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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

> we up in northern Norway paid around $0.0005 / kWh last summer

Is that figure accurate? It’s so crazy low that it would lead me to expect the area to be saturated with aluminum smelting and other high electric consuming operations.

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Fun fact: We've had negative prices, a couple of times. In which case you actually get money for the electricity you use.

But those are very rare moments, and only last a couple of hours her and there. Not unique to Norway, but basically what happens is that there's huge amounts of downpour, coupled with little demand / usage - typically something you see in periods where people are away, and if the weather conditions are there.

I pay $0.20/kWh. At your rates, my electric bill would be less than the stamp it cost to mail me the bill.

I assume that everything is electric powered in homes in your area?

Without having studied the Norwegian grid, the Swedish one that it is connected to also experience negative prices som nights when there’s a lot of wind and we generate some 10 GW of wind power. Coupled with the nuclear plants in Sweden that still are online and we pretty much have an issue with too much being generated… Then again things freaked out in the opposite direction when two of the plants went a offline, the wind was basically zero and we had freezing temps all over the country.

Hydroelectric power is pretty stable as a baseline but can only scale so much. At some point higher-cost energy would have to come online to meet demand, at which point the savings would be gone.

Transport issues extend to goods too.

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