Energy industry engineers have expressed concern that power grids could be overloaded due to the growing prevalence of heat pumps. Economics Minister Robert Habeck, on the other hand, contradicts this concern and sees no legitimate reasons for it.
Heat pumps and overloading of the power grids: Habeck’s plans under criticism
Is there a risk that Habeck’s heat transition will overload the power grids? The FDP asked the Economics Minister 77 questions about his controversial heating law. This also includes the effects of the increasing number of heat pumps on the overloading of the electricity grids. Because by 2030, the devices should increase from just over one million to six million.
Especially on extremely cold days, the devices could represent an additional load on the power grid, warned the head of Stadtwerke Munich, Florian Bieberbach. In January, the President of the Federal Network Agency, Klaus Müller, also warned that there was a risk of overload and local power failures in the distribution network. This is especially true if many new heat pumps and charging stations continue to come online unless we take action.
Habeck has now dealt with the topic. According to the Handelsblatt, such warnings are considered unfounded by Klara Geywitz’s (SPD) Ministry of Economic Affairs and Construction. The ministries quote that the additional power consumption of heat pumps is low due to their high efficiency, especially when using ambient heat from the air, ground or water. According to the ministries’ calculations, the planned five million new heat pumps by 2030 would require less than 30 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity. That would be less than five percent of electricity consumption in 2030.
Controversy surrounding Habeck’s heat transition: is there a risk of a self-inflicted electricity shortage?
How can that be classified? In 2022, total electricity consumption, also known as payload, was 484.2 terawatt hours. According to the latest forecast by the federal government, this must increase to 750 terawatt hours by 2030. This corresponds to an increase of over 37 percent. One could accept Habeck’s assessment without contradiction and sit back and relax. But there is another aspect. According to the Energy Industry Act, the energy suppliers could throttle the power consumption of devices in the vicinity of the consumer. In addition, heat pumps should only be subsidized if they have an interface that allows them to be partially remotely decoupled from the power grid.
Civil engineer Lamia Messari-Becker criticized this in an interview with the Berliner Zeitung (Berliner-Zeitung: 05.06.23). Her accusation is that Habeck is focusing the heat transition too much on electricity and is not diversifying enough, which is leading to a self-inflicted shortage. So why this interface for heat pumps when there is said to be no risk of grid overload?
Expert dispute about energy supply: Ministry of Economic Affairs counters concerns and relies on grid expansion
The Berliner Zeitung asked the Economics Ministry directly why it was so resolutely rejecting the concerns of many experts and consumers (Berliner-Zeitung: 04.06.23). It quickly became apparent that the ministry was banking on both the necessary expansion of the distribution grids and the increase in electricity generation in Germany. With regard to the expected increase in heat pumps and electric vehicles in particular, the country needs well-equipped electricity distribution networks. A ministry spokesman replied to our query: “A timely and forward-looking expansion of the distribution networks is therefore essential”. The Ministry of Economic Affairs sees the call by the head of the Federal Network Agency, Müller, in January to press ahead with the necessary expansion of the networks as a call to the network operators. But the fact that the expansion cannot follow the plan is more due to the lengthy approval process than to the will of the network operators. (Blackout-News: 06.03.23)
The Federal Network Agency is currently providing information about the conversion of the electricity system by 2031. In the coalition agreement, the traffic light coalition also decided to phase out coal by 2030. At the same time, the Federal Network Agency states that private charging stations for electric vehicles and heat pumps could sometimes lead to significantly higher electricity requirements in the local grids. In addition, a significantly higher simultaneous use of the networks is to be expected.
Heat pump controversy: Why should power consumption be throttled?
Why does the government want to curb the power consumption of heat pumps and charging stations for electric cars when, according to the Ministry of Economic Affairs, there is no supply problem? The ministry spokesman assessed the conclusion that the devices would be disconnected from the power grid as misleading. He explains that nobody is disconnected in the truest sense of the word. Only if the consumer agrees can he get less power from the power lines. This regulation does not affect private households, but rather the charging stations. Still, the issue is now being presented as if we’re about to collapse, the spokesman said. He says that such warnings are only used to exert pressure.
The local network operators are currently assuming that electricity consumption in Germany will more than double by 2045 due to the electrification of transport and heat. According to a spokesman for the Berlin transmission system operator 50Hertz Transmission, this increasing consumption is taken into account in the current expansion plans as part of the network development plan 2037/45 for the transmission network. In the future, Berlin’s power grid will also have to “plan very wisely, invest and build in good time” in order to meet customer demands for a grid connection, said Managing Director Erik Landeck recently at the annual press conference. Politics gives the impression that everything is going according to plan. But both the expansion of renewable energies and the expansion of the grids are years behind the plans of the politicians.
Expansion of the power grids at risk: Heat pumps and green electricity losses cause bottlenecks!
According to the expansion scenario of the Network Development Plan for Electricity 2013, the transmission system operators will have to lay around 145,000 kilometers of new power lines by 2032 in order to ensure the successful integration of renewable energies. For their part, the federal states estimate the necessary expansion to be around 280,000 kilometers. The federal government’s climate targets have since tightened and the forecast power consumption has increased significantly. So how fast do the construction workers have to push ahead with the expansion?
The CEO of Vonovia, Rolf Buch, had previously criticized the fact that the expansion of the electricity grids was already too slow. This is said to be the reason why the real estate group was unable to put the installed heat pumps into operation in many cases. The Federal Network Agency identified further problems at the turn of the year: In the first half of 2022, 5.4 billion kilowatt hours of green electricity were lost in Germany because the transmission capacity of the networks was insufficient. This corresponds to around four percent of the green electricity generated. Due to these bottlenecks, the green power plants could not generate a possible 5.8 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, which accounts for over one percent of the total electricity generation in 2022. If you also take into account the shortage of skilled workers, the concerns of many do not seem to be unfounded. Why does Minister of Economics Habeck have such a long line?
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