What’s gone wrong with the Dutch power supply?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 796 Ratings
🗓️ 10 November 2025
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As the country shifts away from fossil fuels, thousands of homes and businesses have been left on waiting lists to connect to its electricity grid.
Has the Netherlands moved too fast in its switch to renewable energy, like solar, wind and hydropower?
Some commentators are calling it a “grid crisis” – so, could this affect economic growth?
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Presented and produced by John Laurenson
(Picture: A line of wind turbines in a field in the Netherlands. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:07.6 | Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm John Lawrenson. |
| 0:11.9 | Today, an energy crisis for the 2020s. I'm in the Netherlands where the network or grid of cables that transports electricity from producers to users |
| 0:22.2 | can no longer cope with the transition to green energy. |
| 0:26.3 | They have invested a lot in solar panels, in batteries and in EVs, |
| 0:31.1 | and they cannot connect those devices anymore to the grid. |
| 0:34.6 | New companies cannot connect to the grid. |
| 0:37.1 | So they really have a grid crisis. |
| 0:39.5 | In the Netherlands, we have about 12,000 organizations, so factories and the bakery and the larger |
| 0:46.4 | industries, who want to take off and consume electricity. And we need to put people to the |
| 0:52.3 | waiting list because we cannot grant them the capacity that they requested. |
| 0:56.7 | Grid congestion, a world of pain for the Dutch economy, coming up in Business Daily. |
| 1:06.5 | An electric delivery truck arrives at a charging station at a distribution centre belonging to the little supermarket chain in Almmerie on the outskirts of Amsterdam. |
| 1:17.0 | You're going to charge it up? |
| 1:21.5 | Yeah. |
| 1:22.5 | This depot got its first e-lory three years ago. Now it has 17. The aim is to replace the entire 30-diesel |
| 1:31.7 | truck fleet with e-vehicles. Transport, heating, cooking, the host of rechargeable devices we now use. |
| 1:39.9 | The Netherlands is electrifying extremely fast. |
| 1:48.8 | It has the largest number of EV charging points per capita in Europe, for example. |
| 1:57.6 | As for electricity production, the Netherlands has replaced gas from its large North Sea reserves with wind and solar, |
| 2:01.7 | leading the way in Europe for the number of solar panels per person. |
| 2:07.4 | More than one third of Dutch homes have solar panels on their roofs, which is all good, right? |
... |
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