The objective aims at 20% reduction in emissions, 20% renewable energies and 20% improvement in energy efficiency by 2020. The message came while I was at a conference where a series of success stories about implementations of renewable and distributed energy resources, electrical vehicles, large scale wind generation and advanced systems for protection, control and data-acquisition all leading to considerable improvements in performance, cost limitations, lower CO2 emissions and others were presented. Now why is a well-developed country like The Netherlands falling behind on its climate targets (and I am sure my country is not the only one)?

If you look up official government statements and ask a majority of the citizens in The Netherlands, we are very much in favor of reducing the effects leading to climate change, and willing to meet the European objectives. In addition,  we have all the means available to make the change. If we look  however, at how other countries handle this issue, while being in a similar situation, we see significant differences in results.
Now, when objectives are not met we immediately hear a series of excuses that all sound reasonable at first. Me as a Dutch citizen and a promoter of real Smart implementations and the use of IEC61850,  am however not surprised that we are not meeting the objectives. Why, because I think there is one fundamental reason for many of the objectives set out in large scale projects not being met and that is Lack of Will.
Right now the financial crisis, the lack of proper regulation, the large investments required, the immaturity of technology, privacy laws, and many different reasons are used to justify why we cannot meet the objectives. In my opinion this is all just window dressing to hide the real reason which is that at different levels of society we lack the will to take a step, take a risk, spend money, implement solutions and move forward.

The reason why I make such a bold statement is that there are several examples available around the world showing that it can be done. For example, the strategic decision by the German government to endorse the Renewable Energy Sources Act in the year 2000 that sparked the use of wind energy, has led to a full grown wind industry in Germany and a leading position in the world for German companies in this field. More important however, is that based on this single decision the share of electricity produced from renewable energy in Germany has increased from 6.3% in 2000 to about 17% in 2010, and Germany being the world's first major renewable energy economy. There are also examples from other European countries such as Denmark and Spain where their share of renewable energy has increased far beyond the level The Netherlands are currently at.
The sad thing is that there are several good initiatives and projects in The Netherlands that show very promising results such as the Smart City Amsterdam project and small scale zero emission initiatives by the Dutch utilities, but there seems to be a general lack of will to make the big step and move these initiatives into a legislative framework that supports investments in larger scale deployments by the utilities. This leads to risk averse and thus investment adverse behavior by the utilities, which is understandable in itself but not excusable in my opinion.

So what needs to happen to make a change? I think the answer is actually quite simple!
We engineers need to do what we are good at. We need to take a methodical approach, breaking the problem down into smaller manageable issues and then step by step eliminate the excuses. At the same time we need people with the drive to do things. In other words, we need people that have the will to make a change. Many years ago we had a commercial on the Dutch television that translated states “A Better World Starts with You.” - This is exactly what I believe. What we  all have to start doing instead of hiding behind excuses why not to do things, because like my parents told me many times “where there is a will there is a way”!