The two words missing from the HN post title (“says minister”) give the crucial context. As everywhere in Europe, there’s a heated ongoing debate in Finland about the rising price of electricity, what should be done about it, and who is to blame. This is a political statement aimed at defending the government’s past and current policies, not more or less than that.
(At the moment of writing this the yle.fi title is “Finland will be self-sufficient in electricity within a year or two, says minister” whereas HN title is “Finland will be self-sufficient in electricity within a year or two”.)
"self sufficient" doesn't mean "pricing will not depend on external influences".
If you have cables to the rest of europe, they will be buying any cheap energy off you.
Clearly, thats good for the economy as a whole (better to sell that energy and earn a decent profit for the country), but voters might still be unhappy at high prices.
Not neccesarily. They could choose to implement a two-tier system for pricing. One system for internal use (within Finland), and only making the rest available for export (and thus Europe) after the finnish needs have been covered.
The full market integration isn't a natural law, as some free-market enthusiasts would have you believe.
Blame me if it sounded like clickbait. I submitted with the verbatim headline ("..., says minister") but HN rejected it as too long. It was late, I was lazy, so I just removed the ", says minister" and carried on. I should have edited it down more intelligently. Apologies.
Finland has the benefit of a small population (5.5M) and thus a relatively small amount of electricity demand, a large territory with plenty of places where wind turbines aren't going to bother anyone, and humongous geopolitical incentives to avoid any energy dependency on its eastern neighbor.
Wind power is nice, but the key is nuclear power, which covers 35% of Finland's needs already and that number is going to go up once they fully ramp up Olkiluoto 3.
Unfortunately it also took around 17 years to build the thing, so this playbook is not going to be particularly useful to anybody else who needs to wean themselves off Russian energy now.
> ...so this playbook is not going to be particularly useful to anybody else who needs to wean themselves off Russian energy now.
At some point, stubborn commitment to terrible policy can't be recovered from.
But it is nevertheless always a good time to admit wrong and start working to correct mistakes. It would be very wise to admit that the Western powers haven't been seriously focusing on energy security for decades now and that really needs to change. If we want to be in a good spot 17 years from now we need to start ASAP.
And people could probably also get some nuclear plants built in less than 17 years if they demanded that they be an order of magnitude safer than coal plants/gas rather than the absurdist standards that are presently applied.
> we use electricity for heating a lot (gas furnaces at homes are very rare).
That's a kind of a blessing actually. As opposed to central Europe, Finland is not that dependent on gas from Russia. Electricity can be produced without a pipeline dependence on Russia.
That being said, Finland used to import quite a lot of electricity from Russia, and that is now gone, so there is an urgent need to invest in domestic production capacity. In the short term that certainly means much more wind, longer term hopefully more nuclear reactors (in addition to the soon upcoming OL3) coming online would be useful too.
That may be so, but population density is ridiculously lower than Germany's.
According to Wikipedia:
DE: 232/km2
FI: 16.4/km2
EU: 106/km2
They should probably be OK as far as GP's argument is concerned (space for wind turbines not bothering anyone), especially since I expect most of the people are living in the south. Not sure whether there's enough wind in the sparsely populated areas, though.
Wind accounted for 2,2% of our total energy production in 2020. I don't imagine it's hugely higher today. Nuclear will be doing the heavy lifting in the immediate term.
That is not to say you aren't right - indeed there's plenty of uninhibited land to place turbines into
I would argue that most larger Western nations have the ability to be self-sufficient in electricity. And those that don't can often partner with other neighbors or allies for smaller, more secure access to energy.
I would also argue that all nations current have motive as well as ability. The reliance on potential adversaries for energy makes entire nations or blocs fully dependent on these adversaries, which has been clear since at least the 1973 OPEC sanctions.
Political will and long term planning are very important. Unfortunately short-sightness is what's killing these projects. Anything that cannot be completed in a government's term in power is very hard to be approved.
> I would argue that most larger Western nations have the ability to be self-sufficient in electricity.
If I recall correctly granite by virtue of its uranium content has more energy than coal does by combustion. And everywhere has granite if they dig deep enough. If you’re willing to import uranium you have even fewer non-political problems if you have the requisite engineering skills. Among European countries that probably excludes places like Malta and Luxembourg but if Finland can do it there’s no reason to believe e.g. Ireland couldn’t.
>> thus a relatively small amount of electricity demand
That doesn’t smell right to me. Finland’s pretty chilly. Surely their energy usage has to be high?
According to world data bank, Finland has one of the highest kwh per head of population demands in the world. About 3-4x more than the US for example.
>> where wind turbines
The energy supply breakdown for Finland appears to be predominantly about a successful Nuclear deployment for electricity and social / district heating.
> The energy supply breakdown for Finland appears to be predominantly about a successful Nuclear deployment for electricity and social / district heating.
Sadly nuclear isn't used for district heating at all. There is a LOT of waste heat (in the GW range) that is just pumped into outside to "heat" the sea (very locally). There has been some plans about building pipelines from the nuclear plants to big cities to transport the heat to them (Loviisa to Helsinki would only require ~90km pipe) but isn't currently possible without a change in nuclear safety laws/codes.
Even the town of Loviisa is not using the waste heat of the 2 nuclear reactors there to heat the town itself.
edit: Obviously the electricity produced by the nuclear plants is used in district heating to power heat pumps but that is very inefficient (already ~60% loss just from heat -> electricity at the nuclear plant).
There is a lot of NIMBYism though. Also large parts of the east of the country can't really build wind power as it messes with defense (military radars at the Russian border). But still a lot of space and the best spots to build wind is at the sea anyway not inland.
It's possible for many countries to do this, but they choose not to for political reasons. The United States could have also done it if Nixon's Nuclear agenda went to it's logical conclusion [1]. Unfortunately, he had to resign over some issues that had to do with spying on the other political party and getting caught constantly lying about it.
In total energy consumption, the US produces more energy than it uses.In May 2011, the country became a net exporter of refined petroleum products.By 2014, the United States was the world's third largest producer of crude oil, after Saudi Arabia and Russia, and second-largest exporter of refined products, after Russia.In November 2019, the United States became a net exporter of all oil products, including both refined petroleum products and crude oil.By 2021 the US was the world's largest producer.
It just so happened that the US became a net exporter a few years after conquering a large oil state. They keep saying it's domestic production but I don't believe in astrology
Norway has been self-sufficient in electricity for a while, most of it coming from hydroelectric power. Yet the prices in southern Norway are skyrocketing because it is connected to the European grid and European energy crisis is affecting the price rise.
Norway has been self-sufficient for a very long time, but due to the Acer agreement with EU Norway is in practice forced to export electricity until the price balances out at both ends (https://www.nrk.no/ytring/energien-var-strommer-ut-1.1605630...). There's no way that the surplus in production can cover the current needs of Europe. In summer the domestic need is very much lower than during winter (no domestic A/C necessary, bright days etc), so normally you try to save as much water as possible during summer so that you have sufficient resources for winter. But now the hydro power plants are in practice forced to empty out the reserves during summer, and buy electricity from the continent during winter, completely reversing the practice before Acer - which was basically that the surplus was sold and exported, and when e.g. Denmark has too much wind power available you turn down the hydro a bit and import from Denmark, and when there's low wind you export to Denmark (Norway's hydro is one reason Denmark can rely on wind power that much).
The only thing (the only thing) that limits electricity exports from Norway is capacity. Prices in the north of Norway are lower than in the south, simply because there's not enough capacity to transport that much to the south. That's actually a good thing, and would be a good thing for the cables from the south to the continent and elsewhere as well, because what's happening now is insanity. It makes no sense to dry out the water resources during summer and buy in the winter, from coal and whatnot.
It also has a lot to do with not enough transmission capacity to get the electricity from north to south. At this very moment the spot price in north most pricing region Tromso is a lot cheaper than in Oslo region (~1/10th). Sweden has the same problem.
If I was from Norway or Sweden I would demand the national grid to massively invest into the transmission lines to make all the electricity produced in the country actually usable anywhere in the country. Basically work to get rid of these pricing regions within the country. This is how the network here in Finland works
Also why they are now talking about adding new lines from south of Finland to Sweden (also mentioned in the article) so the electricity produced in north Sweden can be sold to south Sweden through Finland as the national grid of Sweden just can't get it done.
Transmission capacity is a classic example of a neat economics problem.
If there was a benevolent dictator making ideal decisions, they would build enough transmission capacity to minimize generation+transmission costs while still serving all users in the country.
However, if there is a private company building a transmission line, they have an incentive to under-build capacity to maximize their profits - since if they overbuild, then the price in all the regions is identical, and their profits by transporting energy are nil.
Yet, due to the nature of transmission lines, it doesn't make sense for 50 companies to build 50 independent transmission lines on the same route to compete on transmission pricing - the total cost of fifty 1 megawatt lines is far higher than one 50 megawatt line.
It's a good example of an economics problem where the free/restricted market doesn't work anywhere near as well as the benevolent dictator model.
There are lots of similar problems - for example shipping goods from a place where they are less valuable to a place they are more valuable.
There has been massive investments into transmission capacity in Sweden. The capacity has not increased that much though. One of the reasons are that nuclear power plants have been closed. Large turbines contributes to an increased transmission capacity. All the big investments have been necessary just to ensure that the capacity doesn't get lowered due to the closing of the nuclear plants.
"If I was from Norway or Sweden I would demand the national grid to massively invest into the transmission lines to make all the electricity produced in the country actually usable anywhere in the country. "
That would be fine if it was only about prices in the country. But due to the way the EU agreement works, higher capacity transmission lines only means that more electricity will be exported and more of those countries would suffer.
Norway currently exports more than the surplus. With higher internal transmission capacity Norway would export even more. Which will have to be imported from EU comes winter, at prices which have already closed a LOT of businesses in Norway.
I do not think that effective transfer of energy from the north to the south would matter much. The price in the energy market is set by the actor willing to pay the most at any given moment.
If energy from the north was enough to influence the German or British prices then maybe, otherwise it wouldn't really matter.
Is this because Norway is only energy independent across annual average load, and can't handle peak usage? Or because theres some contractual arrangement where they can't sell electricity cheaper to domestic users?
As far as I know, they have not built the infrastructure to move the cheap excess power down south and some are using the EU as a scapegoat. Don't take my word for it, though.
When Norway sells electricity across the new cables to the UK we share the profits with the brits. Makes sense, since the risk and cost of building the cables was shared.
It reminds me of the App Store model where Apple takes 30% of the revenue instead of charging a charging a fixed fee of some sort.
Would be very interesting if there was a transfer fee for the new cables instead of a profit share model. Even more interesting if there was a bidding process for the transfer capacity like there is for actual electricity.
Or put another way, Norway doesn't have enough north/south interconnect capacity to supply cheap electricity from generating capacity in their north to their south.
Same with Finland and Sweden - electricity prices would be much lower in the Nordics if they cut off from the European grid, but that’s not politically acceptable
That is not how the system works. If you have extra production in case of high energy prices, you can make a profit by selling it to the eu. If prices increase domestically, it must mean, that the domestic production is not sufficient and energy is bought from the eu, or your domestic production plants use the opportunity to increase profits.
The connected network is and always will be a good idea, just like the open internet :)
Is this because of greed/profit/capitalism? Like we have enough energy for ourselves but we can make a lot of money if we profit now of this bad situation, double our yachts length.
For a country, is being self-sufficient in electricity production necessarily a goal to strive for?
It would make sense if you’re on bad terms with your neighboring countries. But if not, I think it makes a lot more sense to import power from abroad when it’s cheap there and expensive at home, and vice versa.
For example, Denmark has a lot of wind turbines so electricity is cheap here when there’s a lot of wind. Our neighboring country Norway has mountains, and therefore hydroelectric power plants. In periods where there is little wind in Denmark, and Norway is producing cheap power using hydroelectricity, it makes perfect sense for Denmark not to be self-sufficient, and instead import from Norway. And the same for Norway when Danish wind turbines are producing cheap power while their hydroelectric plants are running at low output.
All of the continental Nordic countries, (Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway) are already in a single unified transmission grid and electricity market (Nordpool). The other half of the article was about building a new link between Sweden and Finland. The self-sufficiency here is therefore purely mathematical.
And yes, Finland definitely has one massive hostile neighbor who started this war and caused this energy crisis.
But your plan assumes that the 2 neighbors production is complementary, what is is a bad winter, the demand raises in both countries, wind turbines need to be stopped for some reason and not country B needs to beg from country A, so A needs now to decide if they sacrifice their citizens to help the ones in country B.
You would need more then 2 countries to reduce the risks and you need some power plant that can work at a low capacity during the year but can fast go to full capacity to handle this cases, now this plants will not be profitable when running at idle/low capacity so you need some non-free-market program to keep them running.
Wind turbines don’t have to be stopped, they will stop all on their own when there is calm and cold weather. It can go on for days, even weeks.
As to stand-by generation, no need to grasp for non-free-market solutions. You just bid on stand-by generation capacity on the open market, problem solved.
As a Finn I don't want to have my "do I freeze to death this winter" to be in the hands of any other foreign country be it friendly or not. Obviously it has not been in such a state for a long time but hopefully we can get there at some point.
In the Nordpool market area/nordic grid, Norway and Sweden dominate production and hence prices in the nordics & baltic area. They tend to export a lot as well to the continental grid. But this may still lower the prices a bit.
(Interestingly Norway is as of this writing importing electricity from continental Europe despite being a big hydro exporter usually - they are I'd guess conserving hydro for more profitable market conditions ahead, functioning as a battery for the continental grid.)
Canada has two hydro projects not quite finished that are going to cost around 12 billion too for a about 1 GW. Expensive plants aren’t unique to nuclear
Readit News
(At the moment of writing this the yle.fi title is “Finland will be self-sufficient in electricity within a year or two, says minister” whereas HN title is “Finland will be self-sufficient in electricity within a year or two”.)
If you have cables to the rest of europe, they will be buying any cheap energy off you.
Clearly, thats good for the economy as a whole (better to sell that energy and earn a decent profit for the country), but voters might still be unhappy at high prices.
The full market integration isn't a natural law, as some free-market enthusiasts would have you believe.
Ministers say a lot of things.
Unfortunately it also took around 17 years to build the thing, so this playbook is not going to be particularly useful to anybody else who needs to wean themselves off Russian energy now.
At some point, stubborn commitment to terrible policy can't be recovered from.
But it is nevertheless always a good time to admit wrong and start working to correct mistakes. It would be very wise to admit that the Western powers haven't been seriously focusing on energy security for decades now and that really needs to change. If we want to be in a good spot 17 years from now we need to start ASAP.
And people could probably also get some nuclear plants built in less than 17 years if they demanded that they be an order of magnitude safer than coal plants/gas rather than the absurdist standards that are presently applied.
Finland has the highest energy consumption per capita in EU. (over 2x Germany for example)
Winters are cold and we use electricity for heating a lot (gas furnaces at homes are very rare). Also bunch of energy hungry industry (paper, metal)
That's a kind of a blessing actually. As opposed to central Europe, Finland is not that dependent on gas from Russia. Electricity can be produced without a pipeline dependence on Russia.
That being said, Finland used to import quite a lot of electricity from Russia, and that is now gone, so there is an urgent need to invest in domestic production capacity. In the short term that certainly means much more wind, longer term hopefully more nuclear reactors (in addition to the soon upcoming OL3) coming online would be useful too.
According to Wikipedia:
DE: 232/km2
FI: 16.4/km2
EU: 106/km2
They should probably be OK as far as GP's argument is concerned (space for wind turbines not bothering anyone), especially since I expect most of the people are living in the south. Not sure whether there's enough wind in the sparsely populated areas, though.
The absolute amount of capacity that has to come online for self-sufficiency would be a sliver of the demand of a more populous nation.
That is not to say you aren't right - indeed there's plenty of uninhibited land to place turbines into
I would argue that most larger Western nations have the ability to be self-sufficient in electricity. And those that don't can often partner with other neighbors or allies for smaller, more secure access to energy.
I would also argue that all nations current have motive as well as ability. The reliance on potential adversaries for energy makes entire nations or blocs fully dependent on these adversaries, which has been clear since at least the 1973 OPEC sanctions.
If I recall correctly granite by virtue of its uranium content has more energy than coal does by combustion. And everywhere has granite if they dig deep enough. If you’re willing to import uranium you have even fewer non-political problems if you have the requisite engineering skills. Among European countries that probably excludes places like Malta and Luxembourg but if Finland can do it there’s no reason to believe e.g. Ireland couldn’t.
That doesn’t smell right to me. Finland’s pretty chilly. Surely their energy usage has to be high?
According to world data bank, Finland has one of the highest kwh per head of population demands in the world. About 3-4x more than the US for example.
>> where wind turbines
The energy supply breakdown for Finland appears to be predominantly about a successful Nuclear deployment for electricity and social / district heating.
Sadly nuclear isn't used for district heating at all. There is a LOT of waste heat (in the GW range) that is just pumped into outside to "heat" the sea (very locally). There has been some plans about building pipelines from the nuclear plants to big cities to transport the heat to them (Loviisa to Helsinki would only require ~90km pipe) but isn't currently possible without a change in nuclear safety laws/codes.
Even the town of Loviisa is not using the waste heat of the 2 nuclear reactors there to heat the town itself.
edit: Obviously the electricity produced by the nuclear plants is used in district heating to power heat pumps but that is very inefficient (already ~60% loss just from heat -> electricity at the nuclear plant).
We should all be striving to do the same.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Independence
The only thing (the only thing) that limits electricity exports from Norway is capacity. Prices in the north of Norway are lower than in the south, simply because there's not enough capacity to transport that much to the south. That's actually a good thing, and would be a good thing for the cables from the south to the continent and elsewhere as well, because what's happening now is insanity. It makes no sense to dry out the water resources during summer and buy in the winter, from coal and whatnot.
If I was from Norway or Sweden I would demand the national grid to massively invest into the transmission lines to make all the electricity produced in the country actually usable anywhere in the country. Basically work to get rid of these pricing regions within the country. This is how the network here in Finland works
Also why they are now talking about adding new lines from south of Finland to Sweden (also mentioned in the article) so the electricity produced in north Sweden can be sold to south Sweden through Finland as the national grid of Sweden just can't get it done.
edit:
You can go to https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/Dayahead/Area-... to check the day ahead prices in different price regions.
If there was a benevolent dictator making ideal decisions, they would build enough transmission capacity to minimize generation+transmission costs while still serving all users in the country.
However, if there is a private company building a transmission line, they have an incentive to under-build capacity to maximize their profits - since if they overbuild, then the price in all the regions is identical, and their profits by transporting energy are nil.
Yet, due to the nature of transmission lines, it doesn't make sense for 50 companies to build 50 independent transmission lines on the same route to compete on transmission pricing - the total cost of fifty 1 megawatt lines is far higher than one 50 megawatt line.
It's a good example of an economics problem where the free/restricted market doesn't work anywhere near as well as the benevolent dictator model.
There are lots of similar problems - for example shipping goods from a place where they are less valuable to a place they are more valuable.
If energy from the north was enough to influence the German or British prices then maybe, otherwise it wouldn't really matter.
It reminds me of the App Store model where Apple takes 30% of the revenue instead of charging a charging a fixed fee of some sort.
Would be very interesting if there was a transfer fee for the new cables instead of a profit share model. Even more interesting if there was a bidding process for the transfer capacity like there is for actual electricity.
Exporting more power than you import on a yearly basis might still mean they you need to import power in certain periods during the year.
It would make sense if you’re on bad terms with your neighboring countries. But if not, I think it makes a lot more sense to import power from abroad when it’s cheap there and expensive at home, and vice versa.
For example, Denmark has a lot of wind turbines so electricity is cheap here when there’s a lot of wind. Our neighboring country Norway has mountains, and therefore hydroelectric power plants. In periods where there is little wind in Denmark, and Norway is producing cheap power using hydroelectricity, it makes perfect sense for Denmark not to be self-sufficient, and instead import from Norway. And the same for Norway when Danish wind turbines are producing cheap power while their hydroelectric plants are running at low output.
And yes, Finland definitely has one massive hostile neighbor who started this war and caused this energy crisis.
You would need more then 2 countries to reduce the risks and you need some power plant that can work at a low capacity during the year but can fast go to full capacity to handle this cases, now this plants will not be profitable when running at idle/low capacity so you need some non-free-market program to keep them running.
As to stand-by generation, no need to grasp for non-free-market solutions. You just bid on stand-by generation capacity on the open market, problem solved.
live stats: https://www.svk.se/en/national-grid/the-control-room/
(Interestingly Norway is as of this writing importing electricity from continental Europe despite being a big hydro exporter usually - they are I'd guess conserving hydro for more profitable market conditions ahead, functioning as a battery for the continental grid.)
> New transmission link between Finland and Sweden
This is good. You don't want to totally rely on untrustworthy partners, but interconnected grids are in general a good thing.