The Lever in the Carport

I. Good News

In our recent essays the many have lost one lever after another. The deserted hall no longer needs their labour, the deserted battlefield no longer needs their bodies, and in “The Other Game” even attention moves to the machines. This time it is different. Since 1 October 2026 a set of rules with the unwieldy name MiSpeL, “market integration of electricity storage and charging points”, has applied in Germany. It could put into the hands of millions of households something the whole system needs.

II. The Power Station in the Driveway

A car stands still for around 23 hours a day on average. An electric car carries a battery larger than any other storage a household owns. Until now electricity flowed in only one direction: from the grid into the battery. But newer cars from VW, Renault, Ford, Mercedes or BMW can also give it back. This is called bidirectional charging.

One can picture it like the water towers of villages in earlier times. When the spring flows abundantly, they fill up; when it runs dry, they give back. A grid that lives more and more on wind and sun needs exactly such towers. At midday the sun shines in abundance; in the evening, when the wind drops, power is short. The electric cars on German roads already hold more than 100 gigawatt hours between them. On paper they could supply all of Germany for about two hours, although only one car in 25 is fully electric. And their number is growing fast. In the first eight months of 2026, for the first time, more battery-electric cars than petrol cars were newly registered in the European Union.

The great advantage: these storage units already exist. No one has to build them in addition. They stand in garages, carports and driveways, spread across the whole country.

III. A Lever That Cannot Be Taken Away

Therein lies what is really new. A lever arises where the system needs something that does not belong to it. That was the case with labour in the factories and with soldiers in wars. A grid built on wind and sun needs storage, and here the storage does not belong to a handful of corporations but to millions of people. While artificial intelligence concentrates power in a few firms, the energy transition distributes it, at least potentially, among many.

The word for it is a little awkward but apt: “prosumer”, combining producer and consumer. Whoever has a solar roof and an electric car is both. He buys electricity when it is cheap, gives it back when it is scarce, and earns money doing so. The president of the Federal Network Agency, Klaus Müller, says that millions of households could thereby become “active shapers of the energy transition”.

IV. An Authority That Listens

It almost turned out differently, and the story of how it went well after all is itself good news. The Federal Network Agency’s first draft was so strict that hardly anyone would have used bidirectional charging. It required, for example, two electricity meters to separate cleanly whether the power in the battery came from one’s own roof or from the grid. The installation of the meters alone would in many cases have made the business unprofitable. The agency wanted to prevent abuse, such as someone selling free electricity from the workplace at a high price at home. That was understandable, but disproportionate.

A week before the start, several companies sent a letter of protest. Herbert Diess, formerly head of Volkswagen, told the Handelsblatt that the technology of the future was being “regulated to death”. And then something happened that one rarely expects of authorities: it listened and rewrote its rules. For households with a solar installation one meter now suffices. Whoever stores solar power temporarily no longer loses his subsidy just because grid power was also in the same battery. Instead of sorting every kilowatt hour by its origin, a “rule of thumb” applies. Electrons, after all, have no colour.

DER SPIEGEL writes that the authority must now act “more cleverly than correctly”. After so many texts about apparatuses that serve only themselves, this is a counter-example. And it shows something we missed in “One Could, One Should”: here no one said that “one” ought to do something. Here people wrote letters, and it worked.

V. The Cooperatives

Germany already has a form in which citizens own their energy together. Almost a thousand energy cooperatives with some 220,000 members are organised in the cooperative association DGRV. They have invested 3.6 billion euros in wind and solar installations and generated around eight terawatt hours of electricity in 2025. One in five already operates battery storage, more than one in five offers services for electric mobility. And in each the principle applies: one member, one vote, regardless of how much someone has paid in.

In “Who Owns the Deserted Hall?” we described forms in which the yield is not distributed according to who bought shares. The energy cooperative is the German, quite everyday variant of this. If the owners of car batteries in a community join together, millions of individual storage units become a power station that belongs to the citizens themselves.

VI. What Is Still Missing

For the good news to become a good development, some hurdles remain. MiSpeL applies provisionally for only one year, until 30 September 2027. The simplified rule still needs EU approval, because it counts as state aid. And all 866 distribution network operators in Germany must play along. Bastian Gierull, head of Octopus Energy in Germany, considers that the real hurdle. Since 2025 his company has offered in Britain, together with the carmaker BYD, a package in which the customer charges for free and in return the company may use his battery.

This example also shows the most important open question. The storage in the carport is a lever only if its owner has a say in when it gives back power and at what price. If in the end a corporation controls millions of batteries through an app, the lever has merely shifted, from the power-plant operators to the platforms. Whether that happens is being decided now, in the contracts, tariffs and cooperative statutes of the coming years.

VII. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The first objection: constant charging and discharging wears out the batteries, and in the end the car owner pays the bill. That is a legitimate concern. Whether the wear is significant depends on how often and how deeply the battery is discharged, and the manufacturers will have to show it in their warranties.

The second objection: electric cars and solar roofs belong mainly to those who are already well off. That is true so far. But prices are falling, and a cooperative can also include those who have no roof of their own.

The essay would be refuted if in a few years the batteries in the garages supported the grid but their owners no longer had any say in it.

VIII. One Does It

Erich Kästner formulated the shortest objection to the shrug: there is nothing good, unless one does it. The technology is there, the cars stand in the driveways, the rules have been sensible for a few days, and an authority has proved that it can listen. This time the lever does not lie with others. It stands at the front door.

The decision lies with the many. They can organise and together create a cooperative platform, or they can take the easy way and hand the lever over to a corporate platform.

When millions of garages become small power stations: will their owners keep the lever in their hands, or hand it over to the next platform with a tap of a finger?