> people can switch to their cheap electric heaters to at least keep their living rooms warm

The grid isn't build for such a load.

Then how are they planning to supply the electricity for electric cars in future, if they cannot even supply sufficient electricity for some small heaters? An electric heater usually consumes 2000 Watt, that is not really something that should bring the electric grid to its knees.

By producing more energy, having less cars, better insulated houses, ... It's been calculated and described a thousand times by now by various institutes how this can be done. But obviously this can't be done in a few months, after the previous governments ignored experts for years.

> An electric heater usually consumes 2000 Watt, that is not really something that should bring the electric grid to its knees.

That's an additional 40GW when all gas-heated apartments use one of those heaters. You'd need ~30 additional nuclear reactors to sustain such a load -- the 3 remaining ones in Germany provide 1.4GW each.

Germany also uses electric stoves for cooking more than gas. An electric stove uses 2000-5000W. The grid handles everyone turning on their stove around the same times fine. Maybe heaters will have to run on top of that, but likely most won't have their space heater running while also cooking.

What are you talking about? The reason why electric stoves don't bring the grid down is because it is designed with this load in mind. Adding electric heating to the grid is an additional load, because people won't stop cooking when it's cold, nor would they stop heating if they're hungry.

That's why experts are warning people to not suddenly switch from gas to electric heating this winter.

Well, but electricity is also generated by gas (at least part of it)

But there may be not enough gas at the end of the winter. And in that case you should gather any other source of electricity available, even if it covers only 8 percent, as nuclear energy currently does.

Fortunately it's possible to use the not yet mothballed nuke plants to split H20 and inject the resulting hydrogen into the natural gas supply for use in heating systems and industrial processes. Blend specifics matter, but the necessaries are well studied and adequately well understood https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hyblend-opportunities-....

Good luck getting that up and running at scale before the end of the winter.

People in the west have forgotten how to address scaled emergency problem sets with physical world engineering rather than the crutch of financialization so yeah, I'm as optimistic as you are. But it would be orders of magnitude less costly and easier than sticking to the status quo, and also offers a model for potentially using intermittents like wind and solar to generate H2 for injection into the NG pipeline infra. I expect we'll see Japan making pioneering strides in this area over the coming decade, but it takes more than a parallelclimate crisis, global pandemic and return of industrialised warfare to Europe to shock business leaders, politicians and the public out of cognitive dissonance and complacency evidently.