It was summer 2025, the air felt heavy with the humidity around this time. Aukje van Bezeij, one of the founding members of the Zuiderlicht Energy Cooperative, took a walk around her neighborhood that floated on the Schinkel River, like she usually did each morning before the sun got too strong. She had a few regular routes she liked walking where she passed two milestones on her route. The first, the ASV Arsenal football club that installed solar panels, Zuiderlicht’s first large project, reminded her of how the cooperative started. The second, on the way back the feeling of stepping off the sidewalk onto the floating walkway to her houseboat; a daily reminder that context matters. She attributes living in a “drifting neighborhood” or houseboat community as making her more open to or receptive to integrating solar panels. Sure, there’s the reminder of being on water and climate change, but more than that, houseboats have flat roofs, ideal for solar panels. Many residential buildings in Amsterdam, the Netherlands did not.
Until recently, energy sharing of surplus solar energy to households and other connections in the low voltage network (i.e., the neighborhood, usually reaching around 300 houses) was prohibited under Dutch law. As of summer 2025, a key provision of the new Energy Act was finally being implemented: one where energy sharing was finally legal as long as all connections had the same energy supplier. The same-supplier requirement was planned to be a temporary setup, until a multi-supplier sharing system was set up by summer 2026. Some energy cooperatives had already been piloting this model for a few years with special regulatory sandbox permissions. Zuiderlicht had decided not to apply for the special permission to pilot at the time. They felt they were already spread too thin. Now that energy sharing was legal, Aukje felt that they were missing key knowledge on how to shift into energy sharing. She reminded herself to not feel like they missed the boat. What she needed to figure out now, together with the rest of the cooperative, was how to make their energy sharing goals a reality.
