How Green Is My Polder (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine June 2003

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How Green Is My Polder (Cont.)

IT'S ONE THING TO OBSERVE Ecotopia from the lab, but what's it like to live here? One afternoon I board a high-speed train to Nieuwland, a state-of-the-art development of 5,000 moderately sized, moderately priced homes about 30 miles southeast of Amsterdam. Cleverly realizing that its citizens will go green only if doing so is easy and affordable, the government heavily subsidizes developments like Nieuwland. Beatrix herself helicoptered in during construction several years ago, and there are long waiting lists to buy property there.

A man on the train warns me that Nieuwland is way too bourgeois for Holland's hardcore greens. And indeed, when the train stops at the city of Amersfoort, I hop into a shared taxi with Lucas Vangool, a resident who doesn't look like he's ever gone near a pair of Birkenstocks. Vangool's no eco-freak, but a former Dutch marine commando whose reasons for choosing Nieuwland are mostly practical. "It's fine to save the planet," he says, "but I just like the apartment."

Passing duck ponds and a communal garden, I meander down to Nieuwland's photovoltaic-tile-topped Sports Hall looking for Bernard Verheijen, the public-relations director of the development's green utility company, Eneco Energy. I was expecting a company man in a company Volvo, but Verheijen, a middle-aged redhead, cruises up on a rusting three-speed bicycle and tells me to hop on sidesaddle.

I clutch Verheijen's heaving midriff, and we creak past Nieuwland's deli and day-care center to a quieter street lined with "energy-neutral" homes. A thousand of the houses here are equipped with power-generating photovoltaic cells, and 501 of those get half their juice from solar panels. The rest are hooked up to a natural-gas cogeneration plant, which produces heat and electricity at the same time. The government encourages wise energy use by exempting buyers from the hefty tax imposed on conventional energy, subsidizing R&D, and requiring developers to build to stringent green standards.

The house Verheijen shows me is a flesh-colored stucco job, its roof topped with neatly integrated photovoltaic tiles. It's owned by his co-worker, an engineer named Herman Eijpe, and is one of two models theoretically capable of producing as much power as it consumes.

We're greeted by Eijpe's son Dennis, a gangly teenager who quickly disappears. A computer screen is flickering in the den off the two-story atrium. Verheijen groans.

"This is why the house does not fit into our exact calculations," he says. "We projected one hour of computer use a day, and they have three computers, always downloading things." He shows me a digital meter on the wall. Just now, on this bright spring afternoon, the house is producing 2,014 watts and using only 552. This month, it has produced 50 percent more energy than it's used. But Holland is often enshrouded in fog and rain, and over the span of a year the tiles produce only 92 percent of the home's energy needs.

"We have to learn," Verheijen says. "It's all new." Is his company making money in the meantime? "Not much yet," he admits cheerfully. "But we hope it will be nice."

That's another thing about the Dutch: They're patient.

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