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In a Dutch government television initiative titled "Flip the Switch" a performer warns audience members about their power consumption.

"When we all use electricity at the same time, our electricity network gets overloaded," she says. "This can lead to malfunctions. So, use as minimal electricity as possible between four and nine."

It is a sign that, in among the highly developed economic systems in the world, something has gone wrong with the nation's power supply.

EV Adoption and Green Energy Growth

The Netherlands has been an eager user of EVs. It boasts the greatest quantity of charging points per capita in Europe.

Regarding power generation, the Netherlands has replaced natural gas from its large North Sea reserves with solar and wind.

So much so that it leads the path in the region for the amount of photovoltaic panels per individual. Actually, more than one 3rd of Netherlands homes have solar panels installed.

The country is also aiming for sea-based wind farms to be its biggest source of energy by 2030.

Grid Overload Challenges

This is all good in ecological aspects, it's putting the Netherlands' power network under enormous stress, and in recent years there have been a number of outages.

The problem is "network overload", explains an energy executive, chief executive of a Netherlands energy producer and provider.

"Network overload is like a bottleneck on the electricity network. It's triggered by either excessive energy consumption in a certain region, or too much power supply fed into the grid, beyond what the system can handle."

The expert clarifies that the challenge is that the grid "was designed in the era when we had only a few of massive, mainly gas-fired energy facilities".

"Therefore we constructed a grid with large transmission cables near those power plants, and increasingly smaller cables as you got closer to the residences.

"Currently we're switching to green energy, and that implies there's a significant energy being fed into the network in the periphery of the system where there are just comparatively small power lines."

Furthermore these small cables are struggling to deal with the substantial electricity flowing from wind turbines and solar panels scattered around the country.

Expert Analysis and European Situation

Damien Ernst, academic of electrical engineering at a European university, is among Europe's leading experts on power networks. He states it is an costly issue for the country to resolve.

"They have a grid crisis because they haven't invested enough in their distribution networks, in their main power lines, so they are facing constraints throughout, and it will take a long time and billions of dollars to solve this."

The expert notes that it is a Europe-wide issue. "We have an vast amount of solar panels being deployed, and they are set up at a rate that is significantly too high for the network to be able to handle."

Control Approaches and User Effects

Within a leading power provider's headquarters in the port city, executives showcase a large monitoring system that the company calls its "digital energy system" and "the brain of our activities". It is employed to assist in balance the network, preventing blackouts.

During periods power production is excessive throughout the country, it allows operators to turn wind generators away from the breeze and deactivate solar panels.

Regarding when consumption for electricity is peak, it reduces the energy to consumers who have accepted to allow providers to stop or reduce their electricity supply when the network is under pressure in exchange for reduced rates.

However for homes and businesses who wish to scale-up their use of energy with a new or larger grid connection, that, increasingly, is just not possible.

"Often consumers desire to install a heating system, or charge their electric vehicle at home, but that needs a significantly larger power connection, and increasingly they just cannot get it," says the energy executive.

The official continues that it is more challenging for businesses. "Often they aim to expand their activities, and they just cannot get extra capacity from the network managers.

And it has got to the stage where even residential development in the Netherlands is becoming progressively challenging, because there's simply no available power to connect those developments to the network."

These people, and businesses, end up on queues for a number of years. Simultaneously there are also waiting lists for those who wish to feed the network with power, such as a new home fitted with PV systems on its top.

Business Impact and Long-term Plans

State-operated agency that manages the Dutch power network says that 8,000 companies are presently in queue to be able to supply power, while 12,000 others are waiting for authorization to use more power.

Certain industries of the Netherlands economy are alerting that it is hampering their expansion. "Network overload is putting the long-term viability of the Dutch chemical sector at risk… while in other countries it will be easier to put money," states the Head of a leading industry association.

Therefore, was all this avoidable? "In hindsight I believe almost every problem is preventable," says the energy executive.

He adds that following the 2015 Paris Agreement on aiming to address climate change, "the industry were very much concentrating on expanding the green energy production side. But we somewhat didn't fully anticipate the impact it would have on the power grid."

The grid operator is currently planning to invest €200bn on reinforcing the network, comprising installing some 100,000 kilometers of new cables between now and 2050.

That's a huge amount of money, but there is additionally a big cost to not spending it. Grid congestion is costing the Netherlands economic system up to €35bn a annually, as per a recently published analysis from a management consultancy firm.

A senior representative responsible for grid congestion explains that patience is unfortunately necessary. "In order to strengthen and upgrade the network, we need increase twofold, triple, occasionally increase tenfold the capacity of the existing grid.

"And it's taking on typical about a decade to