the key difference is that most of the delivery infrastructure is fully owned and operated by the same companies that do the production
That used to be the case here as well, but these companies got split up into a network company and a power company when the government decided to open up the energy market for competition.
It sounds like the Netherlands does in fact have two power providers then in the form of Enexis and TenneT, at least as I understand the term “provider” as we use it here. Or do you also maintain contracts/payments with individual power production firms that you haven’t already described? What is the benefit of maintaining a contract with any of these companies if they already sold the power to Enexis/TenneT and they don’t do any other administration services?
You misunderstand. Power companies do not sell their power to TenneT or Enexis. It’s the other way around: power companies pay TenneT and the local network owner (Enexis is just one of them) for transporting the power they generate to their customers. These are the fixed network costs that get passed on to the consumer.
TenneT, Enexis and the other network companies own the power distribution infrastructure, and they basically charge for access to their network.
Saying there is only one power company because Enexis delivers the power to my house is like saying there is only one online shop because the postal service delivers all my online orders to my door.
Just like I can order something from Amazon, or bol.com, or CoolBlue, I can also buy power from any of these 52 power companies. It all gets transported by TenneT and Enexis just like all my packages are transported by PostNL. And just like when I order something online, I don’t have a contract with the delivery service: the delivery service is contracted by the seller. Just like the PostNL shipping costs show up on my bill, so do the energy transport costs. I still only have a contract with the energy company.
The energy company either generates the power themselves (analog to Amazon shipping from their own warehouse) or they can pay someone else to generate the power they sold me (analog to Amazon drop-shipping a purchase). The company I currently buy my power from (Essent) has several power plants, but they may buy additional power on the open market, or sell it if they have spare capacity. This varies hour by hour.
Since all electricity is the same, there is no need to transport the exact energy produced by my energy company to my house. Or to use the packages analogy: imagine every online shop only sold 1, identical product. Online store A sold 3 products to customer 1, 2 and 3, and online store B sold 2 products to customer 4 and 5. Since all products are exactly the same, they don’t bother putting address labels on them, company A just sends 3 unmarked packages to the postal service warehouse, and company B sends 2 unmarked packages. Since it’s all the same, the postal service just tosses all the incoming packages onto one big pile. They then deliver a random package from that pile to customers 1 through 5, it doesn’t matter which as they’re all the same anyway. Why keep track when there is no point? The only thing that matters is that if company A tells the postal service to deliver 3 packages to their customers, they should also send 3 packages to the postal services’ warehouse. No need to keep track of individual packages, but number of packages in and out must match for each online store.
We regularly experience outages affecting people into the hundreds of thousands.
Power outages are extremely rare here and usually only affect a small group of houses. With the exception of the high-current linking network, all our power lines are underground so they aren’t affected by things like falling trees and the like.
That used to be the case here as well, but these companies got split up into a network company and a power company when the government decided to open up the energy market for competition.
You misunderstand. Power companies do not sell their power to TenneT or Enexis. It’s the other way around: power companies pay TenneT and the local network owner (Enexis is just one of them) for transporting the power they generate to their customers. These are the fixed network costs that get passed on to the consumer.
TenneT, Enexis and the other network companies own the power distribution infrastructure, and they basically charge for access to their network.
Saying there is only one power company because Enexis delivers the power to my house is like saying there is only one online shop because the postal service delivers all my online orders to my door.
Just like I can order something from Amazon, or bol.com, or CoolBlue, I can also buy power from any of these 52 power companies. It all gets transported by TenneT and Enexis just like all my packages are transported by PostNL. And just like when I order something online, I don’t have a contract with the delivery service: the delivery service is contracted by the seller. Just like the PostNL shipping costs show up on my bill, so do the energy transport costs. I still only have a contract with the energy company.
The energy company either generates the power themselves (analog to Amazon shipping from their own warehouse) or they can pay someone else to generate the power they sold me (analog to Amazon drop-shipping a purchase). The company I currently buy my power from (Essent) has several power plants, but they may buy additional power on the open market, or sell it if they have spare capacity. This varies hour by hour.
Since all electricity is the same, there is no need to transport the exact energy produced by my energy company to my house. Or to use the packages analogy: imagine every online shop only sold 1, identical product. Online store A sold 3 products to customer 1, 2 and 3, and online store B sold 2 products to customer 4 and 5. Since all products are exactly the same, they don’t bother putting address labels on them, company A just sends 3 unmarked packages to the postal service warehouse, and company B sends 2 unmarked packages. Since it’s all the same, the postal service just tosses all the incoming packages onto one big pile. They then deliver a random package from that pile to customers 1 through 5, it doesn’t matter which as they’re all the same anyway. Why keep track when there is no point? The only thing that matters is that if company A tells the postal service to deliver 3 packages to their customers, they should also send 3 packages to the postal services’ warehouse. No need to keep track of individual packages, but number of packages in and out must match for each online store.
Power outages are extremely rare here and usually only affect a small group of houses. With the exception of the high-current linking network, all our power lines are underground so they aren’t affected by things like falling trees and the like.