Utrecht the first municipality to force residents off gas network

Utrecht will be the first Dutch municipality to forcibly cut residents off natural gas. The city council and housing corporation Mitros consider it necessary to speed up the energy transition and avoid wasting money on renewing gas pipes that won’t be needed in a few years, the Volkskrant reports.

“This is an end to the non-commitment and the foreland of how we will do things in the Netherlands,” said alderman Lot van Hooijdonk.”This is a modest project. But for the first time, a municipality says: the gas is out.” The city council will vote on it today.

It concerns 320 rental homes in the Overvecht-Noord district, which only have a gas hookup for cooking. During a consultation, 92 percent of the residents voted for the switch to electric cooking, 5 percent voted against it, and 3 percent abstained.

And the switch will be good for tenants, the city argued. They’ll save 150 to 200 euros per year, mainly because they no longer have t pay a fixed fee for a gas connection. The housing corporation will reimburse the induction hob and accompanying pots and pans, as well as the electricity connection reinforcement and the gas meter removal.

“People find change difficult, even if it is cheaper,” Henk Peter Kip, director of Mitros, said to the newspaper. “The good news is that a large majority is in favor of the switch. If we want to make progress, we have to take these kinds of steps.”

Such minority resistance has been a significant obstacle in Utrecht’s goal to get Overvecht-Noord off the natural gas network. The city wants all approximately 8,000 homes in the district to be gas-free by 2030. But due to a few objections slowing down the process, it may now have to replace a large part of the aging gas network.

For similar reasons, more municipalities will likely follow Utrecht’s suit and start forcing people to participate in the transition away from natural gas. The Climate Agreement states that 1.5 million homes must be cut off from the natural gas network by 2030, and the process is going very slowly. The Cabinet is therefore preparing a law in which all municipalities can use coercion as an instrument. “We cannot wait for one block of houses resisting like a Gallic village,” Housing Minister Hugo de Jonge said earlier this year.