Fork me on GitHub Dutch known electricity generation
Dutch electricity generation, imports and exports. Data from TenneT via ENTSO-E.
Be careful! These graphs are experimental.

Many websites provide pretty and seemingly comprehensive data about Dutch electricity production and consumption. Almost all of these sites report data from the same predictive model (owned by Dutch national gas company Gasunie). Since official Dutch electricity statistics are not very complete, a lot of assumptions and calculations are required to get to pretty graphs showing solar and (actual) wind production.

In contrast, on this page you'll find only straight data without modeling. This means no pretty graph of CO2 emissions saved, since we can't really tell. This site however can function as an alternate look on the output of opaque models - if things are looking good here as well (from a renewables perspective), they probably are good.

The graph above shows known sources of Dutch electricity production. Surprisingly, a lot of unreported generation is going on. This includes almost all solar electricity, plus tons of wind turbines and combined heat & power production. These are not in the graph.

This is a complicated graph, but it offers a lot of information. Countries produce electricity, but there is also transmission between countries. This graph starts with calculating net imports or exports, and that is the red line in the plot.

If energy is being imported, the red line is above the x-axis, and in that case the graph is pretty straightforward: it shows all non-renewable electricity production in the country, plus everything imported.

If energy is being exported, things are a bit more complicated. An example may help. If we export 3000 MW of electrical power, while 4000 MW of power is produced by non-renewable means, this means the "national" non-renewable production was 1000 MW. The rest was sold abroad.

If however we export 4000 MW of electrical power, but only generate 2000 MW non-renewably, this means we can confidently claim that all our own electrical needs were satisfied renewably. When this happens, there is empty space between the power plot and the x-axis.

The area above the x-axis is for Dutch national consumption. Anything below the x-axis is for exports.

This is the 'non-renewable duck curve', showing for the past week how coal, gas, nuclear, waste and 'other' power production for national use developed. The graph 'dips' if there is wind or if the sun shines.


Today's "day ahead" Dutch electricity prices, per hour


The Netherlands has interconnectors to Norway, Denmark, Germany, Belgium and the UK. Over these connectors flow gigawatts of energy. Often that power is merely transiting The Netherlands. The 'Total' line however shows how much electricity we are consuming from the world, or conversely, exporting to it.


Bit of a geeky graph showing logarithmically the various power sources that are reported by TenneT. Note that the solar part really is just a tiny tiny part of the actually installed capacity. It does however (probably) show when curtailment is going on because there is an excess of electrical power, or when our transport capabilities are overloaded.

All data and scripts are on GitHub. Page by bert hubert, bert@hubertnet.nl or @bert_hu_bert.