Laadpalen langs de snelweg: straks wel een stekker, maar geen stroom?

Laadbedrijven waarschuwen voor problemen met de stroomvoorziening langs Nederlandse snelwegen. Het FD bericht daarover onder de kop ‘Laadpaalbedrijven waarschuwen: straks geen stroom meer langs snelweg’. Fastned-topman Michiel Langezaal trok eerder al aan de bel over het nieuwe beleid voor snellaadstations en netcongestie. De discussie draait om een eenvoudige vraag: blijft laden onderweg mogelijk als vergunningen opnieuw worden verdeeld?

Vergunningen lopen af

Volgens de door Nederland Elektrisch beschreven kabinetsplannen moeten vergunningen voor laadpunten vanaf medio 2027 worden geveild. Tussen 2028 en 2030 lopen op ruim 150 van de 288 Nederlandse verzorgingsplaatsen bestaande laadvergunningen af. Zonder tijdig ingevoerde wet kunnen die locaties niet opnieuw worden geveild.

Dat is geen administratief detail. Nederland Elektrisch citeert minister Vincent Karremans: wanneer vergunningen aflopen, moeten de laadstations worden verwijderd. Het kabinet wil met nieuwe regels voorkomen dat een groot deel van het laadnetwerk langs snelwegen verdwijnt.

Een veiling bepaalt wie mag laden aanbieden, niet hoeveel stroom beschikbaar is.

Een vergunning is geen stroom

Het nieuwe stelsel voorziet in afzonderlijke vergunningen voor laden, tanken en een gemakswinkel. Per voorziening en per verzorgingsplaats krijgt één aanbieder een vergunning. Volgens het ministerie moet dat ondernemers meer zekerheid geven en een einde maken aan juridische conflicten die investeringen hebben geremd.

Maar duidelijkheid over de exploitant is niet hetzelfde als zekerheid over de stroomvoorziening. De waarschuwing van Fastned gaat juist over losse eindjes in het beleid en netcongestie. Een laadstation heeft niet alleen een plek en een vergunning nodig: voldoende stroom is een onmisbare randvoorwaarde.

Zwaardere aansluitingen kosten tijd

Daarom investeert het ministerie via het Mobiliteitsfonds in zwaardere netaansluitingen op verzorgingsplaatsen. Het programma Stopcontact op Land coördineert aanvragen voor meerdere ondernemers tegelijk. Voor één exploitant kunnen zulke investeringen te groot zijn om binnen de looptijd van een vergunning terug te verdienen.

Daarnaast wil het kabinet verzorgingsplaatsen opnieuw inrichten. De voorbereidingen daarvoor zouden begin 2027 starten; de daadwerkelijke herinrichtingen worden volgens de beschreven plannen pas vanaf 2032 verwacht. Dat is later dan het moment waarop de eerste bestaande laadvergunningen aflopen. Die herinrichting en de aanleg van netaansluitingen zijn overigens niet hetzelfde traject.

Voor de automobilist telt niet wie de veiling wint, maar of de laadpaal werkt.

De cijfers op een rij

Nederland telt volgens de beschreven kabinetsplannen 288 verzorgingsplaatsen. Op ruim 150 locaties lopen laadvergunningen af tussen 2028 en 2030. De geplande veilingkalender omvat 69 laadkavels in 2028, 42 in 2029 en 40 in 2030. Het beoogde begin van de vergunningveilingen is medio 2027.

Geen voorspelde landelijke laadstop

De waarschuwingen zijn geen bewijs dat straks alle snelladers langs de snelweg uitvallen. Ze wijzen op risico’s bij de overgang naar een nieuw stelsel. Voor elektrische rijders is vooral van belang dat nieuwe regels en investeringen de continuïteit van het laden bewaken. Een verzorgd laadplein zonder bruikbare stroomvoorziening schiet zijn doel voorbij.

Meer weten?

• FD: laadbedrijven waarschuwen voor stroomproblemen
• Nederland Elektrisch: kabinet wil laadvergunningen veilen
• De Telegraaf: Fastned waarschuwt voor losse eindjes

Scots-written Till the Bells Ring premiered a year before the Hollywood film, which featured spoken words by Al Jolson

For almost a century, The Jazz Singer has been celebrated as the world’s first feature-length film to include synchronised dialogue (known as a “talkie”), and English as the first language of cinema. But a chance discovery threatens to upend film history with the news that it may have been beaten to the title by a full year – and by a film made in Glasgow and written in Scots.

The breakthrough was made by the historian and self-confessed “film nerd” Marc David Jacobs, who was conducting research for a book on the first wave of British sound films when he came across the story of Till the Bells Ring.

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A toxic debate over anti-Zionism leaves the Green leader looking like a passenger in the movement that carried him to the top

When Donald Trump calls someone a socialist he is not using the word in the same way that, say, Zohran Mamdani does. The mayor of New York espouses democratic socialism as a mission of equitable distribution of wealth and opportunity. The US president says socialism only pretends to be democratic “because it sounds so nice”; that “it’s really communism you’re talking about” and that people such as Mamdani pose “the biggest threat to our nation … since its founding”.

People who despise an idea, seeing it as the manifestation of everything wicked, cannot be expected to define it accurately. As with the radical right and socialism, so it is with the left and Zionism.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

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After a phenomenal decade-long run, the Cursed Child two-parter is being pruned. Will it still work? Our writer swishes her cloak, levitates her luggage – and hops aboard the streamlined Hogwarts Express

‘Silencio!” Two dozen tank-topped and T-shirted figures fall quiet, and look expectantly at movement director Nuno Silva. “If you’ve got a cloak, accio it now …” With that summoning charm cast, broomsticks are stowed, wands holstered, suitcases grabbed.

The Harry Potter and the Cursed Child rehearsal room – a creaky church hall whose Victorian wall clock gives a serendipitously Hogwarts flavour – is a near-permanent bustle of activity. A sound technician quickly re-sets cues on her laptop, a costume designer helps an actor into a suspiciously long pair of gloves. Associate director Nicola Samer is quietly running notes with a couple of the leads while the rest of the company preps for the next scene.

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Conflict between UN-recognised government and Iran-backed Houthis has impacts far beyond country’s borders

Yemen has been plunged into a civil war that has extended to one of the world’s most vital maritime choke points and to Saudi Arabian oil sites.

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Mood in trade talks said to have changed as EU member states harden demands for protection against Chinese imports

EU trade negotiators are heading to China for two days of crunch talks aimed at sealing a breakthrough deal tackling Beijing’s record £1bn-a-day trade surplus by curbing its exports of cheap hybrid electric cars into Europe.

Trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič and his team fly out on Wednesday and will be negotiating up to the wire in talks scheduled to start the following day and continue late into Friday.

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Drugs, drink and dancing made Bez famous. Thirty-five years on, has he really swapped it all for filtered water, intermittent fasting and walks with the dogs?

Bez has both shoelaces undone and it’s making me nervous. Out walking his dogs, we’re up and over barbed wire, across streams and over gates. We bash through brambles and skid down slopes. I’m becoming fixated on the perilously trailing laces of his trainers and why he hasn’t tripped over them. Can he be such a thrill-seeker that a dog walk can be turned into an hour of jeopardy?

Of course he can. This is Bez, anarchic maraca-shaker, party person, the man Shaun Ryder, his Happy Mondays bandmate and partner in crime, says is a bad influence. Bez, whose real name is Mark Berry, has been in more scrapes than seems possible for one person. A small sample: knocking his teeth out in a motorbike crash at the age of 16, threatened with a gun when he and Ryder were trying to buy crack in New York, kidnapped and held hostage during another drug deal, smashing his body up in another motorbike crash in 1999 and then getting MRSA in hospital and ending up in a coma for a month.

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In the second article in a series on the Polish economy, we look at how the country is forging closer ties with its neighbours

Two miles off the coast of Gdańsk, the white steel piles of Poland’s first offshore gas terminal rise from the slate-grey Baltic. Installed at a height eight metres above the waves, the floating cranes and construction vessels here are on the frontline of Europe’s push for energy security.

Since the taps were turned off on Russian gas after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago, Poland has turned to the global energy market for supplies. But while conditions are far from ideal as the Middle East war drives oil and gas prices to stratospheric levels, strengthening the diversity of the country’s energy mix remains a top priority for Poland, its Baltic neighbours, and the EU at large.

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Voordat het roer voor enige tijd omgaat, is het vandaag nog uitstekend weer in het Rijnmondgebied. Er zijn mooie zonnige perioden en het blijft tot het einde van de middag droog. De middagtemperatuur komt uit op 21 of 22 graden.

South Korean president Lee Jae Myung has told the nation’s cabinet that it’s time to develop AI-powered defensive tools to combat AI-wielding attackers. “Recently, a series of personal information leak incidents have been occurring at financial and public institutions,” he said yesterday – likely referring to incidents like the breach at e-tailer Coupang and last week’s raid on local banks that exposed customer data. “Circumstances indicate that artificial intelligence was utilized, causing great concern and anxiety among the public,” he claimed. “I request that the relevant authorities swiftly and clearly identify the circumstances of these incidents, and rapidly deploy and concentrate the necessary personnel and resources to minimize damage,” he added, before calling for South Korea’s government to “build security capabilities that can detect attacks in advance and preemptively block them.” “I urge the relevant ministries to quickly inspect the security systems across the entire national core infrastructure, as well as the private sector, and immediately implement any necessary security measures,” he continued. “I hope we can accelerate the development and distribution of AI technologies specifically tailored for cybersecurity.” President Lee thinks South Korea needs to “completely innovate our society's security paradigm to fit the AI era.” That work will involve public and private sector players collaborating “to transform our technology, systems, and awareness.” The remarks amount to a major policy statement, and a very public one at that. South Korean ministers and tech giants now get to turn the president’s words into action, a complex task given the broad scope of the leader’s demands and the fact that nobody thinks it's possible to defeat cybercrime. Meanwhile, Down Under Also yesterday, Australian politicians had their chance to grill OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon, who fronted a parliamentary committee to answer questions about how his company’s agents accessed a government medical records website. Kwon allowed that OpenAI should have done better than emailing the abuse reporting email address at the relevant Australian government agency but defended the company’s efforts to learn from the Hugging Face incident. The committee is sitting for another two days this week, with one topic of debate being how or if Australia should tweak its copyright laws to ensure AI companies pay content creators whose works they use when training their models. Australian law doesn’t include a fair use provision like those that AI companies in the USA relied on when sourcing content. Creators fear a rumored opt-in payments scheme will be too weak, but Australia’s government fears it may miss out on big datacenter investments and access to onshore frontier models if it doesn’t change copyright law to make it more AI-friendly. ®

niggyl :) has added a photo to the pool:

Trial Harbour on a nice day.

Ricoh GRiii, 18.3mm f/2.8 GR lens, 1/500th sec at f/10, ISO 160.

braart has added a photo to the pool:

Crab Fest is coming back to Mandurah in March 2027. WA's biggest free regional festival returns for another incredible weekend of fresh food, live music, entertainment, and everything that makes Mandurah special.

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The pipi harvest and feasts were an annual event of aboriginal nations that could access the sandy beaches of the South Queensland and Northern NSW. The local clan/tribe would invite other inland clans to the feast, and such events were highly significant cultually.
Depending on the food resources of the inland tribes, they would similarly reciprocate and invite others to their cultural events around the bonyi bonyi (bunya nuts) feast, for example.
The pipi (or eugarie) is a bivalve that is readily found on the sandy shores of the high energy surf coast.
So pipis hold immense cultural and historical significance as a primary feast food. This set of sculptures has been erected on Minjerribah /North Stradbroke Island which is the traditional territory of the Quandamooka people, who have for thousands of years, gathered these saltwater clams. Ancient shell middens stand as testament to generations of traditional seafood feasts and intertribal gatherings.

Een gevangenis zonder muren: dat is dwingende controle, een vorm van huiselijk geweld die vaak onzichtbaar is voor familie, vrienden en hulpinstanties. Lotte Kok schreef Waarom ging je niet weg?, waarin ze vertelt hoe ze ontsnapte en hoe we slachtoffers beter kunnen beschermen.

Novel appetite for camel meat helps Western Australian pastoralist fight feral population. Feral camels are an expensive problem for pastoralists in central Australia, and now one Western Australian station owner has come up with a solution — forming a partnership to turn the nationally declared pest into pet food.

Actor in fine cinema such as The Food of the Gods, Viva Knievel!, and Starcrash, the distinctively curly blond-headed Marjoe Gortner, has passed at the age of 82, in Santa Fe, NM.

After growing up as a talented revival Pentecostal child preacher, Gortner was the subject of an Academy Award winning 1972 documentary film, Marjoe, which definitevely ended his preaching career. And launched his acting career, most notable for starring in notoriously bad movies. Gortner previously.

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