The vast majority of Dutch people support the government’s goal of massively switching off natural gas from households to heat pumps and heating networks. At the same time, there is great skepticism about the precise plans. Citizens fear high and unfairly distributed costs. They consider climate policy to be “inconsistent”, for example due to constantly changing plans regarding the compensation system for solar panel owners. And if municipalities want to cut off gas to homes and possibly incur costs for residents, between 30 and 50 percent of respondents say they will protest.
All this emerges from the Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency’s (PBL) investigation into Dutch support for a natural gas supply cut. Previous cabinets have stipulated in the climate agreement that all households must be free of natural gas by 2050, and that 1.5 million households must be made more sustainable by 2030. It is not clear whether the Schoof cabinet also wants this, although it says it will stick to previous climate targets.
Not on the way
The Netherlands is not on track to meet these housing targets. “Progress has stalled,” says PBL researcher Astrid Martens. This is partly due to the high costs of heat networks and heat pumps, the difficulty energy companies have in achieving their revenue models and the overload of the energy grid. But citizens’ scepticism is also the cause of the difficult transition, Martens emphasises.
Two thousand Dutch people completed PBL questionnaires and some participated in longer interviews. It is good news that the Dutch want, in principle, to get rid of gas due to climate concerns (76 percent) and to become less dependent on other countries (88 percent).
At the same time, citizens often disagree with how the government wants to do this. For example, the previous government wanted municipalities to be able to cut off the gas supply to neighbourhoods. While 54 percent of respondents believe that municipalities should simply not do that. The majority of citizens also want the costs of new heat sources to be widely supported. While the previously proposed policy hardly achieves that. Given the low trust of citizens in the government, the new PBL cabinet must make a “change of course.”
Away from gas
Sanne de Boer, an energy transition analyst at RaboResearch who was not involved in the study, thinks it is “very good that the support base has been thoroughly investigated”. “We have been hearing these sounds for some time.” She points to the “very difficult” transition away from gas. Especially since then, Climate Minister Rob Jetten announced that heating networks should not be owned by companies, as is currently the case, but by the government. Companies such as Eneco and Vattenfall subsequently withdrew from the projects.
What should the Schoof cabinet do to get millions of households to stop using gas? The PBL does not (yet) provide policy advice. Rabo analyst De Boer does. “If you want to make heat pumps and heating networks attractive, you have to make fossil fuels more expensive. And thus save the groups that have difficulty switching and have lower incomes.” The new cabinet wants to reverse an announced increase in the natural gas tax.
More subsidies for heating networks
The Council of Ministers must also “start over” when it comes to heating networks, says De Boer. “When the climate agreement was drawn up, it was thought that it would be smart to take gas away from neighbourhoods en masse and connect them to heating networks. But now heating networks only seem to be efficient in specific places.” For example, places with many old, high-rise buildings, where many people live who need a relatively large amount of heat, make sense for heating networks. The government must also invest more subsidies in heating networks, because it is “an expensive form of heat.”
In addition, current subsidies for heat pumps should be maintained, says De Boer. “It is incomprehensible that this government wants to remove the obligation to use hybrid heat pumps; it must be reversed immediately.” According to De Boer, this can encourage manufacturers to make better and cheaper heat pumps, which in turn encourages citizens to switch off to gas.
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