Windturbines: the whole truth.
V2. The government plays a reprehensible role.
It is undeniable that the government plays a reprehensible role in the whole debate on windturbines and in boosting the construction and further subsidizing of windturbines. Simply for the sake of gaining a reputation as acting particularly boldly against the emission of greenhouse-gas, the government propagates and supports the construction of windturbines and takes advantage of the Dutch public's trustfulness. Any form of honest, and therefore complete, information on behaviour, so also the tiny and precarious yield and the inevitable risks of wind energy, are carefully ignored. Among other things, with the aim of not interfering with the beautiful wind turbine story as told by the people and agencies that benefit from it in one way or another. A few names of this kind of people and agencies you will find in Chapter X of the First Part of this story.
All attempts by people having no interest at all in the construction, or not, of windturbines to explain to ministers or other civil servants in a few departments what the characteristics and the inherent risks of windturbines are, have been discarded as being highly inconvenient. With letters (Economic Affairs) like "We have received and filed your letter", or as the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment (VROM) wrote to me when I asked what was wrong with my objections: "We will no longer answer your letters. The government has reached a decision." And that is written by civil servants who have been described as being "knowledgeable on the issue" when it is clear that they have no clue on the matter. One can conclude that, in this specific technical field, in certain Dutch ministries there is an alarming lack of technical knowledge. Do you think this is overdoing things? In any case, it is clear that for many people in those Ministries of Economic Affairs (EZ) and of VROM, even the difference between energy and power is not known. The proof?
It must have been two or three years now since the General Audit-Office had to ask the Ministry of Economic Affairs (EZ) to pay attention, when reporting on the EU discussions in Brussels, to what exactly had been mentioned: amounts of energy, so kilowatt-hours or megawatt-hours, for example, or power, so kilowatts or megawatts. The General Audit-Office was so kind as to send me a copy of this interesting letter. On the occasion of the beginning of the financial year 2007, the government announced its proposal "Less and Clean". The idea was to explain to the public how energy was going to be dealt with in the next few years. But in the whole document, as far as I have been able to determine, not once a measurement unit of energy is mentioned. On the contrary, the power unit MW or megawatt is constantly used. The difference between power and produced energy is of course essential, and even more so for windturbines. That is why I indeed get the strong impression that many civil servants in economic affairs and housing, spatial planning and the environment do not know the difference between power and energy.
What may the citizens of a country expect from their government and government officials?
We expect that when a minister or any other official is not sufficiently knowledgeable on a certain issue he or she ought first to make themselves acquainted by means of professional and unbiased people that definitely have no interest in the outcome of the final conclusion.
They should refrain themselves from making statements on the issue in the Parliament unless these are no longer based on thair lack of knowledge. That would lead to the wrong information for the Parliament and therefore for the Dutch people. According to the rules of our democracy, a person supplying such false information to the people's representatives ought to be removed from his post.
A further rule ought to be that the government may never raise expectations that cannot be fulfilled.
In relation to the issue "The use of placing windturbines in the Netherlands" it is clear that, for years, the government has not observed the rules of this chapter: first to know what one is talking about before making decisions or debating in our Parliament.
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