[Original title: Ontwikkelingen in wetenschap en technologie - Energietechnieken in landelijke gebieden]

Summary

Developments in the sectors of both agriculture and energy imply that new energy technologies will change the appearance of rural areas.

The next few decades will see further changes in the supply of energy, resulting in a system of highly efficient plants installed both at users' and producers' ends in the line of energy supply that will be based on renewable energy sources. Fiscal schemes, research funds, levies and so on will direct how energy is to be supplied and in several decades' time it will simply be "not done" to use polluting fossil fuels. "Clean" will be standard. Following the efficiency improvements of recent years, even more profound improvements will be made and renewable sources will be used. Apart from locally employed solar energy and cases of regionally employed wind power and biomass, renewable energy will be imported also in the form of biomass, electricity and hydrogen. Electricity will come to play a more prominent role in the supply of energy than is currently the case, while heat supply will also gain in importance, particularly in urban areas. To some extent, the supply of energy will be "decentralized". In rural areas, locally produced renewable energy (from sun, wind, biomass) will play a greater role than in urban environments. When such local energy sources are employed, the need for energy storage by using batteries, flywheels, pumped-storage facilities and the like will increase in order to find a balance between supply and demand.

Achieving a sustainable level of energy supply requires more than merely substituting current energy sources by renewables. It will also mean that energy is used differently, providing scope for further major efficiency improvements. If products are designed to make use of renewable energy sources, they will have to meet quite different requirements than are effective today. Until now, efficiency gains have been consistently outweighed by increases in energy demand. This trend will be reversed at a later stage in establishing a supply of sustainable energy.

These developments will have only limited spatial effects. At a restricted number of locations, large-scale wind farms will be built, particularly in more windswept areas. In addition, buildings will take on different appearances because of the visible presence of solar heat and power generation systems.

Rural areas have several possibilities to make their contributions to this evolution in energy supply:

• developing energy systems with maximum energy output per nett hectare; this will include not only crops, but also algae cultivation and solar cell or solar tower systems;
• offering farmers incentives to install wind turbines on a wide scale (provinces of Noord-Holland, Zeeland, Groningen, Flevoland and Friesland);
• developing new and fully sustainable energy systems in rural areas, drawing on new sources and new, highly efficient plants and systems.

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