"Understandable," grid operators say about Tilburg power cut to prevent grid overload
To prevent the power grid from becoming overloaded, grid operator Enexis briefly cut the power supply to approximately 18,000 customers in Tilburg on Sunday morning. The company spoke of a unique emergency measure. Other grid operators spoke of an understandable measure.
The Tilburg area was suddenly consuming a lot of power, an Enexis spokesperson told RTL Nieuws. This forced the company to switch off a substation to prevent the grid from overloading, leaving some 18,000 customers without power.
The outage happened just after 11:30 a.m. and didn’t last long. 17 minutes later, most households had power again. And after another 15 minutes, this applied to everyone who had been disconnected.
“It is extremely annoying for everyone who was affected, but this emergency measure was necessary to prevent things from getting worse. If we hadn’t acted, power components could have broken down. That would have led to a much longer power outage,” the spokesperson told RTL.
Enexis is still investigating the cause of the sudden spike in power consumption. The Dutch power grid has been congested for some time, but bottlenecks typically occur at specific times, such as winter evenings between 4:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. “This moment, a Sunday morning in the summer, is not a time when you expect an overload,” the spokesperson said. The area in Tilburg is also not usually a place that demands a lot of electricity.
Laya Zindel of grid operator Alliander told NOS that she fully understands why Enexis chose to act quickly and cut off power to a large area. “The last thing you want is for the power grid to actually break down. You really have to prevent overloading; otherwise you end up with a very large outage.”
An overload can cause short circuits and overheating, which could result in fires. Repairing a transformer after such an event could take months.
The grid operators told NOS that such outages may occur more frequently in the future. The Dutch power grid has been congested for years due to the energy transition. More and more people are driving electric cars and need charging stations. People are also increasingly switching to induction cooking and heat pumps instead of gas. "It is good to move away from the use of fossil fuels, but the power grid is not yet designed for it," said Eefje van Gorp, spokesperson for grid operator TenneT.
As a result, companies are unable to obtain heavy-duty connections, households wanting a 3-phase connection have been facing stricter conditions since July 1, and construction has come to a standstill in several places across the country due to a lack of capacity on the power grid.
Enexis already warned in October 2025 that it could not guarantee that electricity would always be supplied during the winter. Alliander told NOS it was focusing heavily on capacity-limiting contracts in which large consumers agree to use less power when overload is looming. In May, TenneT announced an alert in Utrecht, similar to an NL-Alert, to warn households if the grid is close to overload.
