I notice a few things. First, the problems with electricity companies seem a very US thing. Here in the Netherlands, and I think also elsewhere in the EU, we have competition between power retail companies who mostly buy from the European (spot) market. Most consumers have contracts with a price that is fixed for one year, but an increasing number have dynamic contracts where the price varies every 15 minutes. I can choose between about two dozen suppliers, and there are no restrictions on solar panels. Until now, we can feed back solar generated electricity into the grid at the same price as what we pay for when we use from the grid. However, this will change because it has become unsustainable: electricity at mid day in the Summer has a negative market value, and yet, the power companies have to pay you mid Winter prices. That was OK when few people had panels, but not when a large proportion have them. This is all the more pressing in northern Europe, where we are so much closer to the Arctic than the US, with far less sunlight in Winter.
We live in a 220sq m detached house that was well insulated by the mandatory building standards of the late nineties, but not by current standards. So a few years ago, when our flat roof started leaking, we replaced the roof insulation, and also the crawl space insulation, reducing our natural gas bill by 30%. A bit later our gas boiler needed to be replaced, and we opted for a fully electric heat pump system and disconnected from the natural gas grid, in the process saving the connection charge. Our monthly electricity bill is now 135 euros for electricity from renewable sources.
That still leaves the car, a 1998 Peugeot 406. It is a comfortable and very well handling car, but it is getting on, so we have started looking around for an EV. We tried a few, and are really impressed. The experience feels a bit like driving the big American V8 car that I used to drive years ago: silent, and with massive torque. We have dcided to hold off a bit longer, because we really want to have a car ready for Vehicle to Grid, using the car battery as a home battery to benefit as much as possible from our solar panels, and all the more so when dynamic electricity prices will become the norm, or even mandatory. This will level the peaks in either supply or demand that our grid is currently having to cope with. Right now the first cars are hitting the market, but the choice is still limited (looking at you Tesla), and the power companies and the government are not quite ready yet. My guess is that it will be another year. We can charge at home, but the Netherlands also have a large charging network. We have a dense network of highways, and I don't think there is a single petrol/gasoline station left along the highways that does not also have enough fast chargers. From the stories that I hear, the same is now increasingly also true for much of the rest of Europe, thanks in part to EU mandatory regulation, but also from consumer demand. Driving an EV is now so much cheaper than using petrol/gasoline that the market forces suppliers to shift. Sales of new Petrol/diesel cars are now just 11% of the market and full electric 39%. The rest is hybrids, with full electric rapidly gaining market share. The Netherlands have 142,000 public stations and 4700 fast chargeing stations.
)) and spent the money on rear wheel steer, active anti-roll bars, torque vectoring and the best tyres (though not the most powerful motor).
. I drive 30'000km per year. I extended the warranty.
