From Wednesday in Zeeland, companies that use a lot of electricity will no longer be able to connect to the province’s power network or increase their connection. Grid manager Tennet has that announced on Wednesday. The Zeeland high-voltage grid is running into capacity problems. Existing plans for hydrogen factories, large batteries for green energy storage and the transition away from fossil fuels require eight times as much electricity as Zeeland currently consumes.
“It gives us a stomach ache,” says Marc de Zwaan against the Zeeland news medium PZC. “We did foresee an enormous growth in the demand for electricity. But we didn’t expect it to go so fast.” It is not yet known how long the Zeeland power grid will have to be closed. As long as the province does not create new space, large companies cannot expand there. New companies will be reluctant to set up in Zeeland without the prospect of improvement.
Electricity networks elsewhere in the Netherlands are also becoming so full that new applications have little chance of success. For example, large companies that want a connection in the Noordoostpolder will be put on a waiting list for the time being. And in North Brabant, large consumers of electricity will not have to make the effort to acquire new power connections for the next five to ten years.
“In the coming years, the obviousness of access to the electricity grid for large companies will unfortunately be a thing of the past,” a spokesman for network operator Enexis said to ANP news agency last month. The municipality of Den Bosch then also pointed out that the capacity problems “impede the possibilities of, in particular, larger companies to become natural gas-free”.
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