Comparing solar and wind in the Netherlands with Belgium

In the post at the end of February, I compared two graphs showing the electricity production by solar and wind versus household electricity demand of the Netherlands, this for the months of June 2021 and December 2021. Belgium is a neighbor country of the Netherlands, so I wondered how electricity production by solar and wind in Belgium would compare with the Netherlands in the same period.

Both countries have around the same share of solar and wind in electricity demand, but population is different (more people in the Netherlands) and also have different installed capacities of solar and wind (much more solar capacity in the Netherlands), so that could show some interesting differences.

The Belgian solar and wind data is registered at 15 minutes intervals, but I don’ t think that this is the case for the graphs of the Netherlands. My guess is that it uses 1 hour intervals (quarter hour intervals or half hour intervals would give much more fluctuations). Combining the data of Belgium at 1 hour intervals with the digitized data from the Netherlands gives this:

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Pot, meet kettle: 2 GW represents only 2 percent of our energy supply

Turns out that our Minister of Energy last week made the claim that “2 GW represents 2% of our energy supply”. That doesn’t make much sense. Initially, I couldn’t find where exactly she said that. There was a lot of chatter about it on social media, but it was not clear what she said exactly and in what context. Luckily, I found this tweet on her Twitter time line (translated from Dutch):

Government will decide on the basis of affordability and security of supply and I will add a third criterion: energy independence.

2 GW represents 2% of our energy supply. We need an agreement for 100% of our energy supply.
#deochtend

The tag #deochtend in that tweet refers to the radio program “De Ochtend” (“The Morning”) and yes, on February 28 there was an interview in that program with our Energy Minister about the situation in Ukraine and its consequences on our energy prices (from 02:13:48 until 02:24:40, the 2% claim is made at 02:22:24). The context of this claim is the Belgian nuclear exit. There are currently two options:

1. Decommissioning all seven Belgian nuclear power plants (plan A)
2. Decommissioning the five oldest and only keeping the two youngest running (plan B).