Let's establish what is true. As of July 1st, a grid connection freeze is in effect in the Utrecht region: new and heavier connections are being placed on a waiting list. Last year, households waited an average of about 45 weeks for a new connection. This is real, and it won't be solved anytime soon; in Utrecht, the congestion is expected to continue until 2033. The root cause is that we are doing two things at once: we are greening our generation—wind and solar, which are intermittent—and we are electrifying our demand. Two waves on the same grid. But the conclusion drawn from this is incorrect.

Because the heat pump is being blamed for the problem it can actually solve. A heat pump accounts for 60 to 80 percent of a household's electricity consumption. That sounds like the problem, until you realize it is also potentially the largest, most easily schedulable appliance in the home. The heat pump sits at the heart of a home's energy system. It is large enough to make a difference and smart enough to eventually choose for itself when to draw power.

We are already seeing this in practice. Many of our pumps run perfectly fine on the 1-phase connection that most homes already have. No grid expansion needed, no waiting list. We are currently working with a group of users on the beta version of Weheat Intelligence, software that allows the heat pump to do exactly this: choose for itself when there is capacity on the grid to draw power and store heat, so the house is already "charged" before the evening peak begins. The resident doesn't notice a thing. We will be launching this for everyone soon. Three hundred Weheat heat pumps together already provide about a megawatt of controllable capacity. That is the equivalent of roughly two hundred home batteries. Except no one had to buy a battery for it.

The regulator already understands this. Systems that mitigate congestion are the first to be connected. Last year, a record of about one billion euros went to batteries, because flexibility is the lever that works in the short term. The smart heat pump is exactly the congestion mitigator that policy is calling for. And yet, the public debate treats it as the cause.

Nokia once made the best phones in the world, until the world wanted a computer in its pocket. Nokia didn't see the problem because they were thinking in terms of hardware. I think our sector is at the same tipping point, but with one important difference: we do see it. The heat pump is good. The software makes it better. And a heat pump that knows when to draw power is no longer part of the problem. It is the solution.