver fuelling the solar push in the Netherlands in recent years.
For the past three years, the Netherlands has been the largest single market for Chinese solar panel and module exports, accounting for an average of just over 23% of China's solar capacity exports since 2021.”
Fun fact 2, courtesy of electricityMaps:
Okay, let’s go.
Now, Ember puts the Netherlands’ solar output at 20.63 TWh but there’s an even higher figure – and it is the official one. The Dutch statistical bureauputs the country’s installed solar capacity at 23.9 GW. The 2023 annual output figure is 21.173 TWh, or 21.173 billion kWh. What was Ember thinking, underestimating the power of the Dutch sun?
But there’s more to the success story. These terawatt-hours were produced at a conversion factor of a little over 10%, per Wikipedia and yes, I had to resort to Wikipedia, sue me. I will not draw any conclusions from this other than those Dutch must have really covered pretty much everything with panels.
I could have left it at that and maybe I should have but I couldn’t. The Dutch solar success story made me curious – it’s an incurable, congenital disease. So I headed to the search engine to learn something new, in this case about sunshine in different European countries.
A website called Current Results offered me a pretty detailed view of various weather characteristics for most countries in Europe, including sunshine. For Spain and many other European countries, there was data on hours of sunshine on an annual basis plus average annual number of clear days.
For the Netherlands, there was data in percentage of daylight hours with sunshine, data for average number of days “with any amount of measurable sunshine”, and data for the average number of hours of sunshine per year.
Lo and behold, the maximum figure in the “usual percentage of daylight hours with sunshine” category was 40%. In terms of days with “any amount of measurable sunshine” the Netherlands did a lot better, at more than 300.
In terms of average annual solar irradiation measured in hours per year, however, the picture wasn’t so good at about 75 days, per my own crude but generous calculation (between 1644 and 1889 hours per year). And yet the Netherlands produced this smashing amount of solar power last year. There was only one way this could have conceivably happened.
This way, turns out, was exactly the way you’d expect it happened: the Dutch mounted solar panels on every flat surface and that’s not a pun. The Reuters report cites “2.6 million residences hosting over 22 million kilowatts of solar generation capacity as of mid-2023, according to the Netherlands' Central Bureau of Statistics”.
Also, “The tops of car parks, train stations, apartment blocks, warehouses and old churches have all been clad with panels, while structures built atop sheep farms and fruit fields have also been put to use to boost the area used for solar generation.”
In other words, the Netherlands has covered itself with solar panels to squeeze out every bit of energy of the scarce sunshine that reaches it throughout any given year. Oh, and the whole thing has been heavily subsidised, of course, to make it make sense.
It still doesn’t, however. Unless installing massive capacity to produce moderate amounts of energy sounds sense-making, which it apparently does for some people. Also, they’re going to run out of space at some point but nobody seems to be thinking about it. No, they’re planning to install a lot more solar. They’re aiming for 180 GW by 2050.
Now, why would I care about the Netherlands? I don’t, not really. What I care about is the hype that has made the Dutch solar success story possible at all. The people to whom it makes sense to build 24 GW of solar installations in a Northern European country are the same people that are advertising the power of solar to non-expert citizens eager to dip into government subsidies at the risk of saddling themselves with a non-returnable investment. Because those subsidies never cover 100% of the installation. Also, because people are greedy.
Here’s a local story. A company is building a factory in Southern Bulgaria and it wants to put solar panels on its roof, subsidised. It also wants to put in batteries (at its own quite considerable expense) – to be able to sell any surplus electricity to the grid.
Now, the company assumes it will have plenty of surplus electricity to sell, which it probably won’t. It also assumes the grid operator will buy its battery electricity, which it won’t, but the company doesn’t care about that. The story is, I believe, a glowing example of just how bad the solar hype has become, with accurate information scarce in favour of advertising solar as the future of energy – with profits!
That advertising has become so fantastical it has made a lot of people believe that they can generate electricity for pennies from their solar panels and then sell that electricity for pounds to the grid – including during the night, from batteries.
Even for those who are not in it for the grid sales, the solar myth has been damaging with people surprised and complaining that their installations are producing close to zero… in the middle of November, which, you know, for climatic reasons is often cloudy for days on end. Kind of like the weather is much of the time in the Netherlands.
The Netherlands story about solar is a story about hype. It is a story about the highest solar capacity per capita in Europe, which I guess is supposed to make the sun shine harder. If only it could. Incidentally, it is also a story about the highest electricity prices in the European Union, no relation to the above, of course. Must be Putin and climate change.
Normally, any solar power company worth its salt would inform their clients just how much output they could reasonably expect from their system throughout the year, based on the local weather patterns and the capacity factor these patterns plus the panels’ design make possible.
It is the ethical thing to do and it is also the safe thing to do, to avoid having angry clients banging on your door and demanding their money back because their 5 kW system that’s been mounted on the western slope of the roof is producing a third of that on a sunny March morning.
It appears, however, that while installers may be, and often are, ethical, pretty much no one else involved in solar has a clear notion of what ethics means. This is how we get stories about a Dutch solar surge.
I’m quite a fan of rooftop solar. In fact, we’re putting up some panels later this year. The reason I’m a fan is that in our circumstances this is the only affordable way of generating our own electricity for any consistent length of time.
The reason we need to think about generating our own electricity is not one I’m a fan of. Bulgaria is about to join the world of deregulated electricity markets very soon. Prices will rise unless a miracle happens and whatever government is in power at the time decides to do a 180 on the whole transition thing.
With a view to a non-miraculous future, solar for my family is a hedge against higher electricity prices. We are going into this with open eyes, aware of all the constraints. The problem is that open eyes are not very popular among transition fans like Reuters and Ember, or the Dutch government, among many other governments.
They’re not very popular among governments promising these here nice subsidies to cover your roof with solar panels and don’t worry if it’s got zero southern exposure and is surrounded by trees on three sides. So what if you live in Northern Europe where there’s little sun? Solar totally makes sense if we really cover everything with panels.
What we have here is a case of widespread short-sightedness. If you mislead a lot of people persistently, you will get them to do what you want but after a while they will inevitably see through the lies and, how should I put it, become disgruntled.
And it is so easy to avoid this, with just a bit of honesty. Of course, this is not the course of action that the climate crusaders are following, choosing the time-honoured approach that Soviet bloc totalitarians favoured: ignore it and it will go away. It worked so well for them.