Yep... 10kw is about right, the size of ours when we lived on Amherst Island in eastern Ontario. Had air source heat pumps backed up by electric baseboards. No natural gas so sized the propane tank to be 3x the longest power outage the locals could recall. No, the local utility (futility?) does not make outage statistics public. This legislation is typical cart before the horse kind of a problem -- the solution maybe wonderful, but only with a reliable, fault-resilient supply. And a personal nuke is a tad out of my price range. Maybe in another 100 years...

That is the problem with relying on electricity for most power needs. But in this particular case there is the cross-Med extension cord that could be easily severed. But one suspects this road is inevitable -- so maybe working on attitudes...

Seems this issue has been addressed already... perhaps thats a starting point.

There is no little bottle like that little bottle of mine. From a future where everyone is grown in a vat and tailored for their future role in life.
SciFi has cited growing a clone to have a supply of genetically identical spare parts. Curious as to where these folks are headed?

Suspect somewhere in the fine print the actual sponsor will be identified -- any chance its the WCTU? Those were the fine folk who brought about US Prohibition. These meta-studies have the same smell...

Using it as storage means they are adding heat to the layer rather than subtracting it. And if you look at the history of fracking, there have been a number of operations that were shutdown because of the seismic events that followed pressurization. That is why my comment was tagged 'side effects'...

Reminds me of the heat storage approaches used in off grid applications. Combined with fracking. An interesting idea -- wonder what the side effects of heating and distorting the rocks will be this time? More earthquakes?

This seems to be another in the continuing series of 'politicians make terrible engineers'. And I recall another where the trains didn't work with the existing platform placement. Where we used to live they put in an electric ferry -- save that at one end of its transit (where it spends most of its time) there is no way to charge it. There needs to be a public list... shaming these idiots. Maybe someday they will stop doing engineering.

Sounds like they need to be introduced to the concept of route diversity for their critical communications...

Sorry, you missed the point. Quebec did not go down when Ontario did because the grid collapse did not propagate across the DC link at the border. And Ontario would not have gone down if it had a way to decouple from the US. One grid to rule them all is not a bad idea save that it needs to be compartmentalized in such a way that a stray tree branch in Oregon does not bring down the entire continent. This was not an argument against a grid but rather an argument in favor of engineering for fault robustness.

One grid to rule them all...and in the darkness bind them.

Back in 2003 or 4 there was a tree branch in Ohio as I recall that tripped the grid in a series of cascading failures that took out multiple states and Ontario. Control systems were in various states of neglect and brokenness so appropriate actions to slow the cascade were missed. The interface between the high voltage AC in Ontario and the high voltage DC in Quebec was a DC gateway of some sort that acted as a firewall. The point is that stuff happens and tying it all together is not always a great thing. Oh, power distribution is a great thing but needs to be designed and built in such a way as to compartmentalize failures. And not to forget that every once in a while a big spitball of plasma from the Sun hits and really causes problems. I think the last one was called the Carrington Event in the 1800's.

Big interconnected networks can lead to large scale outages -- good to avoid.

Sure. My wife is vegetarian and I cook for her -- mostly asian but occasionally other stuff. Mostly I use tofu or self-made seitan meat analogs in the dishes. Yeah, beans are a good source as well -- but they have post-consumption side effects. There are a couple of vendors here in Canada that make fake meats. There used to be some great chicken-like things but the importer got bought out and no longer wanted to bother. BeyondMeat... has a number of products up here -- burgers and sausages. If we are out we might eat at A&W -- I have my usual double teen and she has a Beyond. The burgers are good but very expensive compared to other fake burgers and dead critter. How much of it is importer mark-up and how much is their base cost I have no idea. We occasionally see their burgers at a local frozen food discount outlet and buy them there. Product is good but the economics not so much. Probably why the sales are not great. Sorry... when I shop for food I am buying chevy stuff, not mercedes or rolls royce. So for us the burgers are a treat but for routine cooking, self-made seitan is more affordable. I make chicken-like, beef-like stuff in batches, divide into meal size quantities and freeze them. Works for us and means one or two lab sessions a month, mostly like baking bread. If these folks want sales they need to make it affordable, pure and simple. The flavor and texture they got.

Having lived for a few years across the road from a wind farm in eastern Lake Ontario I would like to observe that wind turbines are actually weather-driven power generators and when the wind is either too weak or strong, no power is generated. That is the downside of weather-driven power generation -- it has to be favorable to work. Where we lived, the pinwheels were turning about 1/3rd the time. The rest of the time, power came from other sources. Ontario, despite frantic moments of virtue signaling, gets most of its power from nuclear and hydroelectric. Power would be pretty green overall had they not built a number of big natural gas plants to backstop the pinwheels. And their pollution nicely offset whatever 'green' windpower provided.

The other minor detail is that the climate is changing. Don't know what is happening elsewhere but in our backyard mean wind speeds were slowly dropping year over year while average temperatures very slowly crept up. Seems to me that going all in on weather driven power to run an electricity-hungry civilization should include some thoughts about whether the resources being depended on were reliable. Personally, I would rather have a nuke sitting in my back yard... at least those things are quiet.

Was in the same place -- wanted a decent gas unit in our new house, but no meaningful provisions for venting over it. Had a Thermador cooktop at the last place with a serious hood... House we bought had an electric stove. I bought an induction hot plate and experimented with it. Then replaced the stove with a new induction unit. Sorry about a few of our pans that had to go, but their replacements are better. And '7' setting gives me the same saute heat every time... Have looked at adding better cooktop exhaust, doable but ugly and expensive. Maybe someday. No gas combustion products to vent but we do make some asian dishes that toast spices at the start -- may as well be mustard gas... Have always suspected gas fired appliances would go away someday -- considering how prevalent they are its probably like electric cars, just don't need a 400 mile long extension cord.

We loved our heatpump -- provided the bulk of our seasonal heating and cooling for 15 years. Was an air source unit -- cost us roughly $10,000 installed. Would have preferred ground source, but the rock drilling required to sink the collection wells would have added another $40,000 to the cost. The heat collection and transfer process becomes less efficient as the air gets colder -- at -10C (14F) the system shuts off. From that point we had to rely on our electric baseboards. Ground source would have been warmer and we might not have needed the baseboards, but uneconomic. As one can probably guess, replenishment rate governs both sources -- the air is always refreshed so cooling it is not a problem. Being in a rural area we had no close neighbors -- which might be a big problem in a crowded urban area. Too many ground source units in a small area could lead to ground freeze-up which would shut everyone down. Glad that Germany thinks this is a solution -- certainly our experience as long as the power stays on.