Finland will be self-sufficient in electricity in a year or two, says minister | Hacker News Reader

Finland will be self-sufficient in electricity in a year or two, says minister

yle.fi

97 pointsemptybits116 comments

The two words missing from the HN post title (“says minister”) give the crucial context. As everywhere in Europe, there’s a heated ongoing debate in Finland about the rising price of electricity, what should be done about it, and who is to blame. This is a political statement aimed at defending the government’s past and current policies, not more or less than that.

(At the moment of writing this the yle.fi title is “Finland will be self-sufficient in electricity within a year or two, says minister” whereas HN title is “Finland will be self-sufficient in electricity within a year or two”.)

Ok, we've restored the minister. Thanks!

Ministers say a lot of things.

Blame me if it sounded like clickbait. I submitted with the verbatim headline ("..., says minister") but HN rejected it as too long. It was late, I was lazy, so I just removed the ", says minister" and carried on. I should have edited it down more intelligently. Apologies.

No worries!

"self sufficient" doesn't mean "pricing will not depend on external influences".

If you have cables to the rest of europe, they will be buying any cheap energy off you.

Clearly, thats good for the economy as a whole (better to sell that energy and earn a decent profit for the country), but voters might still be unhappy at high prices.

this

Not neccesarily. They could choose to implement a two-tier system for pricing. One system for internal use (within Finland), and only making the rest available for export (and thus Europe) after the finnish needs have been covered.

The full market integration isn't a natural law, as some free-market enthusiasts would have you believe.

No, but it is more efficient.

This recent crisis has unleashed a weird strain of anti-capitalist crony-capitalism.

People angry that "their" energy is being sold to "other people" so we should do X, where X obviously makes them poorer, but "sell X to other people at a profit and redistribute the profits to the whole nation making everyone richer" is simply considered iconcievable because it would affect the concentrated profits of crony capitalists and generally make people aware that they have democratic power to do things like that.

Same deal as with carbon taxes.

Yes, but why should we pay the price when it is our natural resources being sent abroad? Why is it not allowed (due to EU/EEC-regulation) to have a competitive advantage on energy prices when it is allowed to have an advantage on for example lower wages.

Plus, transport of electricity is not efficient. You lose a lot in the cables. It would be better to transport the factories that need it to where the electricity is generated.

And, the backlash is because of what is perceieved as poor energy politics from the central european powers. Making oneself dependent on fossil energy Russia while decommisioning nuclear is madness when trying to reduce carbon emissions.

Northern europe is also much more based on the use of electricity for heating than the rest of europe, so it hits them a lot harder when prices skyrocket. The result is much more use of wood for heating, which in turn increases air pollution.

> but why should we pay the price when it is our natural resources being sent abroad

Because price signals are important and useful tools.

But note, I'm not suggesting you "pay" the price. I'm suggesting the "others" pay the price and then you use that money to make your life better, with greater impact than you'd get by just capping prices and using all your resources wastefully locally.

The same reason you have a job and then pay people to do various tasks that you could in theory do yourself. It makes your life richer.

You fail to see my point. Cheap electricity is our only competitive advantage (well, in addition to a well educated population). We cannot compete on labor wages, which are much higher here than pretty much anywhere in the world.

If we give away that advantage for shortsighted profit instead of using it to build our own industry, we will only strengthen central europe's industries, while we go back to being a resource economy.

You don't need to have a competitive advantage to gain from trade. You don't even need a comparative advantage.

You think that trading electricity to the rest of Europe will let them take your manufacturing industry. So your plan is to pointlessly increase Europe's electricity prices by breaking the market mechanisms that allow trade?

That is not a good plan. It's not a good plan if you want to support local industry and it's not a good plan if you don't. It's just not a good plan.

At best, you could claim that there's nothing else you can do that would work, and so this bad plan is better than all the other worse options but frankly it's not a very convincing case.

I know trade _can_ be beneficial even without an advantage. But not if it means giving away our only advantage. I'm sorry, but if you don't tell me why it is a bad plan, I'm supporting it. Trade is not always better than building industry. Especially not if it means that we go back to being a resource economy. Trade is always more lucrative with refined goods than raw materials.

Why would any industry start here if it means higher labor costs if all else is equal? How do we compete then? We've already seen much industry being moved to for example Latvia, or Russia, or China, or Vietnam. And that was with the cheap electricity.

We're not the one "pointlessly" increasing Europe's electricity prices. They did that to themselves by combining the gas and electricity markets in the first place. And relying on Russia for their energy needs, instead of building more energy for themselves.

It's really not that bleak, Finland certainly has other advantages than cheap electricity. But yes, a big change is coming and we'll see whether leaders have the chutzpah to capitalize on that opportunity; if not, yes going back to a provider of cheap raw materials for others to add value to is a real risk.

A recent writeup on this topic, in Finnish unfortunately, at https://jmkorhonen.fi/2022/08/25/uskallammeko-voittaa-teolli...

I guess that's part of the give and take of living in a large union. There are advantages and disadvantages. As someone from the US, that dynamic is familiar.

But you're not giving the electricity away for free or even a low price. As far as I know there's no EU regulations that prevents Finland from redistributing these profits to the population in such a way that it makes the effective price of electricity close to what it would be if it wasn't exported. Or to use some of the money to build more cheap production capacity and increase your advantage in the long term.

But you cannot give it to companies, as that would be illegal subsidies. Thus, our economy will tank even if the households are compensated.

It isn't a natural law, but it is an EU law.

A two-tiered system would also need EU on board, since currently such a system is considered anti-competitive for some reason (unclear to me why).

Because the EU thinks it's ok to have an advantage with lower wages, but not on cheap electricity. If they didn't, they would have made regulation that either normalised wages throughout the EU (VERY unpopular with the inhabitants of northern Europe) or allowed nations to demand that all wages must be paid locally in accordance to local laws or tariffs. This is not allowed today, as it would make work migration a lot less beneficial for capitalists importing workers from eastern Europe.

This goes against everything the EU stands for so that's not happening.

Just curious, but why does the EU necessarily have such a fundamentalist view on free markets?

I simply don't know enough about all the reasons and philosophies behind the policy decisions to give you an adequate answer.

Finland has the benefit of a small population (5.5M) and thus a relatively small amount of electricity demand, a large territory with plenty of places where wind turbines aren't going to bother anyone, and humongous geopolitical incentives to avoid any energy dependency on its eastern neighbor.

Wind power is nice, but the key is nuclear power, which covers 35% of Finland's needs already and that number is going to go up once they fully ramp up Olkiluoto 3.

Unfortunately it also took around 17 years to build the thing, so this playbook is not going to be particularly useful to anybody else who needs to wean themselves off Russian energy now.

> ...so this playbook is not going to be particularly useful to anybody else who needs to wean themselves off Russian energy now.

At some point, stubborn commitment to terrible policy can't be recovered from.

But it is nevertheless always a good time to admit wrong and start working to correct mistakes. It would be very wise to admit that the Western powers haven't been seriously focusing on energy security for decades now and that really needs to change. If we want to be in a good spot 17 years from now we need to start ASAP.

And people could probably also get some nuclear plants built in less than 17 years if they demanded that they be an order of magnitude safer than coal plants/gas rather than the absurdist standards that are presently applied.

>> stubborn commitment to terrible policy

Would it be fair to summarise that policy as “bilateral trade will stop countries killing each other”?

>> Western powers haven't been seriously focusing on energy security

By security you mean self sufficiency? The opposite of stopping further world wars by opening global trade?

The idea a world historically proven to relish excuses for killing each other, would have been better served by following the ideals of self sufficiency rather than trade, it just doesn’t really hold up to any inspection. Are there any exceptions to the rule globally that conflict deaths decrease as trade intensity increases?

Almost all dead civilisations share a common marker before their death: greater self sufficiency (and consequently a loss of skills - which was counter intuitive to me but easily researched since it doesn’t appear to be a disputed finding as far as i can see).

The policy was called "Wandel durch Handel" ie Change trough Trade.

> Would it be fair to summarise that policy as “bilateral trade will stop countries killing each other”?

Trade between like-minded nations is awesome; the EU itself largely has its origins in a wish to avoid yet another disastrous world war between Germany and neighbors. And by all accounts it has succeeded in that.

However, becoming critically dependent on a hostile neighbor with imperial ambitions is dumb beyond belief. As we can see in Europe today.

> Almost all dead civilisations share a common marker before their death: greater self sufficiency

If you read e.g. Tainters Collapse (which AFAIK is nowadays the largely accepted explanation of why ancient civilizations collapsed), it's a bit more subtle than that.

(Obviously post-collapse the survivors will go back to a much more self-sufficient way of life.)

>> becoming critically dependent on a hostile neighbor with imperial ambitions is dumb beyond belief

I’m struggling to reconcile that take on events with a desire for thawing hostilities and mutual prosperity. How could you seek to develop and grow mutual prosperity while deliberately holding back local industry so as not to become interdependent?

There’s 2 ways to avoid cognitive dissonance here that i can see:

    1. “Nice doggy but i won’t put down my stick” - you think they’re morons. You say publicaly that Bi-lateral trade will bring us all closer together but privately you tell your industries to reject growth beyond the point where it incurs dependence on Russia and you expect Russia to accept this asymmetry unquestioningly [EDIT: clarity]
    2. Mutual prosperity was never an option, better we had arrived at conflict sooner and never entertained welcoming Russia in to the global economy

If it’s option 2 then we’re back to how do you stop people killing each other then if not through trade?

>> it's a bit more subtle than that

Subtle seems like the wrong choice of word. Complex perhaps? It’s certainly more complex but nothing i said contradicts Tainter’s view.

> I’m struggling to reconcile that take on events with a desire for thawing hostilities and mutual prosperity.

My point is that I think the argument that trade by itself brings about mutual understanding and prosperity is fatally flawed. The West collectively made that mistake with Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We looked through the fingers at all the warning bells that were ringing, well, pretty much since Putin became the leader. Hopefully our leaders have learned the lesson. There must be much more focus on democracy, human rights, and respect for the sovereignty of other countries. Once those basic pieces are in order, we can talk trade. Until that happens I'm perfectly happy with Russia isolated like North Korea.

Peace in Europe can happen when Russia GTFO of Ukraine, not by appeasement and restarting trade as if nothing happened. Currently dropping sanctions would only help Putin rebuild his war machine, leading to more death and suffering of innocents rather than bring about some kind of trade-induced Kumbaya.

> It’s certainly more complex but nothing i said contradicts Tainter’s view.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you but from what you wrote the implication was that civilizations chose to focus on self sufficiency leading to collapse, which really mixes cause and effect and not what Tainter is arguing.

You mean, Finland has both ability and motive.

I would argue that most larger Western nations have the ability to be self-sufficient in electricity. And those that don't can often partner with other neighbors or allies for smaller, more secure access to energy.

I would also argue that all nations current have motive as well as ability. The reliance on potential adversaries for energy makes entire nations or blocs fully dependent on these adversaries, which has been clear since at least the 1973 OPEC sanctions.

Political will and long term planning are very important. Unfortunately short-sightness is what's killing these projects. Anything that cannot be completed in a government's term in power is very hard to be approved.

> I would argue that most larger Western nations have the ability to be self-sufficient in electricity.

If I recall correctly granite by virtue of its uranium content has more energy than coal does by combustion. And everywhere has granite if they dig deep enough. If you’re willing to import uranium you have even fewer non-political problems if you have the requisite engineering skills. Among European countries that probably excludes places like Malta and Luxembourg but if Finland can do it there’s no reason to believe e.g. Ireland couldn’t.

Granite extraction and especially treatment, given ore grade, would imply gigantic greenhouse gases emissions, isn't it?

This will be more and more of a challenge even in uranium mines: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2051332

Replacing much of the equipment with electric, e.g. Tractors and Trucks, would not only reduce the greenhouse emissions during the extraction and refining process, but would also make the equipment more robust and easier to operate. Electric motors generate all their torque at 0 RPM, right where heavy equipment needs it. Contrast with e.g. passenger vehicles which spend very little time accelerating from a quasi-standstill.

There is no such adequate equipment. The most adequate electric trucks are way too small. And electric version of various other heavy grinding machines just doesn't exist, AFAIK not even as prototypes. Moreover providing massive amounts of electricity in such remote locations, and also delivering it locally (power cables everywhere in a mine shock-full of heavy equipment? What could go wrong?), is a major challenge. If it's easy for you, then providing all this will quickly get you rich.

Wind accounted for 2,2% of our total energy production in 2020. I don't imagine it's hugely higher today. Nuclear will be doing the heavy lifting in the immediate term.

That is not to say you aren't right - indeed there's plenty of uninhibited land to place turbines into

There is a lot of NIMBYism though. Also large parts of the east of the country can't really build wind power as it messes with defense (military radars at the Russian border). But still a lot of space and the best spots to build wind is at the sea anyway not inland.

>> thus a relatively small amount of electricity demand

That doesn’t smell right to me. Finland’s pretty chilly. Surely their energy usage has to be high?

According to world data bank, Finland has one of the highest kwh per head of population demands in the world. About 3-4x more than the US for example.

>> where wind turbines

The energy supply breakdown for Finland appears to be predominantly about a successful Nuclear deployment for electricity and social / district heating.

> The energy supply breakdown for Finland appears to be predominantly about a successful Nuclear deployment for electricity and social / district heating.

Sadly nuclear isn't used for district heating at all. There is a LOT of waste heat (in the GW range) that is just pumped into outside to "heat" the sea (very locally). There has been some plans about building pipelines from the nuclear plants to big cities to transport the heat to them (Loviisa to Helsinki would only require ~90km pipe) but isn't currently possible without a change in nuclear safety laws/codes.

Even the town of Loviisa is not using the waste heat of the 2 nuclear reactors there to heat the town itself.

edit: Obviously the electricity produced by the nuclear plants is used in district heating to power heat pumps but that is very inefficient (already ~60% loss just from heat -> electricity at the nuclear plant).

> edit: Obviously the electricity produced by the nuclear plants is used in district heating to power heat pumps but that is very inefficient (already ~60% loss just from heat -> electricity at the nuclear plant).

Well, heat pumps are pretty efficient, with a COP of ~3(?), the overall efficiency is better with heat pumps. Even better, however, is by combining both with cogeneration producing both electricity and heat for district heating. District heating in cities use the waste heat from the plant, and electricity can be used to run heat pumps outside the cities where the district heating grids don't reach. Of course the problem with cogeneration is that we have to get away from burning stuff, and siting nuclear plants in cities has its own challenges as well.

> a relatively small amount of electricity demand

Finland has the highest energy consumption per capita in EU. (over 2x Germany for example)

Winters are cold and we use electricity for heating a lot (gas furnaces at homes are very rare). Also bunch of energy hungry industry (paper, metal)

That may be so, but population density is ridiculously lower than Germany's.

According to Wikipedia:

DE: 232/km2

FI: 16.4/km2

EU: 106/km2

They should probably be OK as far as GP's argument is concerned (space for wind turbines not bothering anyone), especially since I expect most of the people are living in the south. Not sure whether there's enough wind in the sparsely populated areas, though.

Large parts of the east one is not allowed to build anything very tall (including wind turbines) due to national defense. The turbines mess with radar.

But still we got our own NIMBYs who like to complain a lot.

edit: And the best places to build wind is at the coast so west and south parts of the country. It just is more windy at the coast and/or open sea pretty much always.

On the other hand, most finns can switch to burning wood in an emergency. We have a lot of it. Just need some extra stoves.

Citation needed for "most". Sure, there are wood stoves in summer cottage saunas and old rural houses, but this is not even close to possible for the average apartment dweller, and many of these apartments rely on district heating (kaukolämpö) to boot.

There's nothing about an average apartment that, given a portable stove (which I said was needed) and some wood (which is literally everywhere), prevents it from being heated in an emergency. What exactly is there to cite?

> we use electricity for heating a lot (gas furnaces at homes are very rare).

That's a kind of a blessing actually. As opposed to central Europe, Finland is not that dependent on gas from Russia. Electricity can be produced without a pipeline dependence on Russia.

That being said, Finland used to import quite a lot of electricity from Russia, and that is now gone, so there is an urgent need to invest in domestic production capacity. In the short term that certainly means much more wind, longer term hopefully more nuclear reactors (in addition to the soon upcoming OL3) coming online would be useful too.

The point is that it’s the high per capita demand of only 5.5M people: ~83B kWH total.

The absolute amount of capacity that has to come online for self-sufficiency would be a sliver of the demand of a more populous nation.

The point is they are searching for, and apparently finding, a mix of technologies appropriate to their land which will given them self sufficiency.

We should all be striving to do the same.

Nuclear, appropriate to all lands and strengths of desire for self-sufficiency.

Wind turbines cant be that far from where population lives

It's possible for many countries to do this, but they choose not to for political reasons. The United States could have also done it if Nixon's Nuclear agenda went to it's logical conclusion [1]. Unfortunately, he had to resign over some issues that had to do with spying on the other political party and getting caught constantly lying about it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Independence

In total energy consumption, the US produces more energy than it uses.In May 2011, the country became a net exporter of refined petroleum products.By 2014, the United States was the world's third largest producer of crude oil, after Saudi Arabia and Russia, and second-largest exporter of refined products, after Russia.In November 2019, the United States became a net exporter of all oil products, including both refined petroleum products and crude oil.By 2021 the US was the world's largest producer.

It just so happened that the US became a net exporter a few years after conquering a large oil state. They keep saying it's domestic production but I don't believe in astrology

Wow. Nice piece of small print fact(?).

Do you believe in even basic research? The continental US has become a massive oil and gas state.

It’s because of fracking.

Also, his mother says he's a very good boy, so it must be fracking. He would never steal or lie

Norway has been self-sufficient in electricity for a while, most of it coming from hydroelectric power. Yet the prices in southern Norway are skyrocketing because it is connected to the European grid and European energy crisis is affecting the price rise.

Is this because Norway is only energy independent across annual average load, and can't handle peak usage? Or because theres some contractual arrangement where they can't sell electricity cheaper to domestic users?

As far as I know, they have not built the infrastructure to move the cheap excess power down south and some are using the EU as a scapegoat. Don't take my word for it, though.

> some are using the EU as a scapegoat

What's the argument there? I'd think that since Norway isn't fully in the EU, they'd have more leeway in internal matters?

Norway is in the European Economic Area (EEA) which means that one strong party (EU) in that treaty dictates a lot of market rules for Norway.

It's questionable how much better transfer capacity would help prices (it would help the grid, though).

I think it's more true that the situation you are mentioning insulates northern Norway from continental prices, than the opposite.

There has been a lot of talk about building more infrastructure between the North of Norway and the south. I personally don't think that it would make much difference except increase the prices in the north. The North of Norway produces about 17% of all the electricity in Norway in 2017 with about 10% of countries population. It's also colder for a lot longer up there. Ongoing joke: Missed the summer this year, had to go to the loo.

The latest news was that most of the excess capacity will be used up within the next few years because the oil and gas industry is mandated to connect their plattforms to the electrical grid instead of producing their own power from gas.

EU is not used as a scapegoat except for those who use EU as a scapegoat for everything - there's always someone.

The 'scapegoat', if you will, is the Acer contract - and that's not really a scapegoat, it's the real issue: Exports must continue until prices balances at both ends.

It's the latter. Domestic users pay the same as those that Norway export to.

So how is the country serving the people?

How can a contract mean you need to raise prices for the citizens? This can only be the case if the government is not acting in good faith, and has planned for this eventuality.

I'm still amazed how people think their government is there to help, especially in nordic countries, when it is plainly just an extraction and control device.

> This can only be the case if the government is not acting in good faith, and has planned for this eventuality.

Because during normal times it actually leads to cheaper prices. It has only really been an issue now due to the crisis.

Also this is mostly a consequence of the free market. In the late 90s and early 2000s the Nordic countries freed the electricity markets of the very tight government control. The markets then over time decided that they can make more money by combining each other by joining nord pool (originally a Norwegian company)

There is not just one way to have a free market. The market rules determine market outcomes, and different methods for how prices are formed could be used.

Sure, electricity is in some sense a pretty artificial market with the auctions and system operator etc etc. OTOH, commodities generally price at the margin, and the rules for the electricity market have been designed to mimic this price finding process that comes about more naturally in other commodity markets.

So while currently there are certainly big issues with how the market functions due to Putin, anyone suggesting any major reform will have to think long and hard what the market mechanics are supposed to be, and what could be unintentional side-effects of that mechanism. At the moment there is a lot of political pressure to do something, anything, and it's very likely such hasty proposals will be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The gas situation may be a major stress to the system at this time, but prices were gradually rising even before this current crisis.

You could argue that all domestic energy infrastructure could be nationalized and energy sold at cost to domestic users, but then where does the money come from for investment?

Government funds would have to finance it. Cheaper electricity is a benefit to domestic industry (manufacturing and computers included) - tax money derived from this and public-private partnerships for investing in increased energy supply.

There's plenty of calls to change the pricing rules but I'm amazed that there is so much political resistance. We could be changing this now.

See my other example of effects of the current market rules https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32798081

Something is wrong with how prices are formed in this market.

EU regulations forbid most subsidizing of goods withing country borders in general. There are some exceptions, like for example agriculture.

There were a lot of reports made before the cables were created indicating that prices would not change much. I believe these were created in good faith by incompetent people.

People in Norway are currently paying full price, but the government is refunding 90% of the cost above ~0.7 USD / KWh.

That contract you mention is basically that you transmit electricity from where it's cheaper until the price balances out at both ends. That's when you stop (unless capacity limits you before that happens). It's a horrible contract, there's no consideration for rational planning of e.g. seasonal availability (which is enormously different in Norway compared to the continent). Ref. a link in my other comment (nrk.no) which explained this (in Norwegian. Translate can probably handle it). The sad thing is that politicians, including the former prime minister, seems to not understand the nature of the contract they signed. They still thinks it's about exporting surplus and importing from surplus, which it's not at all about.

How is the country, or the EU serving the people, when they are contractually bound to increase the prices, even when there is no necessity?

I don't want to go into that much politics, but if you look at it from high above there's a little more energy coming into the pool (by using that pricing method to squeeze more export out of Norway), and as a result the net total for all of EUs citizens will be a tiny bit lower. Even though it creates havoc in Norway (prices going up maybe 1500% or, some days, an order of magnitude more). Obviously there's an energy crisis in Europe so I'm not sure EU can be blamed for how it affects Norway, the fault is on Norwegian politicians alone for signing a deal which was such a misfit for how the Norwegian power production works. Unbelievably naive, not even realizing that the already existing methods did everything they wanted - sell surplus when it was safe to do, buy when you could, optimize how hydro resources were used (a lot of the rivers and lakes, the majority in fact, also have fish - and the unwanted high output at the bad time creates havoc - not enough water). The Acer setup, as such, is probably fine for the majority of the continent, but I don't know enough about power production in most of EUs member states.

Same with Finland and Sweden - electricity prices would be much lower in the Nordics if they cut off from the European grid, but that’s not politically acceptable

That is not how the system works. If you have extra production in case of high energy prices, you can make a profit by selling it to the eu. If prices increase domestically, it must mean, that the domestic production is not sufficient and energy is bought from the eu, or your domestic production plants use the opportunity to increase profits. The connected network is and always will be a good idea, just like the open internet :)

Right, so here is one example of what happens in southern Sweden and why prices are pushed up. This is an example to show how the mechanics work.

Sweden is divided into four price regions for electricity, SE1..4 from north to south.

Demand for power in SE4 (most south) comes from domestic use, and from export from SE4 to Denmark, Germany, Poland (typically, flows can also reverse).

The most expensive supplier sets the current price. Let's say domestic supply is 2 GW. Domestic demand is 1.7 GW and export demand (Denmark, Germany, Poland) is 0.7 GW.

The missing supply is solved by importing from Lithuania to SE4 (1.7 + 0.7 - 2 = importing 0.4 GW); this becomes the most expensive power supplied at this instant and sets the current electricity price in SE4 for domestic users and for those that receive the export. (So we have cheap Swedish electricity for the most part, but the expensive Lithuanian production sets the price in this example.)

In this way, SE4 has enough domestic supply to cover domestic demand. Imports are smaller than exports, but the imports still push up the price for everyone.

Note that import/exports are both on the synchronous grids where applicable as well as using HVDC connections.

It’s not as simple as that. There isn’t be enough energy in Central Europe (especially Germany and Italy) to meet demand as long as gas imports from Russia are cut off. Building enough new alternative production will take years.

In practice the loss of cheap gas from Russia results in higher demand (and price) for alternative sources of energy, including electricity, in those countries that relied on Russian gas. And since they are connected to the Nordics via the grid, it also spikes electricity prices in the Nordics. For energy producers this is great, but for consumers in the Nordics it is not good at all.

The analogue to the internet fails in the sense that you don’t have constraints with domestic production with internet data like you have with energy.

"Always a good idea" for whom?

If country A has plentiful production but country B hasn't, the companies of country A are better off exporting to country B, but this will make prices go up in country A.

Definitely not a good thing for the average citizen of country A, which would be better off with a disconnected grid.

Or put another way, Norway doesn't have enough north/south interconnect capacity to supply cheap electricity from generating capacity in their north to their south.

What about when the hydroelectric power plants aren’t running — I assume there’s some seasonal variation here?

Exporting more power than you import on a yearly basis might still mean they you need to import power in certain periods during the year.

Most hydro power is always running.

Is this because of greed/profit/capitalism? Like we have enough energy for ourselves but we can make a lot of money if we profit now of this bad situation, double our yachts length.

Yes, it's truly evil to want to save your neighbor from power shortages.

I understand where you’re coming from but do understand that in about three months time Nordic politicians will be trying to explain why they’re bailing out foreigners for their poor planning at the expense of their countrymen. Not generally a vote getting line of argument.

I am saying it is because of greed, the cost to produce the power did not changed so they increased the prices, is there a risk that the locals will protests and some price caps on profits will be put in place?

Something is super weird with this price increases all over Europe, they don\t make sense, I wish someone will start following where all this profits go and take care of those bastards.

The cost of gas has increased, because it turns out that one of Europe's gas suppliers was a hostile power. Europe is having to buy gas on the open market, which means outbidding the rest of the world for LNG shipments. This is not difficult to understand if you seek out high-information sources.

The profits are going in part to induce LNG tankers to come to Europe. You can ban this, but then the LNG won't come and Europe will freeze. The rest of the profits are going to those companies that had the foresight to invest in non-gas power generation. There is some argument to seize those profits since the current price levels were surely unforeseen, but Europe has rule of law so such a seizure would need to be justified and would be challenged in the courts.

The petrol and diesl prices increased too, causing food prices to increase, also electricity prices increased and the math does not work to blame the gas especially in countries like Romania where there is almost no Russian gas import.

Fuel is fungible, and traded on a global market. Power is fungible and traded on an intra-European market. It doesn't matter whether individual countries were relying on Russian gas; Europe as a whole was.

It also has a lot to do with not enough transmission capacity to get the electricity from north to south. At this very moment the spot price in north most pricing region Tromso is a lot cheaper than in Oslo region (~1/10th). Sweden has the same problem.

If I was from Norway or Sweden I would demand the national grid to massively invest into the transmission lines to make all the electricity produced in the country actually usable anywhere in the country. Basically work to get rid of these pricing regions within the country. This is how the network here in Finland works

Also why they are now talking about adding new lines from south of Finland to Sweden (also mentioned in the article) so the electricity produced in north Sweden can be sold to south Sweden through Finland as the national grid of Sweden just can't get it done.

edit:

You can go to https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/Dayahead/Area-... to check the day ahead prices in different price regions.

There has been massive investments into transmission capacity in Sweden. The capacity has not increased that much though. One of the reasons are that nuclear power plants have been closed. Large turbines contributes to an increased transmission capacity. All the big investments have been necessary just to ensure that the capacity doesn't get lowered due to the closing of the nuclear plants.

I do not think that effective transfer of energy from the north to the south would matter much. The price in the energy market is set by the actor willing to pay the most at any given moment.

If energy from the north was enough to influence the German or British prices then maybe, otherwise it wouldn't really matter.

Transmission capacity is a classic example of a neat economics problem.

If there was a benevolent dictator making ideal decisions, they would build enough transmission capacity to minimize generation+transmission costs while still serving all users in the country.

However, if there is a private company building a transmission line, they have an incentive to under-build capacity to maximize their profits - since if they overbuild, then the price in all the regions is identical, and their profits by transporting energy are nil.

Yet, due to the nature of transmission lines, it doesn't make sense for 50 companies to build 50 independent transmission lines on the same route to compete on transmission pricing - the total cost of fifty 1 megawatt lines is far higher than one 50 megawatt line.

It's a good example of an economics problem where the free/restricted market doesn't work anywhere near as well as the benevolent dictator model.

There are lots of similar problems - for example shipping goods from a place where they are less valuable to a place they are more valuable.

"If I was from Norway or Sweden I would demand the national grid to massively invest into the transmission lines to make all the electricity produced in the country actually usable anywhere in the country. " That would be fine if it was only about prices in the country. But due to the way the EU agreement works, higher capacity transmission lines only means that more electricity will be exported and more of those countries would suffer. Norway currently exports more than the surplus. With higher internal transmission capacity Norway would export even more. Which will have to be imported from EU comes winter, at prices which have already closed a LOT of businesses in Norway.

> higher capacity transmission lines only means that more electricity will be exported and more of those countries would suffer.

Build better transmission within the country but not between countries. The transmission lines between countries is how you limit how much electricity you can trade with other countries.

Norway has been self-sufficient for a very long time, but due to the Acer agreement with EU Norway is in practice forced to export electricity until the price balances out at both ends (https://www.nrk.no/ytring/energien-var-strommer-ut-1.1605630...). There's no way that the surplus in production can cover the current needs of Europe. In summer the domestic need is very much lower than during winter (no domestic A/C necessary, bright days etc), so normally you try to save as much water as possible during summer so that you have sufficient resources for winter. But now the hydro power plants are in practice forced to empty out the reserves during summer, and buy electricity from the continent during winter, completely reversing the practice before Acer - which was basically that the surplus was sold and exported, and when e.g. Denmark has too much wind power available you turn down the hydro a bit and import from Denmark, and when there's low wind you export to Denmark (Norway's hydro is one reason Denmark can rely on wind power that much).

The only thing (the only thing) that limits electricity exports from Norway is capacity. Prices in the north of Norway are lower than in the south, simply because there's not enough capacity to transport that much to the south. That's actually a good thing, and would be a good thing for the cables from the south to the continent and elsewhere as well, because what's happening now is insanity. It makes no sense to dry out the water resources during summer and buy in the winter, from coal and whatnot.

When Norway sells electricity across the new cables to the UK we share the profits with the brits. Makes sense, since the risk and cost of building the cables was shared.

It reminds me of the App Store model where Apple takes 30% of the revenue instead of charging a charging a fixed fee of some sort.

Would be very interesting if there was a transfer fee for the new cables instead of a profit share model. Even more interesting if there was a bidding process for the transfer capacity like there is for actual electricity.

For a country, is being self-sufficient in electricity production necessarily a goal to strive for?

It would make sense if you’re on bad terms with your neighboring countries. But if not, I think it makes a lot more sense to import power from abroad when it’s cheap there and expensive at home, and vice versa.

For example, Denmark has a lot of wind turbines so electricity is cheap here when there’s a lot of wind. Our neighboring country Norway has mountains, and therefore hydroelectric power plants. In periods where there is little wind in Denmark, and Norway is producing cheap power using hydroelectricity, it makes perfect sense for Denmark not to be self-sufficient, and instead import from Norway. And the same for Norway when Danish wind turbines are producing cheap power while their hydroelectric plants are running at low output.

Finland is on bad terms with its neighboring country. Specifically, the one to the east, mentioned two times in the article.

But your plan assumes that the 2 neighbors production is complementary, what is is a bad winter, the demand raises in both countries, wind turbines need to be stopped for some reason and not country B needs to beg from country A, so A needs now to decide if they sacrifice their citizens to help the ones in country B.

You would need more then 2 countries to reduce the risks and you need some power plant that can work at a low capacity during the year but can fast go to full capacity to handle this cases, now this plants will not be profitable when running at idle/low capacity so you need some non-free-market program to keep them running.

Wind turbines don’t have to be stopped, they will stop all on their own when there is calm and cold weather. It can go on for days, even weeks.

As to stand-by generation, no need to grasp for non-free-market solutions. You just bid on stand-by generation capacity on the open market, problem solved.

>As to stand-by generation, no need to grasp for non-free-market solutions. You just bid on stand-by generation capacity on the open market, problem solved.

This could bite you in the ass if you don't negotiate a long term contract with giant penalties if you don't get the energy when demanded, but it will cost you a lot but yeah you can do it with free markets.

All of the continental Nordic countries, (Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway) are already in a single unified transmission grid and electricity market (Nordpool). The other half of the article was about building a new link between Sweden and Finland. The self-sufficiency here is therefore purely mathematical.

And yes, Finland definitely has one massive hostile neighbor who started this war and caused this energy crisis.

As a Finn I don't want to have my "do I freeze to death this winter" to be in the hands of any other foreign country be it friendly or not. Obviously it has not been in such a state for a long time but hopefully we can get there at some point.

In the Nordpool market area/nordic grid, Norway and Sweden dominate production and hence prices in the nordics & baltic area. They tend to export a lot as well to the continental grid. But this may still lower the prices a bit.

live stats: https://www.svk.se/en/national-grid/the-control-room/

(Interestingly Norway is as of this writing importing electricity from continental Europe despite being a big hydro exporter usually - they are I'd guess conserving hydro for more profitable market conditions ahead, functioning as a battery for the continental grid.)

One would hope so considering their newest reactor cost US$12.4 billion to build, the 8th most expensive building in the world according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_buildin...

The Finns were smart though, and paid a flat amount of 3 billion Euro. The cost overruns will have to be borne by the French.

Canada has two hydro projects not quite finished that are going to cost around 12 billion too for a about 1 GW. Expensive plants aren’t unique to nuclear

The actual article content all sounds quite positive, though I'm not sure the headline is appropriate or even a good target

> New transmission link between Finland and Sweden

This is good. You don't want to totally rely on untrustworthy partners, but interconnected grids are in general a good thing.

Slovakia will be net exporter by the end of the year. They just launched new reactor.

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