
Power to the People
Dutch households are putting solar panels on their roofs and buying shares in shared wind turbines, turning neighborhoods into small-scale energy companies that sell their surplus power back to the grid. This VPRO Backlight film, directed by Sabine Lubbe Bakker, follows that shift from consumer to producer and asks how far the same logic could spread, from insurance to elder care. It travels to the Danish island of Samsø, where residents pooled money to build community-owned wind and solar systems and now split the profits from the excess electricity they generate. American economist Jeremy Rifkin appears to argue that this kind of citizen-owned, decentralized capitalism will reshape the economy within a couple of years, while sustainability advocate Marjan Minnesma talks about extending the same collective model, which she calls social sustainability, into shared insurance and communal care. The film treats fixed renewable prices as a hedge against rising fossil fuel costs, but its real interest is in what happens to a neighborhood once its residents start producing something together instead of just consuming it separately.