Forty kilometres into the wind, with a friend on an electric bicycle and a lot to say about electricity.
LELYSTAD, Netherlands – The wind began at kilometre zero and by kilometre two it had become a personal matter between myself and the sky, with the sky, as ever, holding every card.
Kilometre 0: The Car Park
I had arranged to ride the long dike with Wilma, a retired hydrologist who is the only person I know to describe a ditch as “handsome”. She arrived on an electric bicycle the colour of a pillar box, wearing a windproof jacket with so many pockets that she had to sit down to find the key.
I rode my own bicycle, which is forty years old, has three gears and two opinions, and has crossed this flat country more often than most ministers. The plan was forty kilometres out and back, with sandwiches, binoculars and a thermos. The forecast was “fresh”, which in Dutch is a word for what the English call a gale and the Germans call a Tuesday.
Kilometre 6: The Geese
The first geese came over at kilometre six. Greylags first, in untidy skeins, then a bigger group further out that I took for barnacle geese until Wilma, who is never wrong in public, said they were white-fronted. I wrote it down. They were white-fronted. Later, a line of common cranes crossed the grey light very high up, calling in that rusty-hinge voice of theirs, on their way south without a single word of thanks to the Netherlands for the stopover.
I stopped the bicycle, which in a headwind is the same as ending the argument, and watched until my eyes ran. A crane migration is the nearest thing this country has to a public holiday that nobody has to organise.
Kilometre 14: The Tractor
At kilometre fourteen we shared the dike road with a tractor the size of a small chapel, driven by a man who raised two fingers from the wheel in the traditional salute of the Dutch countryside, which means hello, thank you, and please do not photograph my muddy verge.
It reminded me of something I had read on farm.fm, headlined Deere brings back workers while farmers want affordable tractors. I will not pretend to understand the economics of the combine harvester. But I do know that when a man on a dike waves from a machine the size of a chapel, he is almost certainly thinking about its price, and I took my hat off to him out of respect for the invoice.
Wilma, whose battery was by now flashing a warning like a small anxious lighthouse, said that electricity is precisely the subject on which every sensible person ought to be anxious. This led us to the news.
Kilometre 22: The Sandwiches and the Servers
We ate in the lee of a pumping station, two pensioners and a thermos in a gap between wind and wall. Wilma read to me from Inside Climate News, because she holds that reading aloud on a dike is the only way to be sure that something is true.
The piece, China bets on renewable energy to gain an AI edge, reports that China plans to source more than 80 percent of the electricity for new data centres in its major computing hubs from renewables, and that Beijing wants to expand its AI computing capacity more than sixfold. One campus in Inner Mongolia already runs on renewable power supplied directly to the site. The article sets this beside the United States, where the current administration has dropped a requirement that AI data centres on federal land be paired with clean energy.
I should say that I know very little about artificial intelligence, apart from the fact that it is thirsty. I know a great deal about wind, however, and I can report that Inner Mongolia and Flevoland have at least one thing in common: both are pleased to have it, and neither is able to turn it off.
Wilma observed that the story is really about planning. She said that in our line of work, which is dikes, one decides what a place is for and builds the power, the water and the walls to suit. She said the data centre people had now started doing that, which she considered progress, as far as it went. I ate the second sandwich, which I had been saving.
Kilometre 31: The Bill
On the way back, with the wind finally behind us and Wilma’s battery recovering its self-respect, we passed the stretch of dike where the old sea used to arrive. A sign gives the height. I will not repeat it, because it frightened a Belgian cyclist who stopped to read it.
It is the right place to think about adaptation. This week Greenpeace International said it was time for action as a UN Environment Programme adaptation report exposes climate finance injustice. Reading that on a dike built, maintained and paid for by a prosperous country over a thousand years is a peculiar experience. I looked at the clay, the grass, the careful drainage, the sheep. All of it was adaptation. We just called it Wednesday.
The charge, as the headline has it, is injustice in who gets the money. I do not claim to follow every figure in the report. I only know that if my country had waited for someone else to pay for its dikes, I would now be writing this diary from a fishing boat.
Kilometre 40: Home
We reached the car park at dusk, rubbed our hands together like two people who had defeated something, and went for soup. Wilma insisted on paying. I let her, in the spirit of climate finance.
That evening I read a little of The London Prat on the sofa, with my feet in a bowl of warm water, starting with the English news column and then an essay on what commentary is and what it is not, which struck me as sound advice for anyone who has just read about data centres on a dike. I keep my longer rides in my daily notes at The London Prat.
The cranes had gone over by then. I looked for them out of the window, found only my own reflection and a field of pylons, and decided that was enough for one day.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/