The power is wide. Electricity, gas, transportation, heating, etc. House laying is usually easier than the entire production chain. Before you put a product (eg a microphone, a nice subject because it’s one of those things that usually consumes very little) on your table there is a full current of power in it. Transportation, materials and material extraction/refining (look at Aldel’s problems, for example… due to the electricity crisis in NL, we will soon not be able to make aluminum ourselves… while Shell smiles 25% of one of the largest wind farms “takes” to manufacture hydrogen to a refinery so that the overall energy cycle is not closed but suffers a loss in the form of undesirable by-products that cannot be used).

For pure families, the story is … different. smaller than the macro. I don’t have to tell you much about gas: there is a shortage due to chain problems (for which we have to work with LNG, which again leads to some amount of power lost…). You can replace gas with electricity, with COPs which are also very attractive. Electricity … is very wide in the Netherlands. We already have a branch network of transmission and distribution. Series from 380 kV, 150 kV, 50 kV, 24 kV, 10 kV to 0.4 kV to connect your home. Compare it to a road network with the Highway (TenneT), regional access roads, and the gateway to your area where all those 30km poles are.

The point is that there are tweaks in different places, and it is not always possible to turn on / off. It could be neighborhood level (and the current can’t normally go up) so you can suddenly measure 252 volts in phase (at that point the solar panels are turned off because the inverters are changing). Locally, you can say: “Hey people, use more,” and this translates to a negative energy rate. We usually switch our cars to a single phase charging capacitor, and our inverter to another, because the story is a bit more complicated (after all, we want to keep these panels running, so if the second phase is only 247V there is definitely room for 5 volts). However, these are very regional problems. There is a shortage of everything, even water (https://www.rtvoost.nl/ni…der-water-vitens-zegt-nee).

In general, there are “widely observed” shortages, infrastructure shortages locally, and small local surpluses in SOMETIMES (which is less of a problem than you might think from an electricity point of view just because you can get smarter).

Believe me – any form of energy, especially globally, is in short supply right now. The less dependent you become, and the more homogeneous you can make your energy needs, the better for now.