Brickbat: All Charged Up

Starting next year, Germany will ban new oil or gas boilers from being installed in buildings. Instead, building owners must install heat pumps. But the country's electricity grid is already straining because of lack of investment, so the government has also given grid operators the ability to throttle heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers, also starting next year. The government's green energy plans anticipate adding 500,000 heat pumps every year through 2030 and adding 15 million electric vehicles in that time. But during periods when demand threatens to overwhelm the grid, heat pumps can be limited to 4.2 kilowatts per hour and electric vehicles chargers will get just enough juice to charge a vehicle for a 50 kilometer drive over two hours.