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Comment by cingraa | Hacker News Reader

Cost of electricity in Russia: $0.05

Cost of electricity in Estonia: $0.26

Painful.

It is a bit misleading, at least for Lithuania, but I believe for Estonia and Latvia too. First of all Baltic states does not import electricity from Russia/Belarus anyway, for the last 4 years, regardless we are still synchronized with them. So synchronizing would not affect energy price (to be precise it will affect, but it is fraction of euro cent so it is very minor).

Other thing is that electricity is in open market, so you can get individual fixed price per individual provider, or you can go for market price changing by hour, if there is technical capacity (smart meter installed).

The Baltic countries do not trade electricity with Russia, hence the big cost gap.

2024 average electricity price in Estonia was 0.08727 €/kWh. There was no trading with Russia during this time. This is open data. I have no idea where you get the 0.26USD figure.

Source: https://data.nordpoolgroup.com/auction/day-ahead/prices?deli...

>0.08727 €/kWh

That's more than double of what I pay in Russia.

Most of us are happy to suffer if it means not relying on Russia. This is the price of independence.

Doesn't it mean you're now dependent on the US (and our particular politics) as well as the middle eastern oil monarchies? Or is the idea to try to source all of the EU energy needs independently?

Yes, it is exactly that.

There are also two cables connecting Sweden to Lithuania and Finland to Estonia.

https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/

As can be seen in the link, both Sweden and Finland currently exports power to Baltics.

Both Sweden and recently Finland are European power-houses when it comes to electricity.

Sweden always was (despite what everyone complains about here in Sweden). With a healthy mix of hydro, nuclear and recently wind power. And Finland just recently finished a large new nuclear reactor.

Also, in many places of the world (e.g. Scandinavia), electricity does not equal Oil.

Estonia seems to have only 5% or so of electricity from gas, and zero from oil.

Latvia has more gas use, maybe 15% over the year.

Lithuania around 10% gas.

90% independent isn't too bad.

(Data eyeballed from the annual charts on app.electricitymaps.com)

I think you and other in this thread are mixing up a few topics.

The grids are being disconnected from russia but that doesn't mean that estonia was dependent on Russia for electricity before that

Looking at this https://oec.world/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/import/est/all/... it seems like even before the 2022 war Estonian imports from russia of electricity were close to zero

The concern with having the grids connected to Russia rather than the EU is that Russia might exploit this in the future (inducing instability on the grid for instance) so switching to the EU removes that risk

As for the US and ME monarchies, this applies more in general to the EU as a whole which depends quite a lot on imports for fossil fuels, but not all dependencies are made equal and at least for now Saudis and Americans haven't been invading countries in our neighborhood so I'd still take them over the Russians

The ideal scenario would be reducing as much as possible that dependency which is why there's a bunch of interest in renewables, energy efficiency and nuclear across the continent

I quite enjoyed the “in our neighborhood” bit ;)

Middle eastern monarchies are currently better than Russian "democracy". If you had asked me 30 years ago I would have said differently. If you ask again in 30 years I have no idea what I will say. The US likewise has good and bad points and exactly how they come to play changes over time. There is a lot to dislike about the EU as well which anyone living there should be concerned about more than the US (though since I live in the US I worry more about the US - I have a chance to change it maybe)

you are located in Berlin and happy that estonians will pay x5 for electricity?

The poor people will be suffering even more. No trade in electricity, but also no trade with natural gas.

Less painful than dying because russia invaded your country.

Wow that's brutal, what's the context for this change? Was Estonia "bullied" into this, is it a popular change?

5xing electricity prices causes so much human suffering hope estonians have good ways of coping

I wouldn't mind some context here. Is 0.05 the price _only_ inside of Russia.

Regardless, 0.05 seems extremely cheap to me. I can't think of any places in the states that pay that little.

And 0.26 seems pretty darn expensive. I can only think of a few places I have been that charge that much.

Ah gotcha, so they're not actually paying 0.05 now and they probably won't pay 0.26 in the future?

From what I read, there are countries in Europe where it's ~0.40€/kWh (like Germany).

Here in France it's ~0.20€/kWh

It doesn’t quote which price that is, which matters for this discussion, but I routinely pay 5c or less for energy generated in the states.

If it hadn’t been for Germany being one big area in terms of electricity pricing, all swedens four electricity areas would have been far below that. Now our two southernmost areas are infected by what I understand is southern German prices.

https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/

I had to go to Hyderabad, India for a family emergency. Electricity here is on a progressive scale from 1 rupee/kWh up to 9 rupees. 1 rupee is about 1.25 cents. It’s got to be subsidized, just like how water is free.

The price of electricity in Quebec is CAD0.078 per kWh, which is 5.5 cents US.

it's not "now", it's 2024 price. "Grid synchronization" doesn't mean, subsidized by Russia, it just meant that Russia provides energy if Estonia didn't produce enough energy, and the other way around (though it likely never happened). It's clear though that Russia was not selling at inland price.

According to Wikipedia, Estonia did sometimes export energy to Russia.

I don't know why this should be surprising.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Estonia

Estonian here. All baltic states started discussing it about 20 years ago. It was clear that this had to be done, as after re-independnce there has never been times where russia isn't a direct threat. In 2022 when war in Ukraine started, Baltic states also prepared for possibility that Russia will simply disconnect. Without all infrastructure done yet, it wouldwe been chaos for us for several weeks. Happy that we can finally do this move for our national security.

That makes a lot of sense, i would also feel very insecure knowing i was in that situation with Russia

Europeans voted for electricity that expensive, so not sure what the concern is. The government in Germany which shut down local production and decided to outsource it all did not come out of thin air.

> The government in Germany which shut down local production and decided to outsource it all did not come out of thin air.

That is just plain wrong. https://www.iea.org/countries/germany/energy-mix

If not Europeans, who elects the officials in EU that determine energy policy? Also, your graph shows a substantial decrease in domestic energy production.

If Germans want cheaper energy their only option is to elect other politicians. It's the same problem in Norway. People vote for politicians who do everything they can to increase the price, and then they whine that inflation is sky high. You get what you vote for in a Democracy.

Indeed, it came out of the Merkel government, which was notoriously Russia-appeasing, and while popular at the time, it's reputation is rapidly rotting under the gaze of recent history where Russia assaults Ukraine attempting to eliminate the very concept of Ukraine as an entity and independent people, and threatens all of Europe.

Serious question: What brings people to write these comments? It's so tiresome. Always the same twaddle. Merkel was not notoriously Russia-appeasing, she was notoriously German industry appeasing. She didn't stop a business consortium of several large European energy companies from building a new pipeline to Russia, but neither did any leader of the other European countries involved, nor would have any other German chancellor at the time.

Merkel's active policy was making Germany dependent on Russian gas to the point where Russia thought that there was no way Germany would ever oppose their annexation of Ukraine.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/merkel-no-regrets-energ...

In fact, when Trump warned Germany of the risk their diplomats at the UN was laughing at him.

Merkel is a product of the cold war. For her NATO expansion that includes Ukraine was unthinḱable, and most people who lived through the cold war would agree. She never promoted NATO expansion. She thought that through careful diplomacy both peace and trade could be maintained. The US interfered in that.

More importantly, the EU has imported Russian gas through various land pipelines all the time. Nordstream was supposed to secure against various disputes where Ukraine stole Russian gas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_gas_dis...

"Naftogaz admitted that because of harsh winter (lower than minus 30C) some natural gas intended for other European countries was retained and used for domestic needs."

It was really Schroeder who got us into that mess, and gas heating for homes was already very popular in the 1990s in Germany (and none of the home owners really asked or cared where that cheap gas is actually coming from).

Trump was laughed at because it was obvious that he wanted us to buy US gas at a premium instead - not because he was 'concerned' about Germany's dependence on Russian gas (and also - of course - because he's a blithering idiot).

In any case, the discussion is about the Baltics getting more independent from Russia (hooray!), not about Germany :)

Many people are influenced by those USAID-sponsored trolls. Then they even act against their self-interest.

Yes, it is tiresome. There was this famous Trump video where he opposed NATO members on the question of Nordstream 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JpwkeTBwgs

On social media it is spun as "the Germans laughed at him", when the person sitting in the middle opposite Trump is the Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg, NATO secretary and usually a willing US tool. It was all of Europe together.

See timestamp 0:52, i.e. the people behind the sign that says Germany. Not one of them is named Jens Stoltenberg.

https://youtu.be/eKEycjREgPE?si=fIYENA_4E6SQBxpA&t=52\

UN != NATO.

Merkel shut down cold the entire German nuclear power industry, and did not even allow it to do it by attrition; perfectly good plants were shut down.

This move advanced zero climate change mitigation goals, and strongly advanced Russia's agenda of making Germany dependent on RU energy supply. In fact, switching from nuclear to NatGas significantly undermines climate goals.

Keeping the nuclear baseline load and letting it wane by attrition while allowing a pipeline is one thing. Maximizing Germany's dependence on RU is another.

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