Since 1988, climate scientist Pier Vellinga has been calling on world leaders, entrepreneurs, and citizens to take climate change seriously. The professor put his money where his mouth is: together with his wife, Jans, and their neighbors, he has now installed a small wind turbine at their historic farm. A smart choice, in line with his own scientific insights and the current geopolitical climate.
Anyone who goes to the dike in Eck en Wiel (by bike or by car) will occasionally spot it among the trees. Its wooden blades peek out just above the dike. The green mast almost blends into the landscape along the Lower Rhine, but the blades turn proudly on the Huis te Wiel estate in the municipality of Buren. Here stands the first Ecoways wind turbine at a private residence, that of Professor of Climate Change Pier Vellinga.
For him, his work goes beyond discussions and conferences on climate change, though he has participated in many of them. Pier feels the need to put his money where his mouth is. And that’s not so easy as a private citizen. And yet, “perseverance pays off” in Buren.
It’s a festive afternoon in March 2026, in the field behind the dike. Vellinga, his wife Jans, and their neighbors are welcoming guests from all over. The EcoBuren Energie collective is there, along with farmers and neighbors, whether they run a business or not. The wind is strong today, so the small windmill is spinning swiftly. A few meters away stands a colorful parasol. Small glasses of prosecco are handed out, and there are brief speeches by both Buren Councilwoman Martine de Bas and Pier himself. A moment later, Jans brings out a sign, revealing it by pulling a cloth off it. She has rewritten the lyrics of the traditional song “Vader Jacob” on it and asks everyone there to sing along.
“Four years of pushing
Look, it’s standing
All the sails are turning
Wind in time.”
With this lovely bit of group singing, the mill is officially opened!
“Putting your money where your mouth is,” says Vellinga, referring to the English proverb. That’s exactly what he wants to do here, with the windmill in his front yard. “As a professor, I’ve been researching climate change since 1984, more than 40 years, looking at what lies ahead and how we can mitigate it. Because climate change is a direct threat. How can we limit it?”
One week, he gives lectures at VU University Amsterdam; the next, he takes students to Terschelling to see “salt-tolerant agriculture” with their own eyes. And when at home, he wants above all to be independent of fossil fuels with a sustainable home, well-insulated, featuring one of the first electric cars from 2014, and now their own, self-generated energy. “No matter how serious climate change is, it’s incredibly rewarding to be able to work on solutions. I’d like to be a pioneer myself.”
“I’m a farmer’s son from Friesland. My father had six sons and a cattle farm with forty cows. As I was growing up, self-reliance and independence played an important role. In the Netherlands, the talk was all about the ‘butter mountain.’” In the 1960s, the whole of Europe was talking about the “butter mountain” and the “milk lake” - metaphors for the surplus of certain agricultural products in Europe. Farms were innovating rapidly, but many chose to produce the same products, partly because of subsidies.
“That dependence on government subsidies didn’t sit well with my father. And he didn’t want that for us. He said, ‘You shouldn’t become a farmer if it makes you dependent on subsidies.’ My parents had six sons and two daughters. ‘I can’t make a living on the farm for all of you, but I can pay for your education.’ And that’s what happened. One son, with a degree from Wageningen, eventually took over the farm, and his grandson still runs it today. But the other children pursued higher education. Two became professors, two became veterinarians, and the others also did well. One daughter became a farmer and cheese maker in France.
“Young farmers today are facing the same problems due to subsidies and policies that are actually misguided. And I can imagine that this is why they’re rebelling now. Like farmers who, for years, were told by Rabobank that they should focus on investing and scaling up by using chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and commercial feed. Experts are now backing away from that approach somewhat, because it’s not a sustainable solution.”
Vellinga points to the work of Urgenda, where he served as board chair for many years. “Based on research, Urgenda says: ‘We need more farmers. We need them to farm more organically and receive more money for their products.’ Competing on the global market is virtually impossible because the Netherlands has some of the highest wages in the world and the most expensive land. That’s only possible if you deplete the soil and destroy nature. Farmers are the most suitable stewards of nature and the landscape when they focus on producing healthy food within a healthy ecosystem, with the government providing policy support.”
Vellinga began his scientific career in 1976 in coastal engineering: He co-authored the Delta Plan, designed to protect the Netherlands from rising sea levels. “That’s when I read that climate change means storm protection is becoming even more urgent.” Gradually, his focus shifted to the problem caused by rising sea levels: How can we ensure that climate change, with its consequences for sea levels, as well as for the quality of life for people, animals, and nature, does not accelerate, but rather slows down?
“That was the reason I moved to the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning, and the Environment (VROM) in 1988 to organize, together with then-Minister Nijpels, the first global climate conference for governments in 1989. That same year, he was also actively involved in the founding of the IPCC, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” In 2007, the IPCC, together with Al Gore, received the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to gather more knowledge about climate change and to take steps to halt it. In 1991, he became a professor of Climate Change and Societal Implications at VU University Amsterdam.
“Throughout my career, I’ve faced a lot of resistance by saying, based on science: we need to move away from fossil fuels for energy; we need to transition to renewable energy. It was time for me to take action myself.” Vellinga observes that technological developments are accelerating, making the switch to solar or wind energy more accessible.
“I grew up in the 1970s with the Club of Rome. Even back then, it was already warning that the use of fossil fuels is finite. Even back then, there was already a trend toward self-sufficiency. From a societal perspective, that’s very interesting, because the more self-sufficient you are, the better you can protect your democracy.”
“The war that Russia started with Ukraine in 2022 had immediate consequences for energy costs in the Netherlands. Recent events involving Iran and the United States also show that if your country is dependent on oil- and gas-producing nations, your entire country is vulnerable.” The supply of that oil and gas can then be linked, for example, to the country’s voting behavior in international contexts.
“The Netherlands imports a lot of energy in the form of oil and gas, and that can lead to major problems. If, due to a political conflict or war, the supply slows down or even stops, this has immediate consequences at gas stations, but also affects households facing energy poverty and businesses with constant energy needs. Geopolitics has an impact, whether we like it or not.”
Vellinga observes that the farming industry has evolved significantly since the days when his father was a dairy farmer. Farms now have more livestock, but also far more equipment. “Farmers, too, are directly affected by war, and they’re already in the midst of an energy transition. They feel the impact. When a dairy farmer loses power, due to a conflict or a power outage, for example, the farm immediately faces a problem. Those 100 to 300 cows are milked using electricity, often with a milking robot. If the power goes out, the farmer can never milk all those cows by hand; they’ll get very sick right away.”
At the same time, Vellinga notes that thanks to subsidies and available land, farmers now have the opportunity to take control of their own energy supply. “Financial incentives are available to farmers to make the transition to a sustainable energy supply. That’s far from the case in other sectors where entrepreneurs operate. As far as I’m concerned, the government needs to do more to make the switch to sustainable energy easier - both for the climate and for independence. And it’s possible. Wind and solar energy are already contributing significantly.”
“The Netherlands used to be at the forefront of sustainability developments; thanks to ever-improving technology and the net metering scheme, solar panels have become quite commonplace, but the last few cabinets have let things slide. Now China and Spain are the frontrunners when it comes to generating renewable energy. The current Jetten cabinet now has an opportunity, amid the crisis between Iran and the U.S., to turn that crisis into an opportunity for sustainable solutions.
In 2006, Pier and Jans Vellinga, along with friends, purchased a former castle estate in the Betuwe region that included a Betuwe T-shaped farmhouse dating from 1841, a national monument surrounded by five hectares of land. Until 1841, a castle with a moat and a drawbridge, Huis te Wiel, had stood here. It was named after the “Wiel,” a body of water (now a pond) that marks the spot where the dike broke between 1630 and 1640. Together with two other families, Pier and Jans established a new estate here. Space was created within the moat for two additional homes, and the surrounding hectares were opened to the public for walking.
Working with landscape and building architects, the entire complex was designed with sustainability as the theme. The construction incorporated heat pumps and floor and wall heating, all without gas. Solar panels were added later. And now there are electric cars. Inside, it’s cozy on this cold Friday in March. Through the window next to the desk in the spacious kitchen-diner, the blades of the Ecoways EAZ wind turbine whiz by. There’s no shadow flicker or noise.
When you stand on the road next to the farm, the windmill almost blends into the background among the stately willows and tall reeds. The natural colors of the EAZ windmill make it seem as historic as the farm itself.
When the Vellingas moved here, solar panels were the first logical choice for generating their own energy. “But solar panels don’t do much in the winter. I saw these wind turbines a lot in Friesland and Groningen, especially on farmyards, though they were still quite expensive for private homeowners. From the start, we wanted to share the energy yield among the three homes on the property. We increased our mortgage to make this investment. I said, ‘Now we’ve paid our energy bill in advance for 20 years.’”
"Now we’ve paid our energy bill in advance for 20 years."
The purchase and operation involving three homes is complex in this case. While more and more municipalities in the Netherlands have supportive policies allowing agricultural entrepreneurs to install a small wind turbine or farmyard turbine for their own energy generation, such policies are usually not available to private individuals. On top of that, these private individuals, Vellinga and the owners of the two neighboring homes, also want to share the energy. “Current policies make it difficult to share for now. For example, I’m not allowed to run a cable to my neighbors’ homes at the moment. The tax authorities require you to pay energy tax and VAT when you supply energy to someone else, and again when you purchase it from them, so twice over. The government really needs to step in here to make this easier.”
For now, the Vellinga family uses the windmill’s energy themselves to power the historic farmhouse with its cold storage room and to charge their electric cars. “We’re still exploring how we can legally and technically share the output from the small windmill. There may be possibilities given the collective ownership of the land and other facilities on the estate. “Ideally, we would jointly own the windmill and split the electricity from the source three ways. We’ve come across a case of collective energy generation and sharing behind the meter that was approved by the Supreme Court.”
Many people have negative associations with wind energy because of the appearance, noise, and shadow flicker caused by large wind turbines. That was also the case here: “In the municipality of Buren, people are very keen to preserve the landscape, so plans for larger wind turbines were repeatedly rejected by the council. It’s a conservative stance that’s slowing down the energy transition. You can see those larger turbines from 30 kilometers away, and they cast shadows. But in 2021, a proposal was put forward by the energy cooperative eCoBuren. This was further developed by the municipality of Buren as a pilot project for 20 small wind turbines, under which not only farmers but also a small cluster of homes in open areas could obtain a permit.
Still, it took several more years before Vellinga was able to install his wind turbine. The municipality’s press release cites “delays from the province” as one cause. In particular, obtaining a government permit was difficult. Whereas Ecoways typically applies for a permit from the municipality and asks an ecological consulting firm to conduct an ecological quick scan, to identify the best locations for plants and animals, the province of Gelderland required more extensive ecological assessments to ensure that as few animals as possible (particularly bats) would be disturbed by the windmill. Only after these assessments were fully completed were Vellinga and Ecoways able to obtain the necessary permits from the municipality. Alderman Martine de Bas joined in the celebration of this first farmyard windmill in Buren and presented Pier and Jans with a commemorative tile featuring a blue-and-white windmill and the text: “Perseverance pays off.”
Now that the windmill is in place, pioneer Vellinga isn’t done yet. “In the near future, I need to add a battery to get the most out of the windmill and solar panels. I’m currently looking for a used car battery. They’re available for over 5,000 euros.”
This will allow him to store the electricity generated by the solar panels and the EAZ windmill during times when the electricity isn’t being used and is currently being fed back into the grid. “Because generating your own energy only becomes truly cost-effective when you use it yourself,” says Vellinga. As he goes about his work, this professor, together with neighbors and like-minded people, continues not only to talk about how things can be done differently, but also to put these ideas into practice himself.