Launching State of Transition
A new site about the energy transition, written with the numbers attached — heating, electricity markets and the policy around them, in Dutch and in English.
The energy transition is mostly reported as announcements. A target is set, a subsidy is opened, a quarter breaks a record. What is harder to find is the part that comes after the announcement: whether the capacity was actually connected, whether the money reached the houses it was written for, and what a percentage means once you put it back next to the base it is a percentage of.
That gap is what this site is for.
What you can expect
Three subjects, roughly, and they overlap more than they look like they should.
Heating. Heat pumps, district heat, the Dutch and European heating market, and the long argument about what to do with the housing stock that already exists. This is the part of the transition that happens one building at a time, which is exactly why it is slower and less photogenic than a wind farm.
Electricity markets and the grid. Congestion, connection queues, prices that go negative on a sunny afternoon, and the growing distance between how much capacity has been built and how much of it can actually deliver.
Policy. Mostly Dutch and European: what a measure says, what it funds, and what it is likely to do — which are three different questions and are frequently answered as if they were one.
Occasionally something else. Transitions have a shape in common, and the energy one is not the only large system currently changing under everybody’s feet.
The numbers stay attached
Where a post rests on data, the data is on the page — as a chart you can read rather than a figure quoted from a press release, with the source named underneath it. A number without its denominator, its base year, or its definition is not evidence, and this site would rather show the working than ask to be trusted.
Two languages
Some posts are written in Dutch, some in English, and the language a piece is written in is usually the language its subject lives in. Every post is tagged with its own, and you can read either stream on its own from the links above the list. Where a post exists in both languages, each version links to the other.
Getting in touch
There is no newsletter, no comment section and no account to make. If a post is wrong, or right in a way that is worth extending, the contact page has an address.