🔗 Share this article

Through a Dutch government television initiative titled "Flip the Switch" a performer warns audience members about their electricity usage.

"When we everyone consume power at the identical moment, our electricity network gets overloaded," she says. "It can lead to malfunctions. So, employ as little energy as feasible between 4 and 9 PM."

It is a sign that, in among the highly developed economic systems in the world, something has developed problems with the nation's electricity provision.

EV Adoption and Renewable Energy Expansion

The Netherlands has been an enthusiastic adopter of EVs. It has the greatest quantity of charging points per person in the European continent.

As for electricity production, this nation has replaced natural gas from its large North Sea reserves with wind and solar.

So much so that it pioneers the path in Europe for the number of solar panels per person. Actually, over one third of Dutch households have PV installations fitted.

This nation is also aiming for sea-based wind farms to be its largest provider of power by 2030.

Network Overload Issues

While this is all good in ecological terms, it's placing the Dutch national electricity grid under significant stress, and in recent years there have been a number of outages.

The problem is "grid congestion", says Kees-Jan Rameau, chief executive of a Netherlands power company and supplier.

"Grid congestion is similar to a bottleneck on the electricity network. It's caused by either too much power demand in a certain region, or excessive power supply fed into the network, more than what the system can handle."

The expert clarifies that the challenge is that the network "was created in the era when we had only a handful of massive, mainly gas-fired power plants".

"Therefore we constructed a network with large power lines close to those power plants, and increasingly smaller power lines as you got closer to the residences.

"Currently we're transitioning to renewables, and that implies there's a significant energy being injected into the network in the outskirts of the network where there are only comparatively small power lines."

And these small power lines are finding it difficult to deal with all the electricity coming in from wind turbines and PV systems scattered around the nation.

Specialist Assessment and EU-wide Situation

An electrical engineering professor, academic of power systems at a European university, is among the continent's top experts on power networks. He says it is an costly issue for the Netherlands to resolve.

"They have a network emergency because they haven't invested sufficiently in their local grids, in their main power lines, so they are facing constraints throughout, and it will take a long time and many billions of euros to solve this."

The expert notes that it is a continental problem. "European nations have an vast quantity of solar panels being installed, and they are installed at a pace that is significantly too high for the network to be able to accommodate."

Management Approaches and User Impact

At a major power provider's headquarters in Rotterdam, company leaders highlight a large monitoring system that the company calls its "virtual power plant" and "the brain of our activities". It is used to assist in stabilize the grid, preventing blackouts.

During periods power production is excessive throughout the Netherlands, it allows operators to rotate wind turbines out of the breeze and turn off solar panels.

As for situations where demand for electricity is too high, it lowers the power to consumers who have agreed to allow energy companies to stop or limit their electricity supply when the grid is under pressure in return for reduced prices.

However for households and companies who wish to scale-up their consumption of energy with a new or bigger grid connection, that, increasingly, is just not possible.

"Often consumers desire to install a heat pump, or power up their EV at home, but that requires a much bigger power connection, and progressively they simply cannot obtain it," explains the company representative.

He adds that it is worse for companies. "Typically they aim to expand their activities, and they just cannot get extra capacity from the network managers.

And it has got to the stage where even residential development in the country is becoming progressively difficult, because there's simply no available power to connect those developments to the network."

These individuals, and businesses, end up on waiting lists for a several of years. At the same time there are additionally waiting lists for those who wish to feed the grid with energy, such as a new home equipped with solar panels on its top.

Economic Consequences and Future Plans

The government-owned organization that runs the Netherlands' power network reports that 8,000 businesses are presently in queue to be able to feed in electricity, while 12,000 additional entities are queuing for permission to consume more energy.

Some sectors of the Dutch economic system are alerting that it is hindering their expansion. "Network overload is putting the long-term viability of the Netherlands chemical sector at risk… while in other countries it will be easier to put money," says the Head of a leading industry association.

So, could all this preventable? "In hindsight I think nearly all issue is avoidable," says the industry leader.

The official continues that after the 2015 climate accord on trying to tackle climate change, "the industry were very much concentrating on expanding the renewable power generation aspect. But we kind of didn't fully anticipate the impact it would have on the electricity network."

Network managers is currently planning to spend 200 billion euros on reinforcing the network, including installing some 100,000 kilometers of new cables between now and 2050.

This represents a huge sum of funding, but there is also a big cost to failing to invest it. Network overload is impacting the Netherlands economy up to 35 billion euros a year, as per a recently published analysis from a management consultancy firm.

A senior official in charge of network issues says that patience is sadly necessary. "To strengthen and reinforce the grid, we must double, threefold, sometimes increase ten times the power handling of the current grid.

"Furthermore it's taking on typical about 10 years to