The whole thing turned into a self-perpetuating funding circus with relatively little real world impact.
The problem was that they were going on and on about what things looked like and exaggerating the risks rather than to look carefully at what alternatives we had.
NL is kind of special in that way I guess, people here really care a lot about keeping things traditional. It brings in the tourists and of course it is lovely to see the country through a lens like that.
And those pesky windmills and solar panels were going to change all that. So we saw a lot of resistance. In the end they went so far as to determine that any sea based windmill parks had to be an x number of miles off-shore (in much deeper water, increasing construction costs considerably) rather than nearby.
Anyway, it's all moot, they came around and since then it has been good to see them fix things (the Green party also came to their senses at some point, but there are still hold-outs that would love to see all the windmills go away because they are eye sores - or at least, in the eyes of some, I think they are beautiful).
It is interesting to what extent history has been edited, good luck finding much about horizon pollution, bird strike studies or the effect of all those dark solar panels on our traditionally red brick roofs today.
What is also interesting is that we have a huge windmill tradition here, simply because without windmills a lot of the land here would have never been developed (if it even existed) in the first place. So this is the last place in the world where I would expect any kind of headwind (pun intended) for renewable energy. I guess in a hundred years when we have cheap fusion there will be a political party or lobby group trying hard to keep those windmills that are so beautiful.
The amount of noise around 'horizonvervuiling' (horizon pollution, I'm not making this up) and reflections from solar panels as well as bird strike stats that were not even close to realistic turned a whole pile of people off from wind energy and solar. But nowadays Greenpeace can't see enough windmill parks so all is good and your contributions are going towards something positive again, though, in all fairness I think Greenpeace really is more of a self-perpetrating PR machine and lobby group than an activist platform. The days of the Rainbow Warrior #1 are long behind us.
The interaction between 'Groenlinks' (a political party here) and Greenpeace led to some pretty weird results, I'm sure the coal, oil and natural gas lobbies were having a great old time with the green groups helping them.
Well, history will probably say that the actual realists where those that were promoting reducing energy consumption...
Regards Greenpeace specifically: I was already on the edge because they've quite frankly become more part of the problem than part of the solution for their stance on existing nuclear energy production. It makes absolutely no sense to close any nuclear generators early when you're still burning coal / peat / ignite / biomass without carbon capture and storage.