Netherlands rations electricity to ease power grid stresses | Hacker News Reader

Netherlands rations electricity to ease power grid stresses

ft.com

14 pointsdoener13 comments

I don’t understand why electrical grids are so problematic, but they seem plagued by corruption, incompetence, and poor planning everywhere.

Here in Sweden the grids was built by taxpayers and then sold off to a private company for maintenance and operation. That went as well as you can expect. Future development and growth is basically impossible as the private company has zero incentive or interest in laying new wire or upgrading old.

Oof yea I believe it is similar in most US states and the idea of having more than One provider is wild to them yet we can have at least Two ISPs...

Don't forget that some states have their own grid that has no connection with outside grids

Only Texas [ERCOT], and they do it to avoid federal regulation.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27152

"When the ideology destroys the bread factory , the witchhunts must begin"

We have had years of efficiency improvements which led to falling demand. There wasn’t much point in increasing grid capacity in this scenario.

All of a sudden that has changed (thanks to demand from EV’s, heat pumps and AI).

It’s going to take a while to turn the ship around.

When you turn energy generation into a market, it opens up the possibility for huge amounts of money to be made by big players constraining supply at just the right times. Of course if properly competitive markets existed outside econ textbook models, it would solve itself, but unfortunately the barrier to entry is too high in the real world so competition is always limited to a few players who try to get as large as possible (gobbling up any smaller ones in the process).

This kind of profiteering by intentionally constraining supply when there was very high demand was literally something Enron became infamous for, but it still happens all around the world.

Of course, on the transmission and distribution side you can’t even try to have a market and there is always a natural monopoly, it’d just be impossible for anyone to overbuild a new grid in any service area. So turning a state-owned natural monopoly into a private one tends to turn out just as badly as anyone could expect…

Rationing is a bit of a exaggeration. Flexible contracts are becoming more common, but that's part of a longer trend, and there's a national campaign that "asks consumers to charge bikes and cars outside of the 4pm-to-9pm peak".

This is very sensible. You can't build a grid that supports a large part of the country coming home at 5pm: start the oven (and/or induction cooking), heatpump, laundry, connect the electric car all at the same time.

There are probably some cases when people have to charge a car at 5pm, but it's madness that everyone will start doing this just because that's the time they get home.

Keep in mind; 11kW charging at home is not uncommon at the Netherlands, as many homes are equipped with 400V 3 phase power.

https://archive.is/WSsR1

Many European countries currently have serious problems with their power grids, often related to poor maintenance, insufficient generation and a completely botched energy transition as is the case in Germany.

Also noteworthy is that the problems in one country are also problems in other countries, as these grids are all interconnected.

European countries need major investments in Electricity generation and their grids, Energy costs need to come down for European manufacturing to survive.

Personally I think that solar and wind energy are good technologies, but the specific ways that that transition has been implemented, at least here in Germany, was abysmal. Plagued by incompetence and mismanagement, this has had a severe impact on the economy and the ability of German energy intensive companies to survive.

Electricity cannot be delivered to spec anymore in Malta, where I live. If you put a voltmeter in an outlet it's quite normal to see 200 volts on there. It's also quite normal to see 260. That's beyond the 230V +- 10% that it's supposed to be. When anyone notices a problem, the utility company just switches them to one of the other two phases, which will inevitably destabilize too after a while. Meanwhile OVRs became mandatory, but because the supply is so out of spec, you'll have the utility guys setting the limits so wide that it effectively becomes equivalent to the piece of wire it replaced.

Seems like they aren't actually "rationing power", they're just delaying new hookups until the grid has enough capacity to handle higher load.

I wonder what the issue is. Is it production, or distribution? If it's production, there's no excuse for that, build nuclear. If it's distribution, is it due to environmental concerns, or NIMBYs?

New hookups can be demanded immediately. It takes ~10 years to build a new nuclear generator. Battery storage is likely a component of a solution to smooth between production and demand.

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