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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

A bit of context, the south area which this reactor is suggested to be built in has occasionally a 1000% electricity higher price from the northern regions. A big reason for this is that prices in the south is highly connected to markets that the south region is connected to, and those region are heavily importers of electricity creating a higher demand than there is available of cheap energy. For example, in order to address this there is a oil power plant operating basically 24/7 and does so very profitably even with high oil prices.

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Another factor affecting the price is that, while there's a lot of hydropower generated in northern Sweden, there's not enough capacity for transferring energy to the south where most consumption is. The investors building industry in the north that can use cheap renewable energy don't seem to mind though. :)

That is, surely, fixable by constructing transmission lines massively cheaper than nukes.

Transmission capacity from the northern hydro to the southern nuclear regions has decreased due to the closing of reactors in the south. Power transmission is more complex than just building a fatter pipe to pour more water through. Having stable power in the south is a prerequisite to transfer hydro power from the north.

I don't understand, surely the southern grid is stabilized by interconnections to europe? I thought closing reactors would be independent of transmission. What am I missing?

They are separate grids: not synchronous, not stabilising each other. Most of the interconnections are HVDC links. Wikipedia has an article on synchronous grids of Northern Europe.

The decommissioning of several large generating stations in southern Sweden has indeed affected the effective transmission capacity from the north.

Can you explain this in more detail.

Which would result in prices going up in the North. Ready to see why people would work against it.

Could theoretically send wind power north when available, and send hydro south when it's not. Glad we are doing nukes though.

As more nuclear power plants are built, we will be building up expertise to make them safer. This AP1000 design already is much more inherently safe than Gen 1 or 2 reactors

But they get better price for their electricity, more profit for the plant, more taxes and thus the people benefit.

Yes, local electricity bill would go up but if the price is often extremely low, selling some for higher price is a net win. Ie this is why we have trade as concept in the first place.

Yes, the overall economy does better, but the local people might get higher electric bills but little other benefits, as the profit goes to the power plants. Usually increased tax revenue is less than the increased cost for the consumer.

Ironically, this is why the interconnects to mainland Europe that let (southern) Sweden sell its electricity at high prices when there is demand elsewhere are a good thing for everyone involved.

Not a good sign when right-wing governments are complaining about market based price signals and trade.

No, not everyone involved, everyone that can’t afford the bill in Southern Sweden, it is not good for them.

Just because Germany destroyed their electrical system it should not mean that companies in Sweden should go bankrupt. Germany tampered with the EU market, they ought to pay fines.

How is it good for the small local businesses who don't have a choice but shutting down?

Maybe, but more power generation is a better investment. $1 spent on nuclear generates $10 in energy. $1 spent on transmission lines is just $1 gone.

It doesn't in any way solve the increasing electricity need in the future though, even assuming it would be fast and cheap to fix (it's not).

That said, the coalition also wants to improve the transmission lines.

Fix increasing electricity need

About as easy as fixing world peace.

Also, a lot of the new energy needs comes from "green steel", which would give massive reduction in the green house gas production required to produce steel.

But for that to make sense we need lots of clean energy.

Transmission lines increase the end customer costs (a lot). They are necessary but you want as little of them as you can get away with. Obviously not having enough can also increase costs as you have to use very expensive forms of production to compensate.

Here in Finland the transmission costs before this current price hike were usually 50%+ (for me with my current fixed price contract they are around 60%) of the total electricity bill. We got a really good network but it does come with a cost.

In the globalisation/market liberalism mindset it's traditionally considered good if places with high supply and low demand export to areas where products fetch higher prices.

True but not when the upkeep of that infrastructure costs more than the profits you get from selling your high supply product in the far away high demand market.

Obviously with the current market prices the cost of the transmission capabilities is a rounding error but if we get back to the electricity prices of a year or two ago the costs of transmission could start to dominate the price again so you have to be careful about investments like this (just like you have to be with nuclear plants for the case that the price on the markets is goes permanently under your production costs)

And transmission capability upgrades are really long term investments. Sweden started lately to try and fix this issue. If that project finishes on time it will take 14 years to finish. These are the kind of timescales where building a new nuclear power plant can be a faster fix.

Do you know if redispatch costs are included as part of your transmission costs and how much they are? Because if they are, then investing into the transmission lines can decrease transmission costs since the providers need to pay less for redispatch.

Tell that to Germans https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suedlink (started planning in 2011, the construction should have taken place 2016-2022, now they are hoping it will be done by 2028, lots on NIMBY court challenges along the route of the cabling).

Tell that to the French. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan... reactor three (construction started in 2007, now they are hoping it will begin operation in mid-2023).

Ideally you’d do both.

Also most of the wind power is in northern Sweden.

So how are they able to transfer electricity to Finland, Poland, Germany etc but not from north to south sweden?

Completely unnecessary rules were put in place to create submarkets for north and south sweden, and it's these rules that disallow the transfer of the electricity. It's more profitable to limit production to keep prices high in sweden, then export and sell in other countries.

Hydro in sweden was overflowing and forced to produce more electricity in sweden during the fall, prices would be zero and even negative if supply and demand was actually in effect, but this would mean zero profits as well, so it's not allowed.

> So how are they able to transfer electricity to Finland, Poland, Germany etc but not from north to south sweden?

That's a strawman. There is energy transfer to all these places, but the capacity is limited in each case.

From what I understand it's also (mainly?) because the southern areas pricing is very connected to Danish and German markets.

Maybe someone should sabotage some energy infrastructure on the Baltic seabed to ensure better prices in Sweden…

Sweden isn't exporting electricity for free. The money is there - it just needs to be redistributed from companies to the people.

Or the very least, be used to build new energy infrastructure and generation.

Especially since the Swedish power company - Vattenfall, is 100% owned by the Swedish state.

I'd say other countries should take note. But privatization of infrastructure assets is a lie that has been sold to millions across the world

Vattenfall is not the only Swedish producer. Not even the biggest one!

You mean Svenska Kraftnät (SVK) instead of Vattenfall, they're the ones making money from electricity distribution. Vattenfall is an electricity producer, it's not responsible for this kind of distribution across borders. It is responsible for some distribution within Sweden (regionnät), but there it is not the only player. SVK on the other hand is 100% owned by the state.

That sounds strange, when there's a shortage of power, don't the higher electricity prices go mostly to the energy producers, in order to create incentive to increase production and start up more expensive generation forms?

That's true but the poster you replied to was talking about distribution so I assumed that was what you were talking about as well.

And Denmark and Germany in turn are very connected to countries reliant on French nuclear power. Only half of French nuclear power plants are currently running.

Wouldn't this be affected by the EU principle of paying energy at the highest cost of production? [0]

Unless the power plant would be able to flood the rest of the EU grid with cheap power to the point that the more expensive plants would be turned off, how would this prevent the price going up?

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[0] https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/08/09/watch-heres-ho...

In the south of Sweden there is a general shortage of energy to the point where reserve energy operators have to jump in to supply energy. Those are basically the most expensive energy production you can have. In addition there is a speculative market so available energy production can be bought at one price point and then sold at a higher, making the speculative provider a even higher "cost of production".

If however there is a energy surplus in a region then two things happens. Reserve operators don't need to be used, and the speculative market risk holding energy that they can't sell, thus forcing lower prices.

New export cables will be ready the day these would come online, if the ever come online. Decoupling the SE4 and SE3 regions from the European energy market will never be a sustainable solution due to the possible arbitrage.

> For example, in order to address this there is a oil power plant operating basically 24/7 and does so very profitably even with high oil prices.

This is not why the oil plant exists, it is an emergency plant. If it is running 24/7 then it does so because the oil plant is profitable. Not out of necessity.

> If it is running 24/7 then it does so because the oil plant is profitable. Not out of necessity.

This feels like your splitting hairs because the root cause is ultimately the same: if it wasn’t necessary then it wouldn’t be profitable.

Roding rain forests is profitable, but not necessary.

Logical fallacy

I didn't say "all things that are profitable are necessary" nor that "profitability" and "necessity" were synonyms. What I said was that the root cause of what makes this particular power plant profitable is the same root cause that makes it necessary.

Not really. It is part of the Swedish capacity reserve during winters, i.e. the national grid operator pays it to be in standby to ensure the reliability of the grid.

Its current operations are because even though it is an expensive oil plant it is profitable to run it for export on the European market.

A Swedish professor in energy systems looked closer at the electricity export compared to the operation of the plant, and out of hundreds of hours operated during this year something like 1-5 hours were not matched by equal or more electricity being exported than it produced.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgGy0Vhgt7E

In Swedish, sadly without subtitles, but an amazing overview of the Swedish electrical system.

While interesting its scope is in the typical Swedish narrow mindedness. Solidarity, the Swedish mantra, a very watered out word here. We are part of EU (Union) comes with some conditions or was it started just for sake of profit?

A bit of a weird tangent, I don't see how this is related to the topic? A private company operates this plant, it will run the plant if it's profitable. It has absolutely nothing to do with "solidarity".

Agree, off topic. Solidarity was in reference to other members of the union. Which I thought had some weight as to why the plant ran in first place. I’m not knowledgeable in this but since it affects me greatly tried to understand the problem in more detail last few months.

Thank you for the HVDC cable to Poland, 600 MW on the Baltic floor. We appreciate it in "mainland" Europe.

This is only half the story. What is actually happening is that Sweden is importing expensive electricity from the baltics and exporting it to Germany. So even though the electricity is only in "transit" through Sweden, the prices go up in southern Sweden. Obviously everything is working as designed, but it does feel a bit unfair.

To lower the prices in southern Sweden either southern Sweden or northern Germany must increase "plannable" electricity production to avoid expensive imports from the baltics.

Germany also is just a transit country, producing more electricity than consuming. The problem is that half of Frances nuclear power plants aren’t running of which also surrounding countries like Italy are usually reliant on.

That is not specially accurate. Sweden only import from the Baltic countries plus Polen 20 + 42 GWh but Sweden export to those countries 3229 + 2747 GWh. So the import per year is only 1% of the export. The total export from Swedens to all of its neighboring countries is 23712GWh and the import is only 2957GWh. So Sweden export much much more than it imports. So saying Sweden is just a transit land is not accurate.

Why the electricity is expensive is because the electrical grid is connected to northen europe and the expensive prices there makes the prices also goes up in Sweden because it is the same market.

https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/statistik-efter-amne/ener...

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