The European Electricity Grid System and Winter Peak Load Stress: For how long can the european grid system survive the ever increasing demand during cold winter days?

The rich countries of Western Europe and its citizens benefited during at least the last 30 years from an extraordinary stable electricity grid. This stability was achieved by the european grid system and a large flexible and reliable spare power plant capacity. This system allowed a continuous demand growth during the past 10-20 years of up to a few % per year. However, partially due to this overcapacity, no new large power plants have been completed during the past 10-15 years. The obvious consequence is that the reliable spare capacity has been reduced and that a further yearly demand growth of 1-2% for electric energy can only be achieved if new power plants will be constructed soon. The soon existing gap between the supply and the demand wishes of electric energy is widely acknowledged, but most policy and decision makers behave as if electricity shortages are always a few years