Wind Farms Are Coming: Where the Netherlands Builds Next, and What It Means for Your House

The Netherlands already counts more than 5,300 wind turbines in the national turbine register, and the fleet is nowhere near finished growing. The RVO Monitor Wind op Land 2025 lists 57 onshore wind farm projects in development, good for roughly 1,745 MW, and the offshore pipeline adds another 14 North Sea wind areas totalling 18,800 MW. Using the average size of new turbines (about 5 MW on land, 15 MW at sea), that pipeline works out to an estimated 350 new onshore turbines and some 1,250 offshore ones.

For anyone buying a house, the onshore list is the one that matters. An offshore wind area is invisible from your garden; a 240 metre turbine one polder over is not.

Where the onshore capacity lands

The pipeline is not spread evenly. Noord-Brabant leads with 14 projects and about 455 MW, followed by Overijssel and Gelderland. Together the top three provinces carry more than half of all onshore capacity in development. At the other end, Flevoland, long the poster child of Dutch wind energy, has just one small project left in the pipeline: its big parks are already built.

The largest single onshore projects give a feel for the scale: Eemshaven West in Groningen (166 MW), Duurzame Polder near 's-Hertogenbosch and Oss (125 MW), Windpark Agrowind in Reusel-De Mierden (73 MW), Windpark Bathmen in Overijssel (72 MW) and De Pielis in Bergeijk (65 MW). A 125 MW park at today's turbine sizes means roughly 25 machines of the 200 metre class.

Offshore is a different universe altogether. The seven gigawatt-scale areas planned between 2029 and 2033 each exceed the entire onshore pipeline on their own.

The noise question

In Schalkwijk, a village in the municipality of Houten, the Trienekens family knows what it is like when the map of tomorrow becomes today's backyard. One of the four Nordex turbines of the Goyerbrug wind farm rose less than three hundred metres from their home, machines of the heaviest class the Netherlands allows on land, with a hub height of 155 metres. The family litigated against the park for years, in vain. "We litigated for years, but then you face an army of lawyers", Peter Trienekens told regional broadcaster RTV Utrecht, after the nacelle of a turbine from the same manufacturer came down in Havixbeck, Germany. "We are done litigating."

The family is no statistical outlier that surprises the science. Noise is the most researched effect of living near a turbine, and the relation is clear: the louder the year-averaged sound level on your facade, the larger the share of residents who report serious annoyance. Under the old Dutch norm of 47 dB Lden, roughly 8 to 9 percent of residents indoors are expected to be seriously annoyed. The World Health Organization advises a stricter 45 dB Lden.

Two nuances from the RIVM research deserve mention. First, wind turbine sound annoys at lower levels than other sources: at equal noise levels, wind turbine sound is experienced as more annoying than road, rail or industrial noise. The rhythmic swishing character of the sound (amplitude modulation) and its better audibility at night are likely culprits. Second, the national numbers are small in absolute terms: an estimated 7,300 adults in the Netherlands experience serious annoyance from turbine noise, against far larger numbers for road traffic, simply because few people live close to a turbine. If your house is one of the few, that statistic is little comfort.

The legal side is in flux. The Council of State struck down the general national turbine norms in June 2021 because they lacked an environmental assessment, leaving municipalities to set their own limits per project. New national norms are planned to take effect by 1 January 2027 at the latest, and RIVM is re-deriving the exposure-response relations for modern, taller turbines, with results expected in the course of 2026.

What a turbine does to your house price

The best Dutch evidence comes from Droes and Koster, who ran a difference-in-differences analysis on housing transactions from 1985 to mid-2019. Their headline number: once a wind turbine opens, homes within 2 kilometres sell for on average 1.4 percent less than comparable homes without one. The effect grows with turbine height, and the turbines being built today are the tallest ever placed.

Summed over the whole owner-occupied housing stock, the researchers put the total value loss from the existing turbine fleet at around 900 million euros. Per household near a park the effect is real money: 1.4 percent of a 506,000 euro home (the national median in Q2 2026) is about 7,000 euros, and the 5.4 percent bracket for tall turbines is closer to 27,000 euros.

Check it for any address

Huisverklikker now tracks the development pipeline house by house. Every housing report includes the distance to the nearest wind farm project in development (searched within 25 km), how many projects sit within 3 km, the project's name and its estimated number of turbines, alongside the existing factoids for turbines that are already standing: distance to the nearest one, counts within 1 and 3 km, and the nearest turbine's hub height, tip height and capacity.

One honest caveat, which also applies to the map above: the RVO monitor does not publish exact turbine coordinates. Onshore projects are pinned to the researched project area or municipality, offshore projects to the midpoint of their assigned wind energy area. Treat the distance as "a wind farm is being developed in this area", not as a measurement to a specific mast. Plans also shift: projects in the early Voortraject phase (28 of the 57) can change shape or die in the permitting process, while the 18 marked "Bouw in voorbereiding" or "Bouw in opdracht" are close to certain.

Buying near open land? It takes one click to see whether the horizon is due to change.

Sources: RVO Monitor Wind op Land 2025 (reference date 31-12-2025) and RVO Bureau Energieprojecten / Ontwikkelkader Windenergie op Zee (January 2026), as bundled in Huisverklikker's dataset; RIVM, Factsheet gezondheidseffecten van windturbinegeluid (updated January 2025) and the underlying exposure-response relation (Janssen et al., 2008; Welkers et al., 2020); WHO, Environmental noise guidelines for the European region (2018); Droes, M.I. and Koster, H.R.A., Wind turbines, solar farms, and house prices, Energy Policy 155 (2021); Tweede Kamer, answers to parliamentary questions on wind turbine norms (2025); RTV Utrecht, Onrust in Schalkwijk na ongeluk met windturbine in Duitsland (November 2025). Noise curve points other than the stated 47 dB values are indicative, read from the published RIVM figure.