A clear point of departure for a complex process

Provincial and municipal authorities are joining forces with grid operators in the 30 individual energy regions, along with housing corporations, NGOs, educational institutions and the private sector. The public also has a say in the drafting of the RES. They are working on developing a widely supported energy strategy, with decisions regarding sustainable power generation, the heat transition in the built environment and the required storage and energy infrastructure. The National RES Programme (NP RES) facilitates the regions. By developing expertise and sharing it in the form of guidelines, as well as through data analyses and calculation methods. This opens up opportunities for an open and transparent debate.

NP RES commissioned the development of an online platform with a set of basic data relating to energy consumption, production and infrastructure. This serves as a point of departure for the various regions. These maps provide a shared image across all regions and municipalities, based on the same basic information. Consistency, comparability, countability and transparency are all important in this regard. The maps reveal, for example, that the town of Altena potentially provides room for a maximum of 13 windmills, whereas the adjacent community of Molenlanden potentially provides room for a maximum of 292 windmills. This is key information for discussion and regional cooperation.

In CE Delft and Generation Energy Geodan has developed a platform that brings together all this information and makes this available. In this platform, the different national datasets, relating to the generation of solar and wind energy and available heat sources, was created by Generation Energy and CE Delft. The creators used open data (including Statistics Netherlands [CBS], climate monitor, Netherlands Enterprise Agency [Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland/RVO] and Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency [Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving/PBL) to the extent possible, while Geodan developed the online platform and the viewer to make the data accessible.

The online platform provides all stakeholders within the RES regions access to the viewer. The available datasets and maps are identical for all municipalities and regions. All stakeholders in the region can be secure in the knowledge that they will be using the most up-to-date data, an ideal basis for policymaking related to the energy transition.

In order to continue supporting the energy transition as effectively as possible, they are continuously working on improving the platform’s quality and functionality. For example, the development focuses on the viewer’s user-friendliness, with data being updated and extended.