The promises of renewable energy (RE), often trumpeted in global assemblies such as the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, stand in stark contrast to their actual realization.

Past the euphoria of the decarbonization thrust, not much has been realized, and even nations at the forefront of the global campaign are having a reality check.

The Dutch, despite their vast natural gas reserves, have stubbornly plunged into strict green energy policies — only to find themselves bowing to the folly of renewable energy.

In the Netherlands, a government TV campaign called “Flip the Switch” featured an actress warning viewers about their electricity use.

“When we all use electricity at the same time, our power grid gets overloaded,” she said. “This can cause malfunctions. So use as little electricity as possible between four and nine.”

According to a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) report, the paradox of a nation that is endowed with a vast source of energy resorting to limits in energy use is a sign that something has gone wrong.

The Netherlands has the biggest population of electric cars in Europe and has the highest number of charging points per capita, while for electricity production, it has replaced gas from its large North Sea reserves with wind and solar.

Currently, more than one-third of Dutch homes have solar panels fitted. The country is also aiming for offshore wind farms to be its biggest source of energy by 2030.

The BBC report stated that the shift in energy sourcing may be good in environmental terms, “but it’s putting the Dutch national electricity grid under enormous stress, and in recent years there have been a number of power cuts.”

The massive use of RE resulted in a “grid congestion” similar to a traffic jam on the power grid.

The gridlock is caused by either too much power demand in a certain area or too much power supply entering the electricity network, more than it can handle.

Electricity grids have massive power lines close to generating plants, and increasingly smaller power lines near the households.

The switch to RE meant that there’s a lot of power being injected into the grid on the outskirts of the network, where there are only relatively small power lines.

The small power lines are thus struggling to cope with all the electricity coming in from wind turbines and solar panels scattered around the country.

An electrical engineering expert at Belgium’s Liege University said it is an expensive problem for the Netherlands to solve.

“The country is experiencing a grid crisis because it has not invested enough in distribution and transmission networks, so bottlenecks are everywhere.”

It will take years and billions of dollars to solve the crisis, the expert indicated.

The situation is also deterring business growth since expanding operations has become an ordeal because they cannot get extra capacity from the grid operators.

Thus, the RE boom has become unsustainable because the electricity systems of every nation are built for conventional electricity supply.

Following the 2015 Paris Agreement on tackling climate change, participants were very much focused on increasing the renewable power generation side. Still, they underestimated the impact it would have on the power grid.

To continue with the RE folly, the Dutch grid operator plans to spend $235 billion to refit the grid, mainly by laying new cables between now and 2050.

For a developing nation like the Philippines to be forced to get into the expensive grid adjustment would be nothing less than criminal.

While enormous resources are lost to the corrupt practices of its government leaders, the shift to RE threatens to add roadblocks to development through unnecessary expenses.