About three years ago, wrote an essay over the UK grid-providers, and their fear that when E-cars finally would start to arrive....the grid would be unable to handle the load. Well...Focus picked up things and had a talk with German grid-providers (page one type story), and same fear comes up.
The general German fear? Both E-cars and heat-pumps....at the same general time period....will overburden the German grid.
What may come? Well...if you look at everything....some type of computerized network that continually measures things and 'throttles' to an extent that we can't even imagine today.
You could have a neighborhood of forty homes, with forty-five E-cars in the mix, and the system would sort through to say at 6 PM....only a dozen cars can be recharging, and the rest would have to wait till a 'window' opens at midnight. It's possible in a harsh cold freeze....the neighborhood 'AI' system might even say that none of the E-cars can recharge that night....that all power must be dedicated to the heat-pumps.
Did the pro-E-car enthusiasts or politicians grasp this back eight years ago? I doubt that.
Building an more enhanced grid? You probably could do it....but you'd be talking about twenty years of effort and a fair amount of money that doesn't exist today.
All of this chatter....bringing up the value of homes and their grid-reliability? I would suggest that thought will arise within the next two years. Various areas....in more rural regions....will see their home prices discounted because they live in a marginalized grid zone and it won't be upgraded for at least two decades.
Inventing a big political mess? Yes, without any doubt. But I doubt if anyone wants to go on some public TV talk show and explain how this gets crappy.
I should add these two footnotes: (1) A great majority of Germans have minimum to zero interest in E-cars. (2) Most German homes are not in the condition that could toward the heat-pump. In my region, I would guess around 50-percent of the owners would say a heat-pump is not practical without a massive renovation.
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