Column | Sun king – NRC

Not so long ago, we still lived in the village, I joined a party where a neighbor was loudly calculated how much money his solar panels had raised in early spring. A lot, it looked like he would never have to pay energy bills again. At the same time, he predicted a priceless life. I made the mistake to say that I found solar panels ugly.

Having solar panels also had a moral edge. The ‘investors’ did it not only for themselves, but for the earth.

In record tempo I saw the village, but also pastures and sometimes even entire landscapes afterwards. When we once had to perform in Dedemsvaart at a festival with the name Strawberryfields, a Bed & Breakfast was arranged for us, the price of which I found the space, design and breakfast, surprisingly low. Why was that?

« Just look around you tomorrow morning, » said the farmer’s wife, because it was stitching darkness, we had arrived in the evening. The next morning, we had slept well, I saw that our house was in the middle of a mirror field. The neighbors had already filled their hectares with solar panels. It was said that this was good for the environment, because biodiversity only increased under the panels. Indeed I saw rabbits sitting one after the other. Precisely by destroying the age -old landscape, nature was helped here. The farmer and farmer’s wife found the solar panels just like me ugly. Why are there still welfare committees that bend over dormer windows, but at the same time see all those solar panels through the fingers?

A few months later, Diederik Samsom visited the village, after his political career he had become a trade traveler in solar panels, among others. He told the villagers that they had to lay even more solar panels, when purchasing the solar panel, ideals and wallets gave each other a hand.

In the meantime, the image of the idealistic investor crumbled before my eyes.

In Gelredome, prior to such a sad kitchen champion Division match, I met the former Vitesse chairman Karel Aalbers who, in his good time, traded not only in players, but also in potatoes and raw materials from the former Soviet Union. He went well, he had also become a sun king in real life. He had a South American country, I believe Ecuador, so full of solar panels that he saw it shine through the plane window an hour before landing.

With the end of the netting arrangement in sight – consumers may no longer ignore the costs of the electricity that they purchase against the yield of their solar power – the market for solar panels has finally collapsed. When I recently visited the village again, an old neighbor said that he now also found his solar panels ugly. He hadn’t thought of the environment for a long time, he didn’t hear anyone anymore. First of all, world peace, something I had never heard of him about.

Marcel van Roosmalen Writes a column on Monday and Thursday.

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