Things that frustrate me immensely: There is no hard requirement for equipment like heatpumps and EV wallboxes to be smart in any way. No law that sold vehicles must be able to feed energy back to the grid. We are effectively building out infrastructure we know to be "obsolote" like this. The future will be EVs trading power on the grid, charging when it's plentiful and supporting the grid when it's harder to generate. Heatpumps need to be able to dynamicallly reduce their load on the grid in case of a need of power - and people need to be rewarded for being flexible like this.

Frankly the current state of this technology is a joke. Wallboxes are as smart as a bad calculator (at least *some* have the support for extending them via RS485 or similar, while basic models are basically glorified power outlets), I have seen a new heatpump without any smart external control. It needed a 400€ module to even speak RS485, it couldn't take into account weather forecasts or anything like that. And it's not a cheap system. German name brand, as expensive as a small-ish car.

I am absolutely astonished how badly this is regulated. It's as easy as making it a law - you want to sell a wallbox? It has to have the ability to receive updates and to take control via LAN (fuck this cloud IoT rubbish, it needs to work locally with a local energy management controller). You want to sell a vehicle? It has to be vehicle-to-grid ready according to whatever standard we enforce. You sell a heatpump? Same as the wallbox - it needs to have LAN connectivity for local energy management. Also IMHO this must include user-driven updates, without a manufacturers cloud and some form of escrow - if the company making those products goes bankrupt, the documentation of how those products work internally must be publicized so they can be maintained and updated. We also need well-enforced standards for integration to local energy management hubs.

Imagine a world where you can set a desired minimum charge for your car (for example to reached loved ones in case of an emergency, or you daily commute) - and allow it to trade the rest of the capacity. Imagine you can tell your dishwasher you don't care when it runs during the night, as long as it's done in the morning. Imagine you tell your heatpump you want your house between 19.5 and 21 degrees - and all of those appliances consume the energy when it's cheapest in the market. Combine that with a house battery that sucks up cheap energy at night during winter and your excess solar during the summer, protecting you from grid outages in case they ever happen. We could have all of this, easily. It's not even hard, we build much, much more complex systems - but this needs standards. We need to get away from manufacturer clouds and own inventions, integrations with specific manufacturers and so on to a common language for those products to receive signals - and to give control to the consumer. You should be free to use the energy when you want to, but then it will cost you more, or you are rewarded for the flexibility.