The increase is mainly due to more work on the power grid, explains Netbeheer Nederland. These are planned so that you as a consumer or company can take them into account.
The work is necessary to prevent disruptions. The electricity grid is increasingly overloaded. More electricity is used to reduce dependence on gas. More energy is also generated from sustainable sources (wind and sun).
Peaks due to solar and wind energy
The electricity from wind farms and solar panel parks often comes with large peaks: when the wind is blowing and/or when the sun is shining. The large amounts of power released at once cause power cables and other parts of the grid to wear out more quickly.
And this is reflected in the number of malfunctions caused by aging or wear. Last year the power grid was down almost 27,000 times. That is 19 percent more than the average number of interruptions over the past five years. The number of times wear and tear was identified as the culprit also increased. That was 1,438 times in the past year.
New cables and electricity houses
To reduce this number, a maximum of 54,000 electricity houses will be built over the next ten years. And 105,000 kilometers of new cables will be laid in the ground. To do this safely, power is sometimes disconnected from the grid.
Customers notice this: on average, an interruption lasts almost 22 minutes. The longest outage of 2023, which was caused by a fault in a measuring transformer, lasted 7 hours and 41 minutes. Nearly 18,000 customers near the station in Vroomshoop were affected.
In Oss they can discuss it. The power was out there for two and a half hours during carnival. Thanks to generators, the party continued, but it was no longer possible to pay in cafes.
And that resulted in an amount of around 2,500 euros in unpaid bills, entrepreneur Nick Vink previously told Omroep Brabant. The owner of café-restaurant H23 wrote down the telephone numbers of customers who could not pay, in the hope that they would still show up.
Half cut customers
“Everyone came back to pay,” he says a few weeks later. He did not make any further claims on his insurance. “The costs for throwing away things that were in the oven were not high enough to call in the insurance company. .”
There were also problems in Hengelo. There was a power outage in the center on Saturday January 20, caused by a cable break. Annoying, of course, if your hair salon is full of half-cut customers.
Creative solutions
“We were able to blow-dry at the bookstore opposite the store. And luckily there was a lot of daylight, so we could continue working,” says Brigiet from Kapsalon Styling S. “Luckily we also had hot water.” Payment was arranged by sending a payment request with a banking app. “As an entrepreneur you will be faced with more unexpected moments.”
Companies can insure themselves against damage from power outages, but such business interruption insurance usually does not cover everything, says Elias van Hees. He is a spokesperson for the Dutch Association of Insurers. “It depends on the policy conditions. And relatively few companies have such insurance.”
2024-03-01 12:09:31
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