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Comment by mfer | Hacker News Reader

How is Norway handling the increased use of the electric grid? I ask because Elon noted the US power grid needed to double output to handle a full is transition

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While we have a lot of hydro power, the grid itself is not ideal. There are several regions which are quite constrained in terms of how much power they can import from other regions.

For example, recently there's been quite high electricity prices here (as in most of Europe) due to lack of rain. However this only affected the southern half of Norway[1], as the northern part had a fair bit of rain but limited distribution lines to the south.

There's been quite a bit of talk in the news about how much we need to spend to upgrade our grid for the future. It's not gonna be cheap...

[1] https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/Market-data1/Dayahead/Area-Pri... (compare Oslo with Tromsø for late September)

Last I heard, they actually have so much excess power that they're selling it to the UK.

Do you know how they are generating electricity?

Lots of cheap hydro.

Lots of water in them fjords:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1025497/distribution-of-...

93 percent hydro, 4 percent wind, 2.5 percent thermal.

Mostly hydroelectric. 98% renewable energy sources.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Norway

They aren't necessarily generating it -- sometimes they're just storing it. When we produce too much electricity from wind turbines here in Denmark, Norway buys this at a negative price (to offload the Danish grid), stores it (using pumped hydroelectric energy storage), and sells it back into the market when prices are positive again.

Electrically that is probably pretty inefficient. No doubt that it still makes sense economically.

I’m not aware of any pumped hydropower, but we can buy cheap and use less of the stored water when prices are low. The dams have capacity to store water on a seasonal timescale. However with shifting weather patterns and more renewables these margins may become strained. This winter we may have to import not only to handle peak loads, but also because some dams may run dry.

Yes, and the electricity trade may contribute to higher prices for local consumers.

Norway exports excess power most of the year. 71% over the last three years according to this page:

https://www.statnett.no/for-aktorer-i-kraftbransjen/tall-og-...

Production could outstrip local distribution precisely because the excess is exported. It doesn't tell whether distribution can handle increased load.

First, it’s great they have so much green power generation. I didn’t realize that.

In addition to generation there is local distribution. Power lines, transformers, etc. Is there any information on that part of it? I wonder if they needed to upgrade their grid.

Yep, we've just added a new 1.4GW interconnect between Norway and the UK. I believe it's the longest undersee interconnect in the world. Hopefully more will follow, I think more interconnects over greater distances are really important to help smooth out both demand and supply issues with renewables.

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