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As the minister of energy, industrial design professor David Keyson would develop a smart decentralized grid so that people can generate sustainable energy themselves and sell their surplus to the energy grid. “Look at Germany”, he says. “There people can sell as much electricity as they want to the grid. In Holland the amount is very limited.” The grid should be smart in the sense that it would enable us to store energy locally when there is an excess and it should communicate with the end users the prices they pay for electricity at any given moment. Keyson: “That way people can choose when to turn on their dryer for instance.”
He would also use taxes to change people’s behaviour: “Research shows that people only change their behaviour through economic incentives, not because they are concerned about the climate. Look at the success of the Prius car here. It’s popular because it is free of purchase taxes.”
Financial incentives could make the Dutch car park a lot greener. “Holland is an ideal country for electric cars,” he believes. “The average drive is only about 30 kilometres and there are no mountains, so cars don’t need a lot of power.”
Keyson would free all electric cars of taxes and he would let drivers of fossil fuel powered vehicles pay more taxes. He would give incentives for farmers to operate windmills, lower the city property tax for energy efficient houses, and tax homes and businesses using non-green energy.
Under his rule, the profits from the Dutch gas fields would go straight into sustainable technology development. And he would also divert more money from NWO, STW, Senter Novem and EU funding towards research projects on sustainability. Keyson: “And I would create a massive education program for elementary and high schools on sustainability.”
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