Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ekaros | Hacker News Reader

How hard it is to build North South transfer capacity? I mean intra-Sweden capacity. My understanding is that Finland can buy power from the north and then move it to south effectively... And we don't even produce that power...

View on HN

Would building that North-South transfer capacity even help?

It seems like the basic mental model here is that it would equalize prices between Northern Sweden and Germany, not between Northern and Southern Sweden. And Germany is quite a bit bigger than Northern Sweden. So what should then happen during these German shortfalls is to move the German prices (and Southern Swedish prices) down by an imperceptible amount, while the Northern Swedish prices go up by a ton.

As long as north-south capacity is reasonable compared to south-Germany. So it would increase prices somewhat in north, but as long as not all new capacity can be moved to Germany it wouldn't fully match prices.

The problem is that transferring energy like that requires both lines and the ability to receive the energy. Transferring has (large) energy losses, the ability to receive requires a large inertial mass, like the large and heavy turbines of the nuclear power plants.

There are/ were plans for a number of different power links, but some of them have been denied because of environmental concerns (I think! please correct me on that.)

This is the answer. It's not as simple as just laying down more cable, and it was a really hard self-own to shut down the nuclear plants in the south without anything to cover for them.

Building and reinforcing HVDC interconnects is happening all over Europe now. Certainly part of the solution. Note that the transformer shortage makes that more difficult.

Probably requires many billions of investment that somebody has to budget for and pay for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com