I don't know about Belgium, but in the UK your devices can spot Grid loading without any IoT nonsense or even smart meter: they can watch the Grid frequency. If it starts to dip until 50Hz, the Grid is likely experiencing load, such as at peaks, if its over 50Hz there's more generation capacity than demand (middle of the night). These are only fractions of a Hz, but it turns out electronics is good at detecting them.

I once owned two real 132 column tractor feed Centronics printers back when I was a teenager in mod-late 1980s. They were broken second hand units from some large computer installation that a friend of my Mum sourced for me, and I cobbled together one working printer from the two. I couldn't use it very much though, despite getting it working with my Acorn Electron... mostly because it was incredibly loud. If you thought an Epson FX80 chuntering was noisy that was practically silent compare to these beasts.

Umm, didn't Air Fuel Synthesis do this in the UK some years ago, before they went bust because (at the time at least) there wasn't sufficient market for the synthetic fuels they produced?

My corollary to this: "There is no technical task sufficient short enough that a random human will not fuck it up". We've all met folk like that after all...

That's not strictly true. You can "island" but you need an DNO approved device that will cut your house system off from the grid when the grid supply is down. That's an extra cost item, so isn't usually included in home solar installations where the grid is reliable, which is most of the UK. Can be done though - see Robert Llewellyn's video where he showed off the Tesla unit he has that does this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Sounds like the US staff could do with a free-at-the-point-of-use National Health Service.