The Quiet Revolution at The Hague
Why the Future of Sustainable Infrastructure Might Begin Inside a Second-Hand Shop
When the infrastructure sector talks about progress, it tends to talk about what comes next. New generation capacity, reinforced utility networks, smart cities, intelligent transport systems, district energy schemes and large-scale retrofit programmes dominate policy agendas and draw the bulk of investment. Success is counted in kilometres delivered, megawatts installed, budgets approved and projects completed. Cities compete for growth while attempting to honour increasingly demanding environmental commitments and protect quality of life for expanding populations.
One of the more thought-provoking infrastructure ideas now taking shape in Europe quietly challenges that entire model. During a recent press visit to The Hague, the most interesting story was not a flagship development, a digital platform or a showcase construction site. It was a conversation taking place inside a thrift store, and the principle behind it may matter a great deal more than its modest setting suggests.
Briefing
- The Hague has launched its Hou van je Huis home-energy advice programme inside the Schroeder second-hand network, putting municipal advisers where residents already go.
- The Netherlands is in the grip of severe grid congestion, with household waiting lists for heavier connections now driven by heat pumps and electric vehicle charging.
- Electrification is increasing peak demand faster than infrastructure can expand.
- Reducing and managing demand at the point of useΒ can keep homes electrifying within existing capacity, deferring connection upgrades and the embodied carbon of new infrastructure.
- Treating household demand as a managed resource reframes the smart city around what it can avoid building, not only what it can install.
A second-hand shop as an infrastructure decision
The venue was Schroeder, a long-established social enterprise that operates several second-hand stores and a network of community centres across The Hague under the Stichting Schroeder van der Kolk foundation. Schroeder combines reuse and recycling with job training and social inclusion, providing work experience and personal guidance for people who face barriers to employment and reinvesting its proceeds into the surrounding district. Its community centres already function as places where residents drop in for everything from debt support to ordinary conversation, which makes the organisation an unusually natural host for the experiment now running inside it. It is, in short, a circular economy operation that already sits at the centre of neighbourhood life.
Alongside the donated furniture, clothing and household goods sat something less expected. The City of The Hague and Schroeder are now running a weekly walk-in advice desk in the thrift stores, staffed by the municipality’s housing and energy advisers and offering free, appointment-free guidance on improving the performance of residents’ homes. The conversations are informal and the proposed measures deliberately small. What might look at first like a local sustainability initiative is, on closer inspection, the visible edge of a much larger idea. Rather than expanding infrastructure to satisfy rising demand, The Hague is exploring whether reducing that demand can itself become a tool for sustainable urban growth. That distinction is easy to miss and difficult to overstate.
A different way of thinking about infrastructure
Infrastructure planning has historically rested on a simple assumption. Demand rises and supply follows. When cities grow, authorities extend utility networks, add generation capacity, reinforce transport corridors and increase public spending to keep pace with consumption. This logic has enabled urbanisation across the world and remains essential in many settings. It also creates a demanding cycle in which growth drives ever-larger requirements for materials, construction activity, maintenance and capital investment.
That model is now under pressure from several directions at once. Urban populations continue to climb while public budgets tighten, existing assets age and climate commitments grow more ambitious. The Hague itself illustrates the strain, with city officials expecting roughly one hundred thousand additional residents over the next fifteen to twenty years. Utility operators must maintain resilience while absorbing new loads from electrification, digital connectivity and shifting patterns of living and working. Building more capacity will remain necessary in many cases, yet the cost of relying on expansion alone keeps rising in economic, environmental and political terms. The question emerging in The Hague is therefore not how quickly infrastructure can grow, but how it can perform better by easing pressure at the point of use.
The quiet economics of avoided demand
One of the least discussed concepts in infrastructure is avoided demand. Public debate gravitates towards visible investment because new assets generate headlines and political momentum. Planners, engineers and network operators understand a less photogenic truth, where demand management can sometimes deliver greater value than expansion, because a city that reduces peak consumption could postpone expensive upgrades while maintaining or even improving service levels.
The effect compounds as it scales. When thousands of households trim their energy use, networks experience lower peak loads and operate more efficiently. Reduced demand extends the working life of existing assets and slows the urgency of reinforcement programmes. Water infrastructure benefits when consumption becomes more efficient, waste systems perform better when reuse and behavioural change reduce volumes, and transport networks ease when communities become more self-sufficient and generate fewer journeys. Over time those savings give municipalities room to redirect capital towards schools, public space, resilience projects and targeted upgrades rather than emergency expansion. Maintenance cycles become easier to manage and planning horizons grow more predictable. The need for infrastructure does not disappear. The relationship between infrastructure and growth simply changes.
The grid that is running out of road
The Netherlands gives the avoided-demand argument an unusually sharp edge, because its electricity grid is running short of capacity. Grid congestion, known locally as netcongestie, has become a structural feature of the system rather than a passing strain, with waiting lists for new and upgraded connections now stretching across much of the country. Network operators describe the problem in terms the road sector will recognise instantly, framing the grid as a hierarchy of high, medium and low voltage that behaves like motorways, provincial roads and local streets, where a blockage at one level quickly degrades the others. For years the pressure fell mainly on industry, data centres and renewable generators waiting to connect. In 2026 it reached the doorstep. The regional operator Liander recorded roughly 27,500 household applications for higher-capacity connections in the first five months of the year, more than half again the figure for the same period a year earlier, and placed thousands of homes on a waiting list for the first time, with some warned of delays of up to three years.
The cause sits at the centre of the energy transition. Households are electrifying, exchanging gas boilers for heat pumps and adding electric vehicle chargers, and each addition lifts the peak load a connection must carry. Total consumption may barely move, yet the peaks climb, and networks are sized around peaks rather than averages. Reinforcement offers no quick escape, with operators putting the timeline for major grid upgrades at ten to fifteen years, far slower than demand is rising. That mismatch changes the character of the avoided-demand argument entirely. In a congested grid, trimming and shifting peak demand is not merely a way to save money or carbon. It becomes a way to stay connected at all, and to keep electrification moving while the wires catch up.
Why insulation has become a grid strategy
This reframes the modest measures on offer at the Schroeder desk. A well-insulated home needs less heat, which allows a smaller hybrid heat pump to do the work, and a smaller heat pump draws less power at the moments that matter most to the network. Grid operators have made the point directly, noting that many homes do not need a heavier three-phase connection at all, and that a modest hybrid system paired with solar panels can often run within an existing single-phase supply. Insulating first is therefore not only the cheapest route to lower bills and a warmer home. It can be the difference between a household that electrifies on the connection it already has and one that joins a multi-year queue for an upgrade the network cannot quickly deliver.
Across a neighbourhood the effect compounds in the operator’s favour. Every home that electrifies within its existing capacity is a connection upgrade that never enters the queue, a street cabinet that is not pushed past its limit, and a reinforcement that can be deferred or designed out. The principle is one the road sector knows well, that managing demand at the kerb is often cheaper and faster than widening the carriageway. The Hague’s advice desk, presented by the city around comfort and lower bills, doubles in this light as a quiet form of congestion management, carried out one household at a time and ahead of the load rather than in response to it.
Why small household changes create large infrastructure effects
Several of the interventions promoted through The Hague’s approach seem almost too modest to matter. Draught sealing around windows and doors, reflective foil fitted behind radiators, improved heat circulation, water-saving shower heads and straightforward behavioural advice rarely feature in discussions about national infrastructure. None of these measures is technologically remarkable and none requires major reconstruction. That ordinariness is precisely why they deserve closer attention.
Infrastructure systems are collective systems, and their performance depends on aggregated behaviour rather than isolated actions. Energy networks are sized around patterns of demand, water systems are designed for expected consumption, and heating systems operate against cumulative loads. A small improvement repeated across thousands of homes can produce an effect far larger than the scale of any single intervention implies. The principle is already familiar elsewhere in the sector. Traffic engineers know that relieving congestion at a handful of critical points can lift the performance of an entire network. Water specialists understand that cutting leakage can defer major capital works. Asset managers recognise that early, preventative maintenance extends operational life dramatically. Demand reduction follows the same logic, where a minor saving multiplied many thousands of times becomes a strategic outcome.
Environmental value beyond operational carbon
Environmental discussion tends to concentrate on operational emissions, and rightly so. Electricity use, fuel consumption and direct energy performance remain central to any credible sustainability strategy. There is, however, a second environmental layer that receives far less public attention, namely the impact embedded in infrastructure itself. Every asset carries embodied costs long before it enters service, from concrete production and steel manufacturing to cable supply chains, heavy transport, excavation, land disturbance and the maintenance that follows for decades.
This reframes how sustainability should be measured. If reducing household demand delays the expansion of a network, environmental value is created through avoidance. Materials are never extracted, construction traffic never arrives, corridors are never excavated and additional systems are never manufactured. This form of improvement is almost impossible to photograph, because its defining feature is that nothing visible happens. The cumulative effect can still be substantial. Cities that reduce demand can lower emissions not only through lower consumption, but also by slowing the pace at which physical infrastructure has to grow. Seen this way, efficiency at the point of use becomes a genuine form of climate action.
The behavioural design hidden in plain sight
The most innovative element of The Hague’s approach may not be technical at all. It may be behavioural. Many public programmes assume that making support available is enough to generate participation, yet experience repeatedly shows otherwise. Information alone rarely changes habits, complex application processes discourage engagement, and formal settings create barriers that quietly deter the very people a scheme is meant to reach. People often delay action even when help already exists.
Placing advisers inside an established community environment changes the starting point. Residents arrive for ordinary reasons and encounter practical support in a setting that feels approachable rather than bureaucratic. The second-hand surroundings reinforce the wider message by linking reuse, affordability and efficiency into a single, coherent experience. The energy transition stops feeling abstract and becomes local, practical and achievable. The desk at Schroeder is branded Hou van je Huis, or Love your Home, and the same instinct runs through the wider city programme, which moves the desk through every district in turn and recruits residents as volunteer energy coaches to support their neighbours. The expertise on hand reflects that breadth. During the visit the advisers present included Danny Jeff Vanam, an energy coach with Duurzaam Den Haag, the city’s sustainability programme, and Jeffrey Beerepoot, an adviser on heritage and monumental buildings, alongside municipal project leaders for housing and sustainable living, Anouk Faber and Xiao-Nan Artz. The presence of a heritage specialist is telling, since the travelling desk tailors its focus to each neighbourhood, addressing themes such as listed buildings or homeowners’ associations where they matter most. Arjen Kapteijns, the city’s alderman for the energy transition, framed the rationale, describing the aim as helping people in a way that is accessible and close to home. The choice of venue, in that light, is not incidental. It is the design decision that makes everything else possible.
Advice backed by real support
A conversation only changes a city when it leads to action, and The Hague has attached tangible support to its advisory effort. Since March 2026 the municipality has run a city-wide insulation subsidy aimed squarely at the homes where efficiency gains are greatest, those carrying energy labels D through G. The scheme covers roof, floor, faΓ§ade and glass insulation, the measures that deliver the most heat retention for the least disruption, and it raised the grant for the first thousand applicants to one thousand euros, up from the standard five hundred and seventy, to encourage early uptake. It is open to homeowners, homeowners’ associations and housing associations alike. Lower-income households, including holders of the city’s Ooievaarspas and residents who previously received energy compensation payments, can access up to three thousand five hundred euros in additional support, directing help towards the people most exposed to high bills and least able to fund improvements alone.
One feature does more than the headline figures suggest. Residents do not have to carry the full cost upfront, with around eighty per cent of the subsidy paid in advance against the contractor’s quotation and the balance released once the work is complete. That detail removes the cash-flow barrier that quietly stops many efficiency projects before they begin. The wider design closes the loop between guidance and outcome. Advisers in a trusted setting lower the barrier to engagement, the insulate-first principle ensures households tackle the building fabric before investing in heat pumps or solar generation, and accessible subsidy turns intention into completed work. Each element is unremarkable on its own. Together they form a pathway that runs from a casual visit to a measurably more efficient home, and from there to a network under fractionally less strain. Multiplied across a city, that pathway begins to reshape the demand curve planners build around.
The smart city that manages demand, not just data
The familiar image of a smart city is a layer of sensors, dashboards and signals tuned in real time. The grid congestion challenge points to a broader and more useful definition, in which the most intelligent move available to a city is to treat demand itself as something to be managed rather than simply met. Dutch network operators are already building that capability at the top of the system, contracting flexibility from large users, running tenders for batteries and smart charging, and using market platforms to ask connected parties to raise or lower consumption when a local network comes under strain. The country’s new Energy Act, in force since the start of 2026, places the flexible use of scarce capacity at the centre of how the grid is run, making demand management a permanent feature of the system rather than an emergency measure.
What The Hague adds is the missing front end. Flexibility markets and battery contracts operate at the level of substations and megawatts, far from daily life, while the household remains the place where peak demand is actually created. By positioning advisers where residents already go, the city extends demand management down to the kitchen and the meter cupboard, shaping load at its source before it ever reaches a congested cable. A smart city, on this reading, is not only one that measures its networks with precision. It is one that helps residents need less from them. The thrift-store desk and the grid-scale battery contract sit at opposite ends of the same system, and the city that deliberately connects the two is managing demand as carefully as it manages supply. That is a quieter vision of the smart city than the one usually marketed, and a more durable one.
Infrastructure that helps cities scale with intelligence
The most transferable lesson from The Hague is arguably not about energy at all. It is about scale. Cities around the world face the same difficult equation, needing to accommodate growth while reducing environmental impact and protecting affordability. Conventional expansion remains necessary, yet expansion on its own increasingly risks becoming financially and environmentally unsustainable. The alternative is not to stop building. It is to become far more deliberate about where growth occurs and how demand develops alongside it.
A simple framework begins to emerge from the approach. Community engagement leads to home assessment, which leads to targeted intervention, which leads to reduced consumption, which in turn defers infrastructure expansion. That sequence could be adapted in countless ways according to climate, housing stock and local priorities, with community centres, libraries, schools, housing associations and local businesses all serving as points of contact. The implication is sharper still for rapidly urbanising economies that have yet to build out their networks. The Hague is retrofitting demand management onto a mature grid under strain, but a city still laying its cables and substations has the rarer opportunity to shape demand before the infrastructure is fixed in place. Designing for lower and flatter demand from the outset allows such cities to leapfrog the oversized, carbon-intensive and capital-hungry systems that wealthier nations are now struggling to manage, rather than building them first and reducing them later. For regions where capital is scarce and population growth is fastest, avoiding a connection upgrade or a generation plant that never becomes necessary is not a marginal saving. It is the difference between an affordable transition and one that stalls. That possibility deserves serious attention from anyone responsible for the networks a growing city depends upon.
For infrastructure investors and policymakers, this creates a different investment question. Rather than asking only where new capacity should be built, attention may increasingly shift towards where demand can be shaped, deferred or avoided entirely. The economic return on avoided infrastructure could become one of the most important but least visible asset classes of the energy transition.
Correspondent’s note
The visit to The Hague did not surface a breakthrough technology or a landmark engineering project. It surfaced something arguably harder to achieve, a city attempting to align behaviour, infrastructure, sustainability and community engagement within a single coherent system. The advisers gathered at Schroeder spanned the practical and the specialist, from an energy coach to a heritage-buildings expert and municipal project leaders for housing and sustainable living, with the alderman responsible for the energy transition present at the launch. Standing among the donated furniture and second-hand books while residents talked through radiator foil and draught sealing, the most striking feature was how unremarkable the scene appeared, and how deliberate it clearly was.
Whether this specific model travels well remains to be seen. Every city carries its own housing stock, economic realities and cultural habits, and an idea that works in a dense Dutch neighbourhood will not transplant unaltered. The principle behind it, however, feels increasingly relevant to a sector confronting tighter budgets, ageing assets, congested grids and steepening climate obligations. As electrification loads networks faster than they can be reinforced, the cities that cope best may be those that learn to manage demand as deliberately as supply, and to treat that capability as the real substance of the smart city. Infrastructure has long been measured by what gets built, and that measure will not disappear.
The next generation of successful cities may also be judged by what they manage not to build. If that proves true, one of the more influential infrastructure ideas of the decade will not have begun with cranes, cables or construction sites. It will have begun with a city discovering that the smartest infrastructure investment was helping people need less infrastructure in the first place.
