The province of Utrecht wants less EV charging during peak hours and electric heat pumps – Image and sound – News

The province of Utrecht advises against charging cars during peak times and wants residents not to switch to fully electric heat pumps, but to opt for hybrid heat pumps. In this way, the province wants to combat grid congestion.

“By not using public charging stations at peak times – especially in winter between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. in the evening – a lot of profit can be achieved,” writes the Energy Board of the Province of Utrecht, a partnership between the province, municipalities and grid operators. When granting concessions for new public charging stations, municipalities can already require that the charging stations can charge ‘grid-conscious’, meaning they charge less during peak hours and during grid congestion. The Ministry of Infrastructure is also investigating the possibility of breaking up existing concession contracts, so that existing public charging stations are also required to charge in a grid-conscious manner. As soon as this option becomes available, the province of Utrecht and Utrecht municipalities will ask charging station companies to implement this in order to reduce grid congestion. However, there must remain an exception option for drivers to be able to charge immediately.

The municipality of Utrecht reported earlier this week that smart charging of electric vehicles can reduce peak loads by fifteen percent. It was also known that the municipality of Utrecht was considering switching off charging stations. This reduction or shutdown is important because the energy grid in the province of Utrecht, among others, is reaching its limits. The situation in that province is ‘dire’, Energy Board writes, ‘partly because the electrification of households and companies has occurred faster than expected, partly due to gas prices that have risen enormously due to geopolitical developments’. Measures are therefore necessary to connect new companies, households and charging stations to the energy grid, for example. In addition, there is a risk of ‘more and long-term power outages’ from 2026 if nothing is done now, Energy Board writes.

In addition to limiting EV charging, the Energy Board wants hybrid heat pumps to ‘temporarily become the norm’. Electric heat pumps are now also being used, but they consume more electricity. Because hybrid pumps can switch to gas during peak times, they place less burden on the energy grid. Housing associations are therefore asked to opt for hybrid heat pumps instead of fully electric ones when making existing buildings more sustainable. “Until there is sufficient space on the electricity network to facilitate fully electric heat pumps in existing buildings.”

A third measure is the use of ‘temporary adjustable generation in the province of Utrecht’, where the province expects natural gas installations to be used. Battery systems are ‘less’ suitable because they can only be used for a maximum of four hours and therefore cannot provide sufficient capacity for the grid. “Given the urgency and the scope that temporary controllable generation provides for further sustainability, the yield of this measure (also in CO₂profit) more than outweighs the disadvantage of the (limited and temporary) CO₂emissions caused by this.”

Although the situation is now most dire in the province of Utrecht, the measures can also be implemented in the Flevopolder and Gelderland regions, the national government writes. The power grid is also ‘reaching its limits more quickly’ in these regions. In addition to these measures, four important high-voltage stations in the region are being reinforced to create more space on the grid. In addition, grid operators want to investigate whether the current grid can be temporarily used more heavily and what risks this entails.