[themanualstates]

Today, around 1/3 of homes in the Netherlands have rooftop solar, accounting for 21% of total electric energy consumption.

Compare and contrast to the stats for 2013, when solar power made up just 0.16% of overall electricity generation and a negligible 0.96% of residences were fitted with PV systems.

The UK and NL are time zone neighbours, so I'd argue solar energy / duration are close also. Apparently the sun keeps shining in winter or with overcast skies regardless.

Initially I also had my doubts, but it seems we've got solar everywhere before the nuclear power mega projects are done with construction.

Take the European Pressurised Reactor. A French 'mass production' design from 1995, constructed starting 2005 in Finland, and commissioned in 2023. France got theirs running in 2025. China managed to generate electricity from a European Pressurised Reactor just a tad earlier, back in 2018, but the stats are filled with inaccuracies.

The mass production hype has been exceptionally farcical, considering we ended up with only three units.

[Manuel_D]

The thing about intermittent sources is that it's easy to use them for 30-50% of generation, but once they saturate electricity demand during peak production their ability to further curtail emissions drops significantly.

For instance the Netherlands generated 33% electricity from solar during July 2025, but in January 2026 it was only 3%: https://lowcarbonpower.org/region/Netherlands/month In practice, this means that ~70% of the daytime energy use is already generated from solar, and another 30% is wind and nuclear. Adding more solar panels will mostly provide more power during the already-saturated periods.

The Netherlands could, in theory store electricity during the summer and consume it in winter. But actually creating energy storage at that vast scale is beyond our capability, short of some technological breakthrough in energy storage.