I think it’s partly the effect of being an outlier in terms of population density (makes it harder to build wind or solar farms), natural resources (few possibilities for hydro-electricity, for example), and quality of farmland (moving production to poorer grounds often isn’t a net win, globally)
There also may be an effect that making Dutch agriculture greener makes it more competitive, increasing output and thus offsetting improvements in efficiency.
But yes, such a rich country that isn’t really dependent on its agricultural output should be able to do more. Stopping fertilizer imports probably would help a lot.
> population density (makes it harder to build wind or solar farms)
This is more an excuse than an actual reason. Because the Dutch have large patches of shallow sea: which is ideal for building huge scale windparks that are, relatively cheap. The "ground" can still be used for fishing, so you hardly loose anything. Yet even building parks in sea is met with strong opposition. From wildlife preservation orgs to people complaining that this will ruin their view over the sea.
Furthermore, the IJsselmeer and Markmermeer have often been suggested as "energy storage" where water is pumped up a few meters by wind, or overcapacity electro. The Netherlands, has, in fact, build some of the largest dams in the world, but "forgot" to use them as power stations. Anyone who has ever visited Neeltje-Jans, for example, will see the opportunity to harvest some of the enormous amounts of water being pushed through the Netherlands. I live on the riverside of the Waal (part of the Rhine), where currently over 7000m³/second of (in winter warm-ish and in summer cold-ish) water passes by my office-window. There must be ways to harvest some of this energy.
There is a lack of will and a lack of urgency. Not a lack of opportunities.
You need height to get ‘serious’ hydro power. In the Netherlands, the Rhine water drops by less than 20 meters across the entire country (ballpark 100km), so I think a 1 m drop already would be optimistic.
So let’s take that 7000m³ and drop it by a meter. That’s dropping 7 million kg of water by one meter, or (if my math is right) about 70 MW of potential energy. You might get somewhat more out by decreasing the speed at which the water flows, but I doubt that would be much (the more you slow the water down, the larger the river downstream has to be)
Also, that’s if you dam the entire river. The Waal is a major river for shipping, so you can’t do that.
Finally, I think 7000m³/s is an outlier. Google gives me 1500m³/s flow rate for the Waal (and, consistent with that, 2000m³/s for the Rhine). So, on average, a system damming of the whole river, requiring all ships to go through locks, would produce about 15MW.
And I think my math is at least in the right ballpark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauharnois_generating_station generates “up to 1,903 MW of electrical power”, but it has a water drop of 24 meters, and runs in a river that has an average discharge about equal to that peak of that of the Waal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Lawrence_River: “The average discharge at the river's source, the outflow of Lake Ontario, is 7,410 m³/s”), and, I would guess, is designed for somewhere around that average discharge, dropping surplus water over an overflow system. So, that would account for a factor of 24 (times the height) × 5 (flow rate)
I deliberately did not talk about damming the river. Doing that would cause a lot of problems for shipping. And my house would flood for sure.
The math is simpler though: potential energy is massXheight. So any one of those can be high. Small hydropower (I built this in Switzerland for fun) using a long pipe and a reversed pump can deliver significant power from a tiny brook, if the height is enough.
If you increase the height of the entire IJsselmeer with 10cm, that is an enormous mass, a gigantic potential energy.
Whether one can economically extract that power is a different issue.
The temp diff is another potential energy. As is the kinetic energy (the water is going really fast!).
We can spend hours debating why things cannot be done, but that has never brought innovation.
IJsselmeer would be storage, not extracting power.
Also, building stuff “for fun” is different from doing things at scale and come out ahead. As you say “Whether one can economically extract that power is a different issue”, but, in this context, IMO of utmost importance.
I don’t think there are easy gains at scale to be had there.
There also may be an effect that making Dutch agriculture greener makes it more competitive, increasing output and thus offsetting improvements in efficiency.
But yes, such a rich country that isn’t really dependent on its agricultural output should be able to do more. Stopping fertilizer imports probably would help a lot.