The juxtaposition is obvious enough that it has been photographed many times, which is usually a reason to leave a subject alone. It survives the repetition because the two objects are not making the contrast the caption expects.
A windmill is a machine for a particular wind and a particular job: grinding, sawing, or lifting water off polder. It works when the weather agrees and stops when it does not, and the landscape around it was organised on that assumption.
A cooling tower is not a power source at all. It is the part of a thermal station that gets rid of what cannot be used. Put beside a windmill it looks like the modern equivalent, and it is nothing of the kind — the comparable object is buried in a containment building out of frame.
What the two actually share is the flat ground. Both stand on polder, and both are visible from a long way off because there is nothing here tall enough to hide them.
The village of Doel is in between. It is the part of the picture that photographs least well and explains the most.
This is the third picture made on this bank on one February afternoon. The others are a container terminal and a railway.
