The Netherlands is Running Out of Grid. The UK is Next — Unless We Plan Properly

What's happening in the Netherlands

The Netherlands has long been held up as a European leader in EV adoption — it has more public charging stations per capita than any other country on the continent. It has been rolling out heat pumps. It has been installing solar panels at pace. On paper, it looks like the energy transition working.

Underneath, the grid is buckling.

The two largest distribution network operators — Liander and Enexis — are now warning customers that getting a new or heavier electricity connection can take years. Around 7,300 households are currently stuck in a queue waiting to upgrade from a standard connection to something that can support their heat pump, EV charger, or solar system. In some cases, the wait is approaching three years. For businesses, grid operators including TenneT have warned of wait times up to a decade.

The cause is straightforward: demand has outpaced the grid's capacity to deliver it. Heat pumps, EV chargers, battery systems, and solar export have all collided at the distribution level simultaneously — and the physical infrastructure, most of which was built for a world of gas boilers and modest household electricity use, simply wasn't ready.

Making matters worse is the fundamental physics of grid investment. Each expansion project takes roughly a decade — eight years of permits, two years of actual construction. You cannot sprint your way out of this problem.

The July 2026 rules: a priority queue for power

From July 2026, the Dutch regulator — the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) — is introducing new rules that formally ration grid access. Care facilities and schools go to the top of the queue. Households come next. Businesses slip to the back.

Where the UK stands

The UK is not in the same position as the Netherlands — yet. But the gap is smaller than government communications tend to suggest, and the trajectory is concerning.

Ofgem has acknowledged the problem and in late 2025 set out a major reform package targeting up to £90 billion in transmission network investment. That ambition is welcome. But ambition and delivery are different things.

Meanwhile, the demand-side push continues at pace. The Warm Homes Plan — a £15 billion initiative — is targeting 5 million home upgrades by 2030, with heat pumps at the centre. The government wants 600,000 heat pump installations annually by 2028. Every new home built in the UK since 2022 has been required to have an EV charger. These are the right policies. But none of them come with a built-in answer to the question: will the grid actually be able to handle what we're asking of it?

Rural areas like much of Oxfordshire are particularly exposed: the local distribution infrastructure is older, substations are more dispersed, and the costs of reinforcement fall disproportionately on those at the end of long rural spurs.

The three-phase problem: learning from Germany

Here is the structural issue the UK has been slow to confront.

The standard electricity supply to a UK home has been single-phase since before the Second World War. A single-phase 100A connection gives you roughly 23kVA of usable capacity. That's fine for a traditional household. It is not fine for a home with a heat pump drawing 8–12kW, a 7.4kW EV charger, a solar system exporting intermittently, and induction cooking. Running all of these simultaneously on a single phase is, at best, a juggling act managed by load-limiting software. At worst, it trips the main fuse.

The Renewable Energy Association (REA), backed by Western Power Distribution (now National Grid Electricity Distribution), has already made the case for mandatory three-phase connections in all new UK homes. Their argument is compelling: the incremental cost at point of build is modest, especially if mandated across all new homes rather than added case-by-case. If the government compelled network operators to fit new homes in this way, the cost would fall further as it became the norm rather than the exception.

Yet here we are in 2026, still connecting new homes on single-phase as the default. The regulations governing DNOs actively constrain them from upgrading to three-phase unless it is the lowest-cost option. The incentive structure is pointing in the wrong direction.

Five things the UK should do now

1. 1

   Mandate three-phase supply in all new homes

   Every home built in England, Scotland, and Wales from this point forward should receive a three-phase connection as standard. Building regulations are the right mechanism. This is not radical — it is catching up with where most of Europe already is. The marginal cost per home at build stage is small. The cost of retrofitting is large. The choice is obvious.

2. 2

   Require whole-estate electrical demand plans at planning stage

   Housing developers currently design homes and then ask DNOs to connect them. The process should be reversed for larger sites. Any development above — say — 50 homes should be required to submit an electrification demand model at planning stage, accounting for heat pumps, EV chargers, solar, and batteries. DNOs should sign off on grid capacity as a condition of planning consent, not an afterthought once the houses are sold.

3. 3

   Reform DNO incentives to reward forward investment

   Currently, DNOs are regulated in ways that favour minimum-cost solutions at point of connection — single-phase where three-phase would be prudent, minimum-gauge cables where a marginally heavier investment would future-proof the street for twenty years. Ofgem's forthcoming regulatory settlement for distribution operators should explicitly reward anticipatory investment.

4. 4

   Make smart demand flexibility a regulatory baseline, not an add-on

   The UK already requires all new domestic EV chargers to be smart-enabled — that's a start. But heat pumps, battery systems, and EV chargers should all be required to respond to grid signals as a baseline condition of market participation. Time-of-use tariff adoption needs active consumer support, not just passive availability. The grid cannot be managed if the loads on it are dumb.

5. 5

   Build a national electrification infrastructure programme with a real pipeline

   The Netherlands is learning that you cannot respond to a grid crisis on a decade's notice. The UK needs a published, funded, multi-year programme for distribution network reinforcement — not announcements about ambitions, but actual committed capital, committed timelines, and committed accountability. The £90 billion Ofgem transmission settlement is welcome at the high-voltage level. The equivalent for low-voltage distribution — the cables and substations that serve actual homes — is less visible and far less well-resourced.