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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

You can do some amazing things with enough energy! And the Netherlands have a lot of extra energy because of all the geothermal energy they get.

This is not [yet] replicable to other places though.

Hopefully soon - unlimited energy would utterly change the world.

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Have you got them confused with Iceland, or are thinking of wind energy?

I saw this in the article:

"The growing environment is kept at optimal temperatures year-round by heat generated from geothermal aquifers that simmer under at least half of the Netherlands."

Some greenhouse farmers use geothermal energy, but this is far from a common energy source. It's been suggested that this might be our way to get off of natural gas, though. (After small earthquakes in the province of Groningen, the extraction of gas has been greatly reduced. Seemingly of less concern politically in NL, gas isn't sustainable.)

Wow, today I learned: http://www.thermogis.nl/general_info.html

Not as hot but definitely useful for greenhouse direct heating.

Do you have more information on this geothermal energy? Clicking around here[1] suggests the Netherlands doesn't actually use much geothermal energy at all.

[1]: https://www.geothermal-energy.org/direct_uses/netherlands.ht...

It's also news to me. Most of our energy still comes from coal and gas, I believe. I believe we were once ahead of the pack in wind energy, but the conservative politics of the past decade and a half has made us fall behind the rest of Europe in switching to sustainable energy.

From the article:

"The growing environment is kept at optimal temperatures year-round by heat generated from geothermal aquifers that simmer under at least half of the Netherlands."

It's deep geothermic energy, you gotta drill >500 meters to get to it. So indeed not as easy as for example Iceland.

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