Time to restart some coal fired power stations ?
Wouldn't help one bit, as it's the distribution net that is overloaded. The energy companies simply didn't plan for this amount of power being consumed way out at an endpoint (aka, house).
What I find really interesting is that they're running into this issue with "only" 4% of the cars in Norway being electric.
I think the electric companies dont plan for anything ever. They are acting like the firefighters.
I'm fighting a different issue at work. Too many solar installations cause the voltage to increase, at some point the inverters have to switch off to avoid overvoltage. This decreases the voltage for others, who can switch on, and they start bouncing on-off until the situation changes. Some people loose 50-100 EUR a year because of this, sometimes even without knowing about it.
Of course instead of replacing the cables with just thicker cables, they want software solution. Great planning. They cannot predict simple things, like: In 5 years we will switch off this powerplant. It takes 5 years to build a new one. When do you need to start building a new power plant:
A) When the lobbyist gives me money
B) After the catastrophic failures start happening
C) Right now? No that cant be right.
There is a strategic system for a country, the power grid. If the grid goes down, GDP goes negative. So it makes total sense, to sell these systems to private operators driven by profit. For example, the USA loses 33 Billion USD every year because power outage. I wonder, if you would spend that money on the power grid, make it redundant and resilient, move it underground where needed, if that would pay back. In a year.
I went to Croatia for a vacation this year, to an island (with a bridge to mainland EU). 3 out of 10 evenings, the power went down for 30+ minutes. Are you kidding me? What is this, early 19 century?