Good News: All Electric Trains in the Netherlands Now Run in Pure Wind Power

It appears Netherlands is on a verge of a breakthrough. All of its electric passenger trains are now powered entirely by wind energy. This marks an unprecedented achievement on its goal to be all-green, a goal that appears to be getting closer and closer by the minute.

This announcement is courtesy of Dutch railway company NS, which has just announced that the entirety of its electric train fleet is now running on pure wind power as of the beginning of the year. This effectively introduces a new era of green transportation.

According to Clean Technica, of course, renewable energy advocates hope that the early success of this venture will inspire other planners to incorporate wind-powered trains in other high-speed rail projects all around the world.

Inhabitat says the Dutch government announced its goal to power the country's electric trains entirely with wind power in late 2015. They're supposed to try to achieve this goal in 2018, but early successes in the field resulted in 75-percent wind power for the trains as early in 2016. Now it has achieved 100-percent efficiency in the first day of the year.

One of the Netherlands' largest railway companies known as NS has partnered with Eneco energy in 2015 to funnel the renewable energy source to its fleet of electric trains, which carry around 600,000 people a day. The trains under NS use around 1.2 billion kWh of electricity per annum.

Inhabitat notes that this is roughly the equivalent of all the households in the city of Amsterdam. Switching to a renewable source for the energy-consuming transportation method will be making a huge reduction to the nation's carbon footprint, which is already decreasing due to investments in renewable energy products.

The electricity used to power Dutch trains come from wind farms in the Netherlands, Finland and Belgium.