EV chargers, heat pumps may be curtailed in Germany as of 2024
By Paul Homewood
This caught my eye:
Germany’s residential grid operators will be empowered to restrict the flow of power to heat pumps and electric vehicle (EV) chargers from 2024 in order to preserve the stability of the grid, which is suffering from chronic underinvestment.
Across Europe, investments into grids are lagging behind what’s needed as the continent embraces heat pumps and electric vehicles.
“Waiting time for permits for grid reinforcements are between 4-10 years, and 8-10 years for high voltages,” the European Commission said on Tuesday (28 November) as it unveiled a new Action Plan to accelerate the deployment of electricity grids.
“Grids need to be an enabler, not a bottleneck in the clean energy transition,” said Kadri Simson, the EU’s energy commissioner.
In Germany, the network regulator, the Bundesnetzagentur, is now taking steps to throttle the electricity delivered to EVs and heat pumps to alleviate pressure on the grid.
“We are taking precautions today to ensure that heat pumps and charging facilities for electric cars can be connected quickly and operated safely,” said Klaus Müller, president of the federal grid agency on Monday (27 November).
Throttling the devices
Müller is walking a tightrope: keeping the lights on while integrating 500,000 new heat pumps every year and 15 million EVs by 2030. But he also has new powers to do this, thanks to a recent ruling by the EU court of justice which boosted its independence.
Going forward, the country’s 880 local grid operators won’t be able to block new heat pumps or wall-chargers for EVs in their service areas.
In exchange, they get to throttle the devices when power demand threatens “acute damage or overloading of the network”.
For that duration, devices will receive a trickle of 4.2 kilowatts per hour – on which heat pumps can continue running, and EVs can be charged for a 50-kilometre ride within two hours, the regulator says. Other household devices won’t be affected.
Even that figure is too high for the companies addressed. “We criticise the fact that the [regulator] BNetzA has raised the minimum guaranteed output even further from 3.7 KW to 4.2 KW,” stressed the municipal utility association VKU, who said the “practicality of the very generous guarantee” has yet to be proven.
Müller says he expects “interventions by the grid operator to remain the exception.”
When DSOs curtail devices, they must expand the affected grid service area. “However, the distribution system operators are not threatened with penalties if the grids are not expanded in line with demand,” said industry association bne.
The rules come into effect on 1 January 2024, with a two-year grace period. From 2025, Germany wants to take time-variable consumption tariffs seriously and reward consumers at times of the day when cheap solar or wind electricity are abundant.
Until then, owners of heat pumps and EV charging stations at home have the option of slashing their bills by €110 to €190 by allowing local grid operators to reduce power supplies when needed. If devices are connected to a dedicated meter, power prices could even be slashed by 60%.
I presume that heat pumps and EV chargers must be directly controlled via some sort of smart meter. This is of course just the beginning of the problem, which will become much more acute as coal power is phased out and demand from heating and cars increases.
What may start as the “exception” will quickly become the norm.
So if you want to heat your home in winter, or charge your car to get to work the next day, tough luck.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
It is difficult to comprehend the stupidity of energy policy in the EU over the last 20 or so years. They have been warned often enough as to what the outcome of their renewable energy policies will be.
They don’t care!
It’s not stupidity: they just don’t care. It’s not their responsibility.
Each decision is taken because those just above in the hierarchy deem it so. All within the decision making machine understand that their salary depends on obeying: and that is greater than their understanding of the Laws of Physics, basic Business Transactions or care for others.
It is matched by stupidity in every other area. The EU is dedicated to central planning – I’m old enough to remember the butter mountains and wine lakes, designed to keep food prices high. All that’s changed is that the EU now plans what farmers do in different ways. Governments everywhere are trying to do what Hayek, von Mises and Friedman showed conclusively cannot be done. And with exactly the results they predicted.
Isn’t that the definition of insanity: to repeat the same action expecting a different result?
“Real communism has never been tried.”
You could also go hiking in the sugar mountains.
It is not stupidity , it is a deliberate policy to destroy the economy of Western countries .https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/climate-change-scare-tool-to-destroy-capitalism/
A lot of Politicians and the media are under the control of the Marxist/ Socialist world leaders to bring about a ONE WORLD SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT.. And a lot of the others are just doing what they are told , [ and paid ], to say .
Yesterday, due to it being a little colder the National Grid’s customers who had signed up for voluntary rationing for a fee were asked to reduce consumption while the government is pushing evs and heat pumps for all they can.
This deficit must surely accelerate as time passes with current policies and lack of investment in dispatchable generation capacity coupled with the downward trend of nuclear generation output?
Technically you can only be on or off with individual devices, so it would have to be something like 30 minutes on, 30 minute off, and you would need a smart meter for each device. The Internet of things, where each device had an internet address and electronic on/off switch never materialised. So you cannot do it, only area blackouts are possible. Another unworkable bodge.
Any way it is pretty easy to bypass a smart meter.
I believe that new installed quick chargers for EVs require a seperate meter if they are to get a lower tariff. May be wrong.
According to this site, you are correct. https://topcharger.co.uk/no-you-dont-need-a-smart-meter-to-install-an-ev-charger/
It seems that most providers won’t install a charger if you don’t have a smart meter. There’s nothing to stop you installing your own charger without a meter but to get a powerful one you need 3 phase I’ve read. Some chargers come with their own smart meter but, without the EV tariff, there would be little benefit.
Don’t you worry, that is their intention. To be able to turn off any device at a whim …. every time you make the wrong comment on social media.
It depends what else is installed with the Smart Meter. Where I lived in France, the supply to the house was 6kVA which had all electric heating. This supply was not for all the rads to operate simultaneously with other equipment.
In the distribution panel was a load shedding device – quite small – which, if the limit was reached, would shut off one circuit in the house for 30 minutes, then restore it and if needed shut down a different circuit.
6kVA is the standard supply to French homes. Higher rated supply can be requested, and the standing charge increases depending on level.
Although France has had over-capacity of supply from its 59 nuke power stations, it has had a very poor grid infrastructure – it a big territory, with a lot of small rural hamlets, villages and individual properties. Piped natural gas is available only in cities and some big towns.
Although there has been a lot of work done over the last 20 years upgrading the grid, this has been catch-up rather than extension.
I suppose it isn’t surprising that the fools promoting the switch to electricity have not considered its distribution, only its generation and forcing people to buy BEVs and electric heating.
Very common in France to see gas tanks in the gardens of properties in the country. We seem to use heating oil instead as all the off-grid properties I viewed when buying were all oil heating. It might be that oil is cheaper given that it is well off its peak and is not used for generation.
I think most Brits do not realise how good an electrical supply system we have when compared to the dross that seems to be tolerated in many European countries. Italian relatives of mine are astounded at the sight of me switching on an electric kettle and toaster in the UK …at the same time!! Most rural Italians make do with a 15amp fused supply, some even less. My 10.5kW electric shower (solely as a back up for if the combi gas boiler fails) simply blows their mind.
Ray Sanders: A bit off topic, but we were in Italy in August when the BBC were reporting that everyone was collapsing from the heat. The barman in our hotel in Lake Maggiore, (who I believe more than the BBC) said that the temperature was below average!
Hooray! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb6jjnCSV2k
But, but everything is going to be fine, they have an ‘Action Plan’
There is no point in pushing EVs and heat pumps until the grid can actually supply them with renewable energy. As we currently use all our renewable and nuclear energy, any new EV or heat pump will be 100% powered by fossil fuels burned in power stations, for decades to come. Even if there were any truth in the CO2 emissions nonsense, it simply doesn’t help. In fact it is worse, because of the hughe emissions and environmental damage from making all the EV batteries in the first place.
So the time when people most need their heat pump is also the time when they’re most likely to ‘throttle’ its electricity supply. Brilliant 🙄
There isn’t a way to make steel cement or concrete that doesn’t produce CO2. You won’t have bricks and mortar to build the house … why will the plebs need a heat pump?
Don’t get me started on smart meters. I was forced to have one installed back in the days of better deals from power companies if you agreed to have one. I put it off until the second generation, but when the installer came he said it would not work, and it never has, for four years. Apparently it’s supposed to use radio waves but they don’t bother making them reach rural properties. The second property, in a village, had a smart meter but it didn’t work after the tenant left, despite not even switching electricity supplier. That was 8 months ago. When they turn off the old 2G/3G, all the first generation smart meters will apparently fail.
It’s no use anyway if you are working, if you have a desktop computer. You can’t do without power, so you rig up a lithium ion battery and an inverter, and a generator to recharge the battery and run everything else (with more emissions than ever). Being in a rural area, my generator runs the freezers when it is cold, the router runs off a battery, as does the TV, with inverters, and also the oil central heating controller and pump.
I ssem to remember that the Germans built offshore wind farms that they were unable to connect to homes because the Greens were fighting the new grid connections needed. No-one ever claimed that Greens were clever.
Their intent is to destroy the fossil fuel economy. They never said they had any intention of replacing it with a new one.
Even more insane, each wind farm had a barge with a big diesel generator to supply electricity to keep the turbines warm and slowly rotating to prevent the bearings from failing due to brinelling.
What could possibly go wrong!
A usefull reminder of the magical thinking and stupidity that permeates Germany, the EU and UK.
Putin must laugh himself to sleep every night.
Hmm. A man who launched a 7 day war that’s about to hit 2 years, thinking his troops would be welcomed as liberators and that his army was competent. No magical thinking there.
Agreed. But his energy sector is still doing pretty well.
Yes. Zelensky is a fool.
To add to my response, do you imagine that Putin sobs into his pillow about the number of dead? Many of the “Russian” dead are actually Chechens or from the multitude of other ethnic minorities in “Russia”.
Certainly, the suggestion that his invasion would be greeted with enthusiasm (if he really believed that) was magical thinking- or really crap advice from the Military. Apart from anything else, even the Russian speakers in old “Stalino’ ( now Donetsk) are very well aware of the Holodomor. And the way they were treated by Stalin both before and after the deliberate famine.
Meanwhile, how many Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Armenians have you spoken to? They all feel (correctly) under some level of threat. Part of that is deliberate agit-prop, of course.
But if Vlad the Bad doesn’t chuckle about his energy market and about how the Russian investment in the Anti-pipeline morons in North America and the Anti-fracking morons in Europe turned out, his sense of humour must have been surgically removed.
It’s almost as if the Glorious Leaders in Germany are incompetent.
It’s not that they are incompetent, it’s that they are trying to do something Economics showed 50 years ago is impossible. You cannot plan an economy. Nobody can possibly know enough to do so. And the future is unknowable. Yet time after time we try and waste resources and time trying to do it. We would be 2-3 as wealthy now had we learnt the lessons of Nobel prize winners.
An example of the incompetence is the attempt to force through changes in consumer behaviour which are unsupported by the current physical infrastructure and are unlikely to be supported by the physical infrastructure in the near future.
Once some customers using some equipment can be cut off, it won’t be long before it’s all customers and all equipment. Electricity will be rationed. Its the only solution to this stupidiy.
A very strange (and largely unpublicised) lesson should have been learnt from the daytime 2019 August blackout. National Grid/DNOs deliberately shed “load” to reduce demand not realising that they simultaneously shed all small generators (typically domestic solar and small, mostly agricultural, wind turbines connected at low voltage to those areas) and created a further nett loss. This was a contributing factor and made matters worse.
The load shedding option rather kills off the notion of returning power to the network from EV batteries (crass idea anyway) as it can lead to losing yet more supply than is being shed.
My physics teacher always used to say “there is a right way and a wrong way to do things and it is a poor fool who can do neither”
Net Zero is the destruction of the entire fossil fuel economy. I will be interested to see how far Germany takes them back into the dark ages before those in charge find that their rope is a bit shorter than the drop.
We know Net Zero will fail. We just don’t know what it’s going to look like. This story from Germany gives us an early look.
I am shocked that die Bundesnetzagentur would issue such a statement. How can anyone now sell a heat pump or EV in Germany? What about the car maker unions that have gone full tilt on electrics? There’s going to be a run on antacids.
In our village a section has been subject to multiple blackouts in the last week. In Ashford Kent similar blackouts have been experienced. Has anybody else experienced blackouts in the last week. Maybe the strain on the Grid is showing already.
Last winter there were blackouts most days across the country .
Usually just a few thousand houses in different areas , and explained away as routine maintenance or lines faults . But they can do that every day and most people will only get a power cut every few years so will not realise that the whole generation and grid system cannot cope with high winter demand .
Electric heating and EVs will make it a lot worse as an ongoing problem , so how long before people and the media start to realise that the whole Net Zero idea will be a disaster .
We had a fault with the high voltage feed to my corner of Surrey a week or so back. Took out many villages and was out for over 3 hours. With these faults it takes a while to fix as happened one Christmas when I drove home and thought it odd that everyone’s decorations were out. There was a few hours. At least I have a gas hob and woodburner.
Mike, next time you are driving around any rural areas of Kent you may well notice some shiny brand new bits of kit fitted on the the overhead electricity supplies. They look like large three pronged forks with tines about a metre long usually upon “H” poles. You will see the power lines looped to one side of the pivot point of these forks that allows them to move down with them if they move.
These are in fact circuit breakers and most can now be remotely activated. This allows the District Network Operator (in our area UK Power Networks) to selectively and remotely disconnect areas very rapidly though the do require manual resetting to restore service. These are supposed to be safety devices but it is becoming very clear they are being deliberately activated to shed load on a rotational basis.
Further to previous, here is a street view image of what a recently installed one looks like. This one is a manual near Wingham and you can see the operating “hook” about half way down the pole.
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.2792989,1.2185686,3a,75y,335.32h,111.34t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sz9725LxI0_YQji7NH2_BcA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu
The remote operating ones have small black box in lieu of the “hook”.
I’m waiting for all these, so far unconnected, potholes in the road to Net Zero and the urge to ruin everyone’s lives with EVs for which there is no E and heat pumps which apparently are totally unsuitable for 90% of UK buildings (I can’t answer for the rest of the world) to reach critical mass. At which point the politicians will be forced to say “f… this for a game of soldiers” and the whole climate edifice will be demolished, blown up, or simply abandoned.
It will happen. I’m just not sure what the catalyst will be.
I was thinking about the large-scale effects of heating buildings in a city via heat pumps.
Suppose a city were converted to be heated entirely by heat pumps and that the temperature in the absence of the heating system would naturally be, say, zero degrees while the desired indoor temperature was, say, +18 degrees. Then the heat pumps would effectively have to lower the temperature of a volume of outside space equal to that of the heated buildings to -18 degrees.
So it seems as though mass use of heat pumps in cities might produce large volumes of significantly cooled air with the possibility of some interesting meteorological effects associated with temperature inversions, as well as lowering heat pump efficiency due to the decreased outside temperature.
The effect would be moderated by the heat generated by operation of the pumps and some sort of rough equilibrium would be reached in which heat flowed out the buildings as fast as it was coming in and also flowing into the city as a whole so the results may not be dramatic. Nonetheless, it might be worth estimating the magnitude of such presumably unintended consequences and their impact on local weather and heat pump efficiency before making wholesale conversions.
This effect is in contrast to more conventional methods of keeping warm via resistive heating or burning materials which can only add heat to the outside environment and so tend to reduce temperature gradients.
Here in Adelaide, and probably all cities in Australia, those multi-storey buildings run their air-conditioning units (heat pumps) 24 hours a day because the air has to be freshened as well.
So a medium size business building uses about 5MW even if not trying to cool (or heat) just to avoid stale air. It also needs lots of power for installed computers etc.
Note that for Heat Pumps to work semi-efficiently in the UK, it is mandated that the building must be extremely highly insulated and that the interior of the building is actually sealed from the exterior and actually pressure tested to obtain the certification.
Yet another reason why air source heat pumps aren’t really practical in other that in new property designed and constructed by experts.
So don’t expect too much by way of fresh air. And do expect mould growth, especially if you need to dry clothes indoors.
You are perfectly correct. There really is no “free lunch” anywhere.
As an example of the crass absurdity that exists in this impractical world of renewables, a recently installed “community” wind turbine near Bristol is having to pay compensation to other nearby wind turbines for “stealing” some of the wind and reducing their output. Total effing madness.
Climate change does worry me; the need to find suitable alternatives is obviously important. However, I used to live in an area where the electricity supply could be interrupted by storms, bringing down power lines, etc, and where the only sensible option was to have alternative means of heating, cooking etc. I believe we need to find several different options to spread the load (pun intended!)
My late mother wanted to have a paraffin stove in her all-electric retirement flat …. and no, we didn’t get one for her. She knew that she would be in a complete pickle if there was an extended power cut – and now, almost 20 years after her death, we still haven’t solved this issue.
‘investment’ – really? Just pissing good money away in the wind on something that will eventually collapse. Never in the field of humanity has so much been spent to achieve so little.
Agree.
I foresee angry mobs carrying pitchforks and flaming torches (or the C21st equivalent) coming to Government headquarters in the not-too-distant future…
That’s what I see when I read history and old newspapers. Book burning, Beatles albums burning…
Hope to see that before I peg it.
The sooner and the more decisively, the better.