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Comment by Illotus | Hacker News Reader

This is basically due to Google probably rightly believing that electricity price in Finland is going up due to all these datacenters and also a pr stunt that the current government loves because they can claim that they aren't allowing these datacenters to raise electricity price.

This isn't investing in power infrastructure in any way, there is no reality where that nuclear plant wasn't staying in operation as long as they can possibly keep it running in the foreseeable future. Basically only way Google and Fortum will be building new nuclear capacity is by Finland promising to cover any electricity price below 15 cents per kWh in the market.

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A customer willing to make a multi-decade deal for half a reactor at a stable price is perfect for incentivizing new nuclear buildouts. The basic financial problem of nuclear is that it' capex heavy and opex-light, so the costs of the entire enterprise are set during the buildout stage, but the revenue is volatile.

> they aren't allowing these datacenters to raise electricity price

If you reduce supply,price generally goes up. Buying a power plants output reduces supply

Only if demand increases to the point where supply cannot meet demand in a short enough time frame. Capacity is a factor here.

You buying a doughnut - even half the doughnuts - from a doughnut shop does not increase the price of the remaining doughnuts unless they can't make enough to satisfy remaining demand and people are willing to outbid you rather than wait.

Does that power station have enough capacity to satisfy the remaining demand?

Yes, it is just pr that now that Google invests with Fortum the price wont rise. Its basically just smokescreen.

What it does allow is for Google and the governemt to say these data centres aren’t generating any co2

Of course everyone’s else’s co2 emissions then increase instead.

The only solution is more zero co2 emissions. Google could have funded large wind farms, or a new nuclear plant, or grid connections to other locations. But that would cost more.

Google has been doing all of that for decades. I remember when they started building their first data center (back when almost no companies required enough compute for an entire data center) they chose the location due to the cleanest energy they could find (hydroelectric on a river that wasn't blocking fish migration).

I'm assuming that was when "don't be evil" still mattered to them?

It is worth noting that Finland is a member of Nord Pool (for electricity) which includes all Nordic nations. You cannot consider Finland alone in your supply and consumption expectations -- you need to include Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. Both Norway and Sweden have massive annual electricity exports exceeding 30 TWh for each country. 60 TWh is the equivalent of four EPR nuclear power units that can produce about 14 THw per year! That is crazy over capacity in my view. The block has plenty of supply.

Further, the article specifically says:

    > Google signed a 22-year contract with Finnish utility Fortum to buy up to 50% of the output from the Loviisa nuclear power plant.

That nuclear power plant has two reactors that each produce about 8 TWh in total per year. So Google bought 4 TWh per year. Meh, no biggie. The Nordic Pool has plenty of capacity.

You can't sum like that, though. Connections between regions and countries have capacity limits, so it would matter where in Finland you placed a data-center, if you wanted to take into account the electricity coming from Sweden and Norway.

Norway exports electricity primarily to England and Germany, only a little goes to Finland:

https://www.statnett.no/en/for-stakeholders-in-the-power-ind...

Sweden sent 10.6TWh in 2025:

https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kraftsystemdata/elstatis...

This matches what Finland says about imports - imported 8.1TWh from Sweden but 0.2TWh from Norway in 2024

https://energia.fi/en/statistics/statistics-on-electricity/

Take a look at the map. Sweden has three underwater cables to the south of Finland near Helsinki (quite near Olkiluoto NPP). Norway only connects in the very far north, its nearest "connection" is via Sweden to near Oulu.

https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/

POV: you know nothing about how energy market works.

Not only disappointing such comments exist on HN, but to be at top is depressing.

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