Having looked at getting a heat pump set up in our house (built in 1902) is that even with the extra insulation we put in, the energy needs of a heat pump are huge which means more electricity is needed and what with congestion happening locally is getting to be a problem to supply all houses with enough oomph to run heat pumps, electric stoves and charging EV’s.
Even with people having solar installations this remains a problem because we’ve had almost three consecutive weeks with heavy cloud cover and fog as well as hardly any wind. So renewable power generation was down across the board.
Fact of the matter is, we adopted many energy hungry solutions without providing the necessary capacity up front.
I worked at a startup (Jedlix) where we built a platform to optimise EV charging specifically to deal with these problems (demand shifting) but there are so many hurdles to get this rolled out at a large enough scale to matter.
Car OEMs don’t provide the necessary APIs, (local)grid companies won’t provide usage data necessary to steer on so billing/compensation becomes impossible removing the incentive for consumers.
It seems so obvious that this would solve a real problem but even though the technology exists it’s not going anywhere. Maddening