The 600,000 Dutch that travel daily by train will now do so thanks purely to wind energy, with the national rail operator Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS) announcing that 100 percent of its passenger trains will be powered by the renewable source from January onwards.
The move is claimed as a world first, and is the product of a 2015 agreement between NS and Dutch electricity company Eneco. Initially, the pair had targeted January 2018 as the time when each of NS' trains would run entirely on wind power, but it looks like things are moving well ahead of schedule.
"NS uses the same amount of energy as the city of Amsterdam," NS spokesman Ton Boon tells New Atlas. "And the electricity is supplied from newly built wind farms. With this we lead by example: this contract will boost the production of green energy, we hope that other companies will follow this in their coming contracts."
NS, along with other train operators, does still run a small fleet of diesel trains, Boon explains, though these will be phased out by the end of 2017.
Source: NS