The Dutch miracle of renewable acceptance (and its small print)

In 2014 I was working in the Netherlands, in the wind sector (I tell the story in my background). Among those of us in the business, the diagnosis was already clear: projects didn't fail on the engineering, they failed in the villages. People argued about noise, about the landscape and, above all, about the question with no technical answer: what's in it for me? There was talk of acceptance, of participation, of compensating the area. What there wasn't was a plan.

Twelve years later, that country has moved from talking to writing. Today 44% of onshore wind output has local owners, and a developer who wants to build on Dutch soil may have to explain in writing what they have done to make the community a co-owner of the park. I wouldn't call it a miracle; I'd call it a political decision sustained for seven years, which sounds less heroic and is far more replicable.

A warning before going on: the story doing the rounds in Spain —"in Holland 50% of every park belongs to the community"— is only half the story, and the more comfortable half. The other half is best understood through two cases.

In Zeeland, more than 4,000 local people own a wind farm. It's called Windpark Krammer: 34 turbines, 102 MW, 365 GWh a year and more than 195 million euros of investment. Two local cooperatives, Zeeuwind and Deltawind, got it going in 2010, and in 2020 their members' assemblies approved raising their joint stake from 51% to 60%. It is, rightly, the largest citizen project in the country.

Two hours' drive away, in Oirschot, the same film cuts out. At the Kriekampen solar park, 25 hectares and 28 MW, the local cooperative KempenStroom hoped to own half. In January 2025 its members decided not to go in: the project's risk was too high for a young cooperative that still lacked sufficient reserves. The park opened in September 2025. Without them.

A country that put 50% in writing

In 2019 the Dutch Climate Agreement, the Klimaatakkoord, set two things at once: reaching 35 TWh a year of onshore renewables by 2030, and aiming for 50% of the ownership of that output to stay in local hands: residents and businesses in the municipality. This «lokaal eigendom» is measured very concretely: legal ownership of the installation —the park, the turbine— as a percentage of annual output. Rooftops are excluded: the model is for land and water. And it distinguishes three types of local owner: neighbourhood collectives and local members (cooperatives, small firms, farmers), public bodies (councils, water boards) and local businesses.

My impression, after all these years, is that the really brave part wasn't the 50%, but daring to put a number on it and measure it every year. The 50% is a goal, not an obligation: the agreement itself recognises "local room to deviate for project reasons". Anyone who presents it as an imposition is wrong.

From aspiration to rule

What's interesting is what came next. The new Dutch Energy Act, the Energiewet, has been in force since 1 January 2026, and inside it is a parliamentary amendment that changed the rules of the game: its article 6.12.3 allows local by-laws to require a developer building or expanding a large renewable installation to make an effort to reach 50% local co-ownership. The result isn't imposed: the effort is, and above all the duty to document it and explain why it fell short.

Translated: anyone who wants to build on Dutch soil has to sit down and negotiate with the area, and prove it in writing. The association of municipalities published a model by-law for each council to adapt. Municipalities such as Kampen, Woerden and Berkelland have already adopted it, and in autumn 2026 Noord-Brabant approved its own: large parks will have to demonstrate their effort towards 50%. Zuid-Holland has gone further in ambition, with 90% local ownership, although for now without legal force.

Of the whole model, this is what interests me most: the law doesn't need to force you to share ownership; it needs to force you to justify why you don't. That's where a developer's behaviour changes.

Not a miracle: a six-piece system

When people talk about the "Dutch miracle" it's worth remembering that behind it there are six pieces put in place at the same time, not a vocation.

First, a subsidy designed only for cooperatives and owners' associations, the SCE, which pays a tariff per kilowatt hour for 15 years. It provides what citizen investment needs most: certainty. Its 2026 budget was 78 million euros and, mind the detail, by 6 October only 16% had been committed (and barely 6% actually granted): 84% was still unclaimed. I'm holding on to that figure, because it sums up the lesson of this article.

Second, a public development loan fund —the Ontwikkelfonds voor Energiecoöperaties, run by the state green fund and the cooperatives' federation— which since 2020 has supported and financed 40 projects and opened nationwide in June 2025. Third, an industry code of conduct signed in 2020 by the wind industry association and the main environmental organisations, setting out how local people are involved. Fourth, a public guide to forms of participation. Fifth, municipal by-laws. And sixth, an annual monitor that publishes who owns each park.

Without pieces one and two, local ownership is a good intention. Without piece six, nobody knows whether it works.

The numbers, unvarnished

The official monitor —the Monitor Financiële Participatie, commissioned by the Dutch government and presented to Parliament in April 2026 with data to the end of 2024— says this:

• Onshore wind: 44% of output has local owners. Of the new output that came into operation in 2024, 65%.
• Ground-mounted solar: around 21%. And here's the problem: that share has barely moved since 2019. It grows in absolute terms, not as a percentage. The government itself concluded that the 50% goal "is not in sight".
• Citizen cooperatives only —what we call energy communities—: the figures drop to 7.6% in wind and 3.7% in solar. Most of the 44% in wind is local farmers: landowners who become owners of the park. It is local ownership, yes, but it isn't the same thing.
• Area funds: 88.5% of the output of wind parks built since 2015 has a local area fund, money that goes to the community without anyone having to be an owner. A figure almost nobody quotes.

On the human side: 696 active cooperatives and more than 143,000 members who together supply electricity to half a million households, according to the Lokale Energie Monitor 2025 published every year by the HIER foundation. In solar alone, 1,425 cooperative projects since 2008.

The small print hardly anyone mentions

The government commissioned a study to understand why the pace was slowing. It was carried out by AS I-Search after talking to more than 40 stakeholders —developers, cooperatives, industry bodies, public funders and public authorities—, and its diagnosis is uncomfortable for everyone: the brake isn't ownership, it's the market and the sites. Negative prices, grid and balancing costs, high interest rates and a lack of available land. Problems that affect every project, locally owned or not.

And there is a second finding, this one uncomfortable for those of us who defend the model: local ownership does not by itself generate more acceptance, at least not at the start. Even cooperatives with fully owned projects run into local resistance. What counts for early support is a careful participation process with the whole area; ownership adds more later, once the park is running. It is one route among others, alongside area funds, local bonds or bill discounts; it isn't a magic wand.

The 2025 data confirm it: not a single new cooperative wind project came into operation, and the sector's organisations have had to set up a crisis team to keep afloat the cooperative solar parks that today's economics are choking. The cooperatives' association, Energie Samen, rightly points out that the clouds hang over the whole sector, not just them. But the warning stands: sharing ownership without fixing the project's economics just passes the problem on to your neighbour.

And here I want to be honest, because it concerns me: I have spent years arguing that energy should be in people's hands. That report doesn't prove me wrong, but it forces me to sharpen the argument. Sharing ownership without sharing the market isn't energy justice; it's sharing a risk.

And Spain?

We have nothing like it. No local ownership goal, no duty to justify it, no dedicated subsidy for cooperatives, no public development loan fund. In terms of framework, we're behind.

But we have an open door we haven't walked through yet. Royal Decree-Law 7/2026, in force since 22 March, amended the self-consumption regulation so that an installation of up to 5 MW, connected through the grid, can be associated with consumers located less than 5 kilometres away. Translated: a plant under 5 MW can supply collective self-consumption within 5 km. And the government is finalising two royal decrees through the fast-track procedure: one on self-consumption, with the figure of the collective self-consumption manager and the use of electric car batteries to provide services to the grid, and another on energy communities, with reserved grid access capacity. They will complete the framework.

I won't paint it prettier than it is: as I explained in the bottleneck of Spain's energy transition, we have the rule that allows us to grow and often we don't have the cable to do it through. So the lever has to be used wisely, where the grid can take it.

There are already 837 energy communities in Spain, 65.5% of them in rural municipalities (and if you don't have yours yet, you're late). And our solar fleet is made up mostly of small installations: almost 98% of those on the register are 100 kW or smaller; plants under 5 MW are spread across the whole country. That's the opportunity almost nobody has looked squarely at.

So I'm not keeping the miracle headline, I'm keeping the lesson:

Ownership without access to the market is decorative ownership.

The Netherlands shared ownership before solving flexibility, storage and price, and today it has cooperatives with assets that lose money. Spain can do both at once, because the lever already exists: turning plants under 5 MW into collective self-consumption, with storage on the same site and real consumers within 5 kilometres, is sharing ownership and sharing value at the same time. So the plant stops being a financial asset in the area and becomes infrastructure of the area.

I have spent years supporting energy community processes in villages and industrial estates, and the question I'm asked most isn't technical: it's "will this be mine?". In the Netherlands they answered it in writing in 2019. We have the good fortune of being able to answer it with the meter, not with the law.

We don't install solar panels. We build energy infrastructure in the hands of citizens. And this is only the beginning.

Keep reading

Main sources

• Monitor Financiële Participatie Hernieuwbare Energie op Land 2024 — RVO / Government of the Netherlands, presented to Parliament on 13/04/2026.
• Lokaal eigendom in de praktijk: zicht op de belemmeringen, succesfactoren en impact — AS I-Search, July 2026.
• Real Decreto-ley 7/2026, de 20 de marzo (BOE-A-2026-6544), amending Royal Decree 244/2019 on self-consumption — BOE.

About the author

Juan Sacri is an engineer, cooperativist and co-founder of Sapiens Energía —a non-profit cooperative that has supported more than 90 energy communities across Spain— and of AVACE, the Valencian Association of Energy Communities.