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Comment by geysersam | Hacker News Reader

But what to do in Finland during the winter months? I'm massively pro solar, and I'm sceptical of nuclear, but this seems like a problem to me. Batteries work well on shorter time scales but not over the entire year.

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Finland's electricity production is already 95% non fossil fuel, so you don't need to worry about them.

Yes but ~37% of that is nuclear. My question was: If they're not supposed to use nuclear what should they use.

Short term for self-reliance Finland can use natural gas (won't need much), wind and hydro. Since they are a nation with many friends they can also buy electricity from neighbors.

To solve the variable production from solar and wind, most nations should probably have a safety valve in the form of synthesized fuels. Meaning that during summer when energy is abundant and has to be dumped at negative prices, we use the surplus to synthesize fuels instead.

Synthesizing fuel is inefficient, but since you use surplus energy that doesn't matter.

These are options that are viable right now, but there are also promising developments in batteries that could make them viable for season storage too.

Do you know what the main obstacles are for producing synthetic fuels from surplus renewable electricity production today? It doesn't seem like a lot of companies are doing it at large scale, even while the electricity price difference between summer and winter is large.

I think the main obstacles are the existing players in the energy space. They are huge organisations for the most part and take a long time to change, even if they were motivated to do so. Things have changed rapidly the past few years.

It can also be argued that many of them are not motivated, because they make money from selling electricity from highly valued assets (power plants). If electricity gets permanently cheaper, they stand to lose a lot of money.

There are probably other obstacles as well, but I don't think any of them are insurmountable.

Synthetic fuel production has a very low efficiency, but that does not matter if electricity cost is cheap. So the idea is to overbuild electricity consumption and let them sit idle when electricity is expensive.

But, AFAICT, to overbuild consumption the capital cost is so high that it does not make much economic sense.

> But what to do in Finland during the winter months?

Is this a serious question or "raising concerns".

A quick search brings up wind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Finland

and hydro: https://www.andritz.com/hydro-en/hydronews/hn-europe/finland

And connections with friendly neighbours: https://cinea.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/cef-energy-finla...

I'm sure that there is a role for Nuclear or gas to cover the last few % that renewables find hard to reach. For now.

It's a serious question. Someone was suggesting that instead of building nuclear, like they did I Finland, they should have built solar. But in the winter in Finland there is not a lot of sun, so I was curious what the commenter, who seemed knowledgeable, had to say about that.

I think the statement is that "Nuclear basically makes no sense at all in 2025."

That's slightly different from "they should have built solar" in 2005 when the last nuclear plant was started, according to https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

It's 20 years later, and "not nuclear" isn't always "go 100% solar".

I guess you mean me, and I can't give a definite answer of course, it's complicated. I can mention some things I think should be considered.

- Solar is bad in Finland during the winter, but good during the summer. Whatever other fuel is used during the summer now can instead be offset to winter. Even natural gas, but preferably imported wind, hydro and such.

- Solar was not an option when Finland decided to build o3. They couldn't have chosen solar instead, back then.

- Finland is a net exporter of electricity, and is in fact exporting a similar amount as o3 produces manually. So basically Finland didn't really need o3 for themselves, they built it to sell electricity.

- When other countries add lots of cheap solar, it will be difficult to sell nuclear since it's much more expensive.

- If the price forces o3 to close ahead of time, Finland still has to pay for it, and its waste, for decades if not centuries.

The good thing about northern regions is that they tend to be wet and have low population density. This is pretty good for pumped hydro even if batteries aren't cheap enough at a particular time. But it's not clear when the manufacturing costs of batteries will hit a minimum. So far they continue to decrease.

Maximum elevation in Finland is is 1 324 m and that is in extreme north with less water. In general there just isn't elevation differences that are useful enough.

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