It is still true what she says. Having an interconnected electricity system is problematic when countries like Germany misbehave by having a horrible energy politics.
That said, it would had been better in Sweden if they hadn't phased out nuclear too! There is a electricity shortage in south of Sweden where industries are denied establishing new initiatives.
Sweden has an overproduction of energy, it is just generally generated in the north (where the hydro is) and consumed in the south (where the people are).
The 'shortage in the south' is just a political lens for explaining the high prices from the introduction of energy zones in 2011. Before then, there was one price for electricity in Sweden and this worked to the benefit of the consumer.
Stepping back, do we really want the south to invest in _generating_ electricity? And if so, at what granularity? At the kommun level, or the län? At what point is that granularity ok but the whole-of-Sweden granularity that we had before the privatisation push is not ok?
It's a single power grid but the transmission lines north->south are insufficient to carry all the potential electricity generated by hydro at peak production.
Actually this is a good thing. There's demand for energy so prices go up. This in turn makes investments in energy generation in Sweden more lucrative since they apparently have a lot of energy revenue coming in from abroad to finance more such projects. There are a lot of renewable energy projects in and around Sweden and the wider region. And of course they are actually manufacturing and exporting a lot of wind turbines as well. Wind technology is a substantial part of their economy.
There is no energy shortage in Sweden. They can export as little or as much power as they want. But of course with prices being high that means they export a fair bit and that causes prices to rise. Which is causing Sweden to make a lot of money from this business.
If they want lower prices locally, they should look at their local energy market, infrastructure, and regulations instead of blaming the Germans for being able to pay market rates for energy to Sweden.
It is but that doesn't help us here in Sweden, we pay the highest bid price for the electricity generated here but being exported.
The last government at least put in place windfall taxes to pay us back during the massive cost increase in the first winter after Russia invaded Ukraine. We got compensated a few months later the prices went insane. The current government already said they won't do that, which is rather absurd since a lot of our electricity is generated by Vatenfall, a state company.
Long-term, macro whatever it may be a good thing I suppose, but short term, the average are suffering under multiplied energy costs. Monthly bills are still double that of what they used to be and any government compensation measures have long ended.
End users should not suffer under government / market fuckery.
This type of "hurr more money good" thinking is exactly the reason why there's a massive energy crisis across Europe, where individuals and enterprises end up paying gigantic electricity bills. People are _dying_ from this situation. Energy is not a random market like any others where number goes up means everything is good. _Lives_ depend on it.
Europe got dependent on cheap russian gas. And it escaped into a bubble of irresponsible behaviour, where the idea that economic realities on the ground mattered itself got faded out. Scream loud and en mass that the rain should go up on the streets- and politicans would promise you the rain would go up, by installing ventilation, physics would not apply to the citizen.
Now the situation is different, and physics applies once more, everybody is screaming, but reality be a harsh mistress- she careth not for the sobbing.
In a similar vein it’s been absolutely nauseating hearing borderline corrupt Conservatives in the UK moaning at every opportunity at the state of the country and its institutions and the idealogical and deliberate decline and underfunding of all of it (including energy).
Despite it being entirely their doing from almost 15 years of the Conservative government.
But the Swedish government is taking blame for local shutdowns. The previous day her boss (PM) said so. The 4th paragraph reads:
"“I realise that nobody is happy when I say that ‘if we hadn't shut down half of nuclear power, we wouldn't have these problems’. But it's true and it needs to be said.”, Kristersson said, referring to the previous Social Democrat-Greens coalition closing several nuclear reactors between 2019 and 2020 as part of a policy shift towards greater reliance on renewable energy sources."
The Swedish Green coalition before them also did shutdowns like the German greens did. And now they have to suffer the consequences.
Note that a lot of people are very shortsighted and might think "energy prices were better with the previous greens/labour/etc". They need to be reminded the causes of the crisis.
The Greens had partnered with the SPD from 1998 to 2005 (and then again recently since 2021 but that's no related to the subject). They directly contributed to creating the Energiewende program. Merkel & friends implemented it, but saying the greens just "indicated preference" is utter bullshit. It's also the greens today trying to exclude any nuclear project from benefiting from grants at the European level.
The Greens do not get to have their cake and eat it when they are, in fact, directly one of the sources of the current german problem. Those 232g CO2/kWH as I write (and over 700 last week) is exactly what they asked for when they pushed for a full renewable energy grid backed by hopes and dreams.
Do you mean they are puppets of the Greens and as opposition to red-green government could not reverse policies they have considered harmful?
> directly one of the sources of the current german problem
From 2005 to 2021 it was Merkel & Co in the government making most of the energy-related decisions, yet you single out Greens as the primary culprits. Why? Did they sign Nord Stream agreements?
> It's also the greens today trying to exclude any nuclear project from benefiting from grants at the European level.
How not starting any nuclear project now is relevant to the current situation? It’s a strange claim given the time and costs needed to build a single nuclear power plant. It’s would not solve anything in the next 10 years at least, will be the most expensive energy on the market and add a dependency on a external supplier outside of EU (you cannot seriously suggest that we should get our uranium from Africa or Kazakhstan, so it‘s going to be an American one, same terms as LNG?)
>yet you single out Greens as the primary culprits. Why? Did they sign Nord Stream agreements?
You're incredibly defensive when all I have done is point out that saying "the greens aren't responsible for it" is a blatant lie. Especially when your purposefully ignore the next sentence, which still puts the blame on Merkel & Friends for continuing to implement it, in their case because it was lucrative to sign agreements with Russia for gas.(Especially this sack of shit Gerhard Schröder.)
>How not starting any nuclear project now is relevant to the current situation?
Aside from the fact that they have been on the offensive not just in 2024, but for close to a decade now (the Fessenheim closure has been demanded since 2016, green taxonomy started in 2020), because of this:
There has not been a _single_ day, a single month, a single year where the german electricity production has been under 200g eqCO2/kWh. Not a single one. The entire project has been slowly killing the planet, one day at a time, because technically illiterate and incompetent people have been leading your country.
>It’s a strange claim given the time and costs needed to build a single nuclear power plant.
While recent developments in Europe have been funny, to say the least (lol Flamanville/Hinkley Point C/Okilouto), half of these costs are caused by incredibly tight regulations, and another huge part has been caused by a gigantic loss of talent, which tends to happen when you demonize an entire industry for 30 years. There's also the fact that most of the recent constructions are new designs, which, yeah, require discovering flaws, unfortunately. China has 5-year construction speeds for nuclear plants using proven designs.
> It’s would not solve anything in the next 10 years at least
Considering renewables have not been solving anything in the past ten years alone, and will not solve anything in the net 10 years either, how about we start looking a little bit further than our noses and build _both_ ?
>will be the most expensive energy on the market
1/ lol lies 2/ lol renewables literally not working for a whole week in germany last week 3/ lol germany pushing for a common energy market where the price of the energy is based on the most expensive energy source available. Nuclear will never be the most expensive as long as we have gas burners for 400€/kWh.
>and add a dependency on a external supplier outside of EU (you cannot seriously suggest that we should get our uranium from Africa or Kazakhstan, so it‘s going to be an American one, same terms as LNG?)
Aside from the fact that I can _absolutely seriously suggest that_ and that I wouldn't take geopolitics lessons from Germany, thank you, we can also discover new sources of raw uranium (hell, even France is full of it, it's just cheaper to get it from Niger despite the instabilities), we can work forward on reusing and making nuclear "waste" useful (Breeder reactors have been an option, killing Superphénix was a mistake (but also the right choice from a financial perspective), keep it as a research reactor).
Germany has had an absolutely blind and ignorant world view of energy production, making it an absolute catastrophe of an energy market that gets covered by other european countries. It's not renewables OR nuclear. It's never been, and that a dichotomy that's been pushed forwards by morons. It's both. I'll be perfectly happy to turn off every single nuclear reactor in the world the day we guarantee all of our needs are fully covered by renewables ,which is going to require a _lot_ of overcapacity, or a globalized electricity grid (I thought depending on Africa and Russia was a bad idea?).
Renewables aren't the solution. They're part of it, and as it stands, are...
> You're incredibly defensive when all I have done is point out that saying "the greens aren't responsible for it" is a blatant lie
And I didn’t say that. Who is defensive?
> Aside from the fact that they have been on the offensive not just in 2024, but for close to a decade now (the Fessenheim closure has been demanded since 2016, green taxonomy started in 2020)
2016-2020 - Merkel government.
Overall most of what you say here can and should be attributed to conservative/socialist parties which were in charge and use green agenda opportunistically rather than strategically. Making greens as a root source of all problems is a lie, simply because they did not make most of those harmful decisions. Regulation is mostly not on them too. I am not big fan of German greens myself, but things should be made straight on this matter: German problem are not greens, German problem are boomers which do not care about change. Most of mainstream politics in Germany is captured by special interests groups, old dudes from some Verein, Kammer or other medieval guild, lobbying to preserve their moats and privileges. Nuclear power has lost the game to Fukushima fears and Chernobyl fallout, but it is a secondary matter. It could have been useful or not, that’s a matter of calculations deep in strategic documents. Last document I saw considered them unpractical. You are right, we do need energy strategy, but honestly I think Germany is incapable of producing it. EU should take it over, it has more momentum and political diversity to figure this out. And it makes sense anyway, not just to regulate the market, but to build.
Regarding the uranium production, yes, there are some expensive deposits in Europe. We have high population density so even if environmental concerns are addressed, they will cost a lot. Post-processing of the waste is going to cost a lot. It is by no means the same price as 20-40 years ago. Can it fully replace gas? I doubt so. Is it the only alternative? I doubt so. We are talking about 20-30 years, the horizon on which we may really see the effects of nuclear scale-up. The renewables will be much more advanced by then, grids more robust and efficient. We may not have the same problems as we have now to be solved by nuclear. So the question is really, does it make sense to commit to fossil fuel for another 50-70 years again?
> does it make sense to commit to fossil fuel for another 50-70 years again?
I now see that you have been arguing in bad faith since the beginning and should not have wasted time, down to repeating exact arguments from the greens that have, so far, proved to be wronged and dragged Germany into one of the worst emitters of Europe.
Good luck with your dreams, knowing you're dragging all of us down with you.
I understand that somehow Greens made you feel so angry that you cannot stand any argument with other opinion than yours, but this is HN, not therapy, we are not here to release your steam. Try to make it less emotional next time.
I‘m not acting in bad faith, I just don’t see how is your argumentation relevant to my original comment above. What I would expect to agree with you is the causal link making greens primarily responsible for current situation. As I pointed out, I do not see it simply because other parties were long enough in the government not only to undo things, but to build something on their own.
And I honestly, being relatively familiar with the topics, cannot see how nuclear power industry could save us if it were restarted couple years ago. The reports from German research teams show otherwise. If you have more data on viability of this approach, please feel free to share.
You can't do this here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. I've banned the account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
You broke the site guidelines badly in this flamewar. I'm not going to ban your account right now the way I did the other one, which broke them quite a bit worse and has more of a history of doing so. But if you keep doing this, we're going to end up having to ban you, especially since this isn't the first time.
Please avoid tit-for-tat spats in the future, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are, and please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post respectfully and thoughtfully in the future. If you had edited out the swipes from your comments, as the rules request, they would have been fine.
Thank you for letting me know! I apologize for the tone and inconvenience caused and will try to make the necessary edits/avoid biting the bait. It was definitely not my intention to start the flamewar.
I realize the parent comment had elements of flamebait in it, but this is the point at which the thread crossed into outright flamewar and ended in a downward spiral. That's not ok, and we've had to warn you about this before.
A nuclear reactor takes much longer than she's been at the office to build, and the Germans would still siphon off most of that electricity driving the price high nevertheless.
Wind obviously wouldn't solve it (since, you know, the energy prices were so high because the wind didn't blow).
The other actual solution would be something drastic like break away from EU energy market, is that what you're suggesting?
The more obvious answer would have been to invest in national infrastructure to connect the hydro in the north to the consumers in the south rather than nuclear.
Either way, she's responsible. The Germans are not. Their actions are an external factor she should have compensated for.
As others have commented on, it's not enough to just lay new cables and the lack of nuclear energy (or hydro or coal...) in the south is why the energy from the north can't reach the south.
Ebba Bush Thor has been a proponent of nuclear power investments for a long time. She has only recently come into a position where she can improve the situation.
She is not at fault for Swedens disastrous energy politics.
Especially if the country shut downs their nuclear power plants in middle of energy crisis, while there are laws in place that mandate energy exchange between different EU and EU adjacent countries(Norway).
Did they have time to handle it? No, adjusting your grid to be resilient to such bad actors takes more time.
When war in Ukraine started and sourcing cheap gas has become a problem - energy is is more than just electricity, although some of gas was also used for that.
Please, don't tie your economy to cheap gas from one source and try to bring everyone down with you when the access to it is constrained.
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...
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.
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.
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.
How is China filling a void in local energy production? Exporting energy over those distances isn't viable.
I mean granted, China's push to expand their solar panel production has led to affordable solar panels for a lot of home owners and communities, massively boosting solar / renewable energy adoption to the point that local energy grids are at capacity. Likewise, their push to expand production of batteries and cars has led to an influx of more affordable cars into Europe.
But isn't that the wish / goal? More renewable energy, less dependence on petrol and gas and the like? It's just that both the US and Europe didn't invest and scale up as much and as fast as China was able to.
> How is China filling a void in local energy production?
China is investing in power generation almost as much as the rest of the world combined. That energy is used by their massive and growing manufacturing industry. Bye bye EU manufacturing like cars.
Note China wasn't even a significant exporter of cars just 10 years ago and now they are becoming dominant.
Germany and the EU dug their grave. It would be hard to undo the damage now.
Energy shouldn't be produced under capitalism IMO. Decades ago the government owned everything energy, and it was better, just like back when we had real postal services.
Energy, water, sewage treatment. Nationalize all of it.
More like sustainability only seems to be possible with this crony-capitalism that is going on in european energy markets nowadays. It wouldn't survive nor pure capitalist market, nor as a state service.
As you can see in France, you don't make money with nuclear power.
Nuclear power is basically taking a loan (national security and trash which has to be stored at least thousands of years) with a huge risk (nuclear disaster like Chernobyl or worse).
Yet, EDF is deep in debt (and I am not even sure they pay all of the cost of nuclear power themselves) and probably would not exist anymore if it was on its own.
Now imagine infinite uranium and everyone using nuclear power. Where would they export now?
Risk is minuscule, and modern reactors actually shut down gracefully. Nuclear waste is an issue, but frankly - vastly smaller one than other kinds of pollution(CO2 comes to mind - and sulfides) used in generating or storing - which is the biggest current problem of renewables - power, and that can be stored in relatively smaller space.
This kind of misguided thinking has stopped us from utilizing nuclear power properly. It is a greatest stopgap we have before we find a way to store energy properly and can pivot to renewables.
Miniscule probability of high damage. Everyone, every power,has to decide on their own if one is willing to take this risk.
CO2 isn't a problem of renewables.
In Germany, the problem with renewables is massively scaling green gas production. Storage exists plenty fairly cheap, even for hydrogen (Underground).
because storing it in any way is extremely inefficient - the best solution we have is pumped-storage hydroelectricity with at most 70-80% efficiency.
Renewables aren't available 24/7, as they work in cycles in most cases(sunlight, tides, waves, wind - geothermal and hydroelectric is an exception, but latter also has problems with damages to ecosystem, and handling sediment travel along the rivers) - this is the most basic problem with them. Grid demands electricity in a way that does not align with the renevable's production, so you need buffers.
So you need to build both energy storage, and energy generation - both are source of pollutants, and eRoI over the whole lifecycle isn't actually that impressive. It is a way to go though, but we are far off from fully transitioning to it.
if you genuinely have to ask that question, you need to read more about energy before you start discussing it. and especially about modern nuclear reactor designs, and how catastrophe in Chernobyl happened(forced orders from above, basically a human failure)
because you have to build it - construction machines, concrete, transportation of material to construction site and all that - does that not produce pollution? Think of whole lifecycle.
also the amount of storage you have to build also damages the ecosystem.
total energy output per required materials over it's lifecycle. by orders of magnitude. and constant power output requiring less buffers to store electricity, hence less waste.
storage itself IS the buffer and will use less concrete than nuclear pp, except you want to build potential storage using concrete blocks or pumped water storage.
An not every materials production implies inherent co2 emissions.
most of them do, also have you heard about quantity?
the amount of storage build for spent nuclear fuel+energy buffer vs buffer for just renewables aren't even in same ballpark. Just do a simple fermi estimation. Btw - the white "smoke" coming out from cooling towers of nuclear power-plant are pure water vapor.
And that's not even going into MSFTs or other reactor types. just traditional ones.
Honestly, such blind faith is actually hurting renewables movement by giving climate change deniers more ammo to pummel the movement with.
You can say that, but on the power flow maps, it was quite clear. At the same time we were paying ~$1.5 USD for 1 kWh, we were exporting power to Germany (and other energy-unstable countries like Italy). Sure, better energy links inside Sweden could have helped, but part of the reason the price was being bid up so high was the exports to Germany.
It is debatable whether higher-capacity interconnects within Sweden can solve this since Germany and neighbouring countries need so much power that any feasible interconnect will be maxed out. A better solution to the problem is to change the electricity regions so that the areas around international interconnects where demand outstrips the supply get their own zones. This way the price on 'the continent' can be decoupled more from the price within Sweden and the extreme price swings and price discrepancies between the north and the rest of the country will be dampened. Swedish customers living within the new regions can get government support to reduce the impact of export pricing without those supports being needed for the current large zones (III and IV being mostly affected).
This blame game is all about supporting current political narratives about nuclear power etc. It's not really about the energy crisis.
Sweden's energy mess is all about 'free markets'. Back in the old days the state-run energy companies in Sweden produced an overabundance of electricity, mostly from hydro, making Sweden one of the cheapest electricity countries in the world. It was really common to replace wood burners with direct electric radiators in old houses across Sweden.
Then the British conservative party (equiv to the current Swedish administration who the article is about), heavily into privatisation, started selling the public utilities. One thing they did was split network ownership from supplier, so you have one company owning trains and another owning track, and the same for electric net vs generation etc. This created a kind of artificial market, because you can't actually choose with your feet what company has power lines to your house etc. So they invented energy markets and mock auctions and things.
Of course in hindsight all those privatisation thingies are no longer popular. But at the time the rest of Europe thought 'oh that's a good idea!'
Within Sweden the electricity is generally generated in the north and consumed in the south and the socialist governments with their nationalised utilitieshad a fixed cost in the whole country.
Interestingly it was the Danes who complained because they border the south of Sweden and can't generate electricity nearly so cheaply so the cheap cost of Swedish electricity was 'unfair competition'. In 2011 the Swedes had to scrap their fixed one-price policy and introduce 'energy zones' that get increasingly more expensive as you approach Denmark.
Fast forward to today and we have Sweden producing more energy than it consumes, but the utility companies get more money from selling that abroad than at home, meaning the Swedes have to buy their electricity from abroad! We basically logically from a market perspective have electricty flowing out of Sweden to be sold by the utility companies and then back into Sweden to be consumed by households.
And we wonder why there is another winter fuel price shock warning in the offing!
Can anyone name a public utility that was privatised in western Europe and for which a clear case can be made that it was a good thing to do (from the perspective of the country and the public)?
We can use the privatisation of water in the UK as a case study.
The water companies in regions across the UK were privatised.
Lots of big international companies borrowed lots of money to buy these companies.
The water companies then borrowed large amounts of money, secured against their ability to extract rent from their customers, and the owners used that money to pay of the debt they had incurred in buying the water company, and also paid it as dividends.
So basically the debt burden moved from the buyers to the company they had brought. Neat!
Now a couple of decades later you have these water companies with silly amounts of debt, the technical debt of not maintaining and investing in the infrastructure (they keep blaming the Victorians, but that is just blame spin) and an owner who would be happy to cut ties and let the water company flounder to be rescued by the taxpayer...
You are derailing my question above with a whataboutism here and I am being downvoted for pointing that out.
There are problems with a lot of things in the world, for instance the rentier economy you mention here. But I don't owe anyone a solution to that just because I want to know which privatisations are the cause of the Swedish energy production and price crisis.
Sounds exactly like Norway. In a sense I don't mind us making billions of selling our electricity to the rest of Europe. Problem is how it's increased prices domestically as well. So government makes billions, people suffer. Most people thus wants to "cut the cables" overseas, but I think a better arrangement would be to share the profits. Which we currently mostly do for homes, by having a subsidized max price, but energy-consuming industry is struggling.
> This blame game is all about supporting current political narratives about nuclear power etc. It's not really about the energy crisis.
In Norway there's a push for nuclear, but I also feel some of it is not honestly about solving anything related to energy. A vocal (minority I hope?) is mostly muddling the water as they're against anything green, so they know this will just stall other things for decades while things are being planned. Or they're against windmills and thus try to push this instead. It's a weird debate, where I certainly can see why nuclear is beneficial or why some people are against, but many of the arguments aren't in good faith.
It's the same situation as Norway. We also have a lot of hydro electricity, but the politicians decided to join the European energy market, and the prices have gone through the roof.
I don't understand why the Germans closed down nuclear power plants without also building a viable alternative. There are lots of people in Sweden and Norway that don't have a lot of money, and have to skip showers and live in the cold because they can't afford to spend more on electricity.
We were promised a balanced market where the cables would be used to cover temporary spikes and drops in power production. Now it seems that we are subsidising bad German politics instead, and they have not delivered on their part of the deal.
> I don't understand why the Germans closed down nuclear power plants without also building a viable alternative. There are lots of people in Sweden and Norway that don't have a lot of money, and have to skip showers and live in the cold because they can't afford to spend more on electricity.
That is what you get when strategical choices are done by ideology and not based on scientific facts.
Germany has a lot tchernobyl-traumatized boomers still associating anything tagged "nuclear" to the doom days from the cold war. These are a significant part of the electorate, specially among the Grunens.
The decision of phasing out nuclear was not rational nor strategical, it was a political choice to please a minority of voters.
Renewable energy with large scale gas power plants (and lots of other types of storage/temporary energy sources and coal for now).
It's just that energy is cheap when renewables are strong and high when they are not (and have to be filled with gas (green in the future), nuclear and coal, which is expensive and partly will be even more expensive in the future, thanks to CO2 pricing (which is good).
Electricity free market actions use a strange pricing scheme. Net puts out request for X amount of electricity. Providers bid. Then everybody in gets paid same price as the highest bid that made it in.
Cables connecting zones (or countries) are limited and move only part of the cheap electricity bids to the next zone. Thus more expensive bids make it raising the price. And there's a cascading effect how cheap energy gradually gets more expensive.
There's a live europe-wide electricity price map showing network events as well. It's very interesting to see how prices grade. And how big difference shows on one side if some connection between regions is down.
Local example here in Lithuania. We have quite fragile connection to Poland which seem to require a lot of maintenance for some reason. If Germany's renewables are doing good and link goes down, our energy prices go up. But if renewables are off and Scandinavian hydros are doing great, then same link going down means very cheap energy here...
Denmark didn't complain about cheap electricity, they complained that Sweden limited electricity export at times when the demand outstripped supply domestically. By creating 'energy zones', Sweden was able to decrease demand for electricity in parts of Sweden instead of cutting exports.
The national electricity transmission network in Sweden is still a public utility so the cause for the imbalances in the Swedish electrical grid is not due to privatizations but rather political decisions such as not investing sufficiently in transmission capacity, shutting down nuclear power plants and making it difficult to get approval for wind energy etc.
So it's clickbait about a polarizing issue of nuclear. In that case this is actually a fair criticism. There is a lot of talk within Germany that this should change, and there should be multiple zones. A lot here means "people in the energy business have talked about it for some time". I believe the northern states have already requested it, but states like Bayern are very much against.
The main issue is that on occasion the markets get out of whack, the price is cheap because a lot of renewable energy is produced in the north, but there isn't enough capacity to transport it to the south. There they then have to fire up e.g. coal plants but this gets paid with other mechanisms and doesn't affect the price. At the same time they refuse to invest in grid upgrades, so they have low transmission costs as well, and also block windmills etc. So in a lot of ways they get to have their cake and eat it.
Swedish government: "We'll only use electric cars!"
Also swedish government: "Please don't vacuum or do laundry on cold days when everyone has extra heaters on"
Also swedish government: "Everyone's income is public record!"
Also swedish government: "We'll give money to people with large homes. The larger the home the more money they will get, because they have more costs for heating."
Also swedish government: "This money is not income and not public record."
Sweden is a very corrupt capitalist country that is still riding the socialist image they created long ago. But that sweden died with olaf palme. Sweden today is a completely different thing.
Remember that the "corruption index" things are about perception, so if you have a good marketing department (and a police that never arrests anyone for corruption) your citizens will generally not know corruption exists.
I live in sweden. I've seen how police investigates corruption: "pin everything on the immigrant cleaner and pretend the managers who signed the budget didn't know anything about it" is the strategy.
Also the widespread racism that makes most people believe swedish people are inherently honest and immigrants are genetically dishonest helps to sell the story :)
Before you downvote me, go live 10 years in sweden, learn the language and meet people who are born there.
Sounds like The Netherlands. Hypocrisy. White supremacy. Living off of the image of a before time. Corrupt yet not willing to admit it. Blaming everything on immigrants.
I live in NL and a lot of what you say about Sweden sounds very similar.
Almost every violent street crime, street robbery, or armed robbery is perpetrated by people with some form of immigrant background. Both in the NL and in Sweden. (I'm a swede living in the NL).
Also western supremacy (the notion that western culture is superior in the world) is not the same as white supremacy.
Hehe dutch people feel very superior to everyone else because their budget isn't as negative as the other european countries, due to their country being a tax haven.
I ONCE met a dutch person who admitted that being a tax haven is nothing of great merit and it was so refreshing :D
I remember arguing with a (racist and violent) dutch guy who claimed portugal is a mediterranean country. I kept saying that you need to be ON the mediterranean to be a mediterranean country. :D
> Sweden is a very corrupt capitalist country that is still riding the socialist image they created long ago.
What I don't understand is how the people living here can't see this. It's absolutely incomprehensible how naive they are. I don't know how the state could make it any clearer that it does not share their values and is not what people seem to think it is. That Sweden died long ago.
That's what happens when government is pretty good for a long time and people get used to trusting it over multiple generations.
This is the biggest cultural shock for 100%-eastern-european-me when I'm exposed to western europe. Why would people trust governments, media and so on? I'll never understand it. Do your own due diligence, prepare for the worst and brace for a beating from government which wants to sell you out. Is it a good way to live? Probably not. But looks like it's the natural state.
They somhow forgot thaat their grandparents FORCED it to be good. That struggle is no different than any other movie now though, just something that happened. They things can be good without making them good. Some kind of just world fallacy on a cultural scale.
Was it really forced though? In US, it looks like society was (and still is, although results vary) on the outlook but force needs applied all the time.
Meanwhile in Sweden, although I'm no expert of it's history, it looks like government itself decided to do good for shit and giggles. And then happily stuck to it's promise for generations. I've a similar feeling about other somewhat naive countries, e.g. Germany. It was outside forces after WW2. And even for mid-19th century one could argue that uniting German lands under Prussia was a somewhat outside force from perspective of a large chunk of Germans.
You have to understand that at the time communism was a real option. And while we now think they lived in poverty and so on, they didn't really have much worse conditions than the rest of europe right after the war.
So governments had to do social reforms to avoid revolutions.
The fact that now communism is no longer considered a viable option by most people is why now capitalism can go unchecked and reveal its true face.
Yes, it was really forced by labor unions, tenant unions and other active forms of organization who were at the time very aggressive. People died over it. There were general strikes, sabotage and liter am armed conflict over it. Things would have gotten much worse if the business cartel had not signed the peace accord. That's why they did, because they were forced to.
IMO the trust between swedish government and people started waaay earlier when Sweden ended its imperial ambitions and the royal family focused on inside.
Agreements like above are important to labour rights, but it’s little compared to struggles other parts of the world came through. Just like labour rights are little compared to much bigger societal things like attempts to eradicate or assimilate whole ethnicities or force all sorts of social experiments on parts of the society. Where Sweden also has some history too, but it touched very small part of the society. And that society has very similar hostile feelings as far as I know.
The debate in Sweden is about the extreme spikes in price that you get nowadays and you see those extreme spikes in price in Germany as well if you look day by day instead of month by month.
A big problem with the "green energy transition" is that we're more than happy to build large wind-parks and promote solar (well, not in Sweden so much, it's dark in the winter), but we build little to no storage for it where surplus energy can be stored.
Storage technology is catching up quickly in terms of economics. It's long been uneconomical to run, but similarly to wind and sola, the prices are plummeting and quickly making the alternatives obsolete.
Remember how solar and wind were considered too expensive for a long time, and all of a sudden they were the cheapest thing available with their construction booming? We're on the verge of that happening with storage as well.
In Sweden, I've been in contact with several companies and associations which are raising small solar farms and selling stocks on them (so, there is a primary market for stocks on renewables). Investment is affordable and transparent and it feels "grass-roots democratic". The problem with solar farms is that this time of the year, they don't produce power. The only green alternative that would produce power is nuclear, and that one is out of reach for small private investors.... I don't even know if nuclear power stocks would be available in a secondary market .
As long as there is enough production capacity (using fossil fuels), it isn't a serious problem, even though not ideal.
Storage systems are economically viable only if there is a high price difference, especially when you have to pay twice the network fee (recently temporarily dropped in Germany).
CO2 pricing will increase the price difference with time (renewable energy stays cheap and fossil backups will be more expensive, making room on the market for businesses storing energy)
The past few days wind has been pretty bad. In the long term I think it will be good as battery storages are rising, but the next few years are still going to be tough.
People need to _stop_ thinking energy production is hyperlocal when, in reality, it is not.
And never has been.
Now, swedes are complaining, germans (i.e. me) are buying energy and raising prices. There will be a time, when they will import energy from us. Just as much as we exported energy to France when half their atomic powerplants have been shutdown due to no cooling water available.
Is it helpful to beancount each and any time more energy has been exported than imported or the other way around? No, i don't think so.
And yes, the next big challenge is to build grid-level energy storage.
Yes, with batteries. No, hydrogen is not the answer. Batteries it is. Get moving, stop complaining.
> Now, swedes are complaining, germans (i.e. me) are buying energy and raising prices. There will be a time, when they will import energy from us. Just as much as we exported energy to France when half their atomic powerplants have been shutdown due to no cooling water available.
Sweden is pretty self-sufficient in power generation, most times I've checked the electricity interchange maps we are exporting electricity, never caught a moment where we imported significant amounts of it.
I'd very much like to not pay exorbitant prices because Germany's energy policies have been misguided, I understand suffering it during a time of crisis (like the Russian invasion of Ukraine) but right now it hurts on many fronts: German's proto-recession (caused in part by high cost of energy) affects Swedish exports since Germany is one of our largest importers; extremely high energy prices shuts down our industry; consumer spending goes down because people get uncertain about prices and buffer more against this uncertainty.
I really like Germany, and have been impressed by the rapid push to renewables after you got fleeced by believing in Russia but it's hard to shake the feeling of resentment on how slow moving your bureaucracy is because of industry's power over your politicians...
I don't know about wind-power stocks, worth taking a look.
About energy storage systems, they fall into "risk investment", i.e., something that venture funds would go for. There is risk capital in Sweden but it is a boutique thing: small amounts, hard to find. The average Sven who can invest wants to invest in something safer. Since the government takes the majority of wage-earners' income in taxes[^1], and thus there is not much disposable income, it's up to the government to step in and finance big and even medium-sized infrastructure, and the same applies to risk profiles.
[1]: 63 cents (öre) on every kronor above the amount equivalent to approx 5000 USD/month that an employer would set apart for wages, including self-wages for self-employed people.
This is not a politician whose opinion anyone needs to take seriously. She's a constant source of extremely bad takes, the latest of which being dismissing expert criticism of her governments extremely poor plan to subsidize new nuclear construction.
Fwiw, nuclear phase-out was a bad call in both Germany and Sweden. New nuclear construction is an equally or worse choice at this moment, with where renewables and storage are today and the trend they are on - prices are already beating nuclear by a large margin and are plummeting, while nuclear keeps getting more expensive each year.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 231 ms ] threadThat said, it would had been better in Sweden if they hadn't phased out nuclear too! There is a electricity shortage in south of Sweden where industries are denied establishing new initiatives.
Sweden started phasing out nuclear in 1999 and has since closed 6 of 12 reactors.
- Barsebäck B1 and B2 was closed in 1999.
- Oskarshamn O1 and O2 was closed in 2015 and 2017.
- Rinhals R1 and R2 was closed in 2019 and 2020.
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A4rnkraft_i_Sverige#Avvec...
Sweden has an overproduction of energy, it is just generally generated in the north (where the hydro is) and consumed in the south (where the people are).
The 'shortage in the south' is just a political lens for explaining the high prices from the introduction of energy zones in 2011. Before then, there was one price for electricity in Sweden and this worked to the benefit of the consumer.
Stepping back, do we really want the south to invest in _generating_ electricity? And if so, at what granularity? At the kommun level, or the län? At what point is that granularity ok but the whole-of-Sweden granularity that we had before the privatisation push is not ok?
Yes, that's because all the industry had to move because of the no energy in sweden.
There is no energy shortage in Sweden. They can export as little or as much power as they want. But of course with prices being high that means they export a fair bit and that causes prices to rise. Which is causing Sweden to make a lot of money from this business.
If they want lower prices locally, they should look at their local energy market, infrastructure, and regulations instead of blaming the Germans for being able to pay market rates for energy to Sweden.
This statement definitely needs a source.
The EU have laws that require 70% of the produces electricity to be on the market.
Source, in Swedish: https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/om-elmarknaden/export-oc...
The last government at least put in place windfall taxes to pay us back during the massive cost increase in the first winter after Russia invaded Ukraine. We got compensated a few months later the prices went insane. The current government already said they won't do that, which is rather absurd since a lot of our electricity is generated by Vatenfall, a state company.
End users should not suffer under government / market fuckery.
Can you explain?
Now the situation is different, and physics applies once more, everybody is screaming, but reality be a harsh mistress- she careth not for the sobbing.
Despite it being entirely their doing from almost 15 years of the Conservative government.
"“I realise that nobody is happy when I say that ‘if we hadn't shut down half of nuclear power, we wouldn't have these problems’. But it's true and it needs to be said.”, Kristersson said, referring to the previous Social Democrat-Greens coalition closing several nuclear reactors between 2019 and 2020 as part of a policy shift towards greater reliance on renewable energy sources."
The Swedish Green coalition before them also did shutdowns like the German greens did. And now they have to suffer the consequences.
Note that a lot of people are very shortsighted and might think "energy prices were better with the previous greens/labour/etc". They need to be reminded the causes of the crisis.
The Greens do not get to have their cake and eat it when they are, in fact, directly one of the sources of the current german problem. Those 232g CO2/kWH as I write (and over 700 last week) is exactly what they asked for when they pushed for a full renewable energy grid backed by hopes and dreams.
Do you mean they are puppets of the Greens and as opposition to red-green government could not reverse policies they have considered harmful?
> directly one of the sources of the current german problem
From 2005 to 2021 it was Merkel & Co in the government making most of the energy-related decisions, yet you single out Greens as the primary culprits. Why? Did they sign Nord Stream agreements?
> It's also the greens today trying to exclude any nuclear project from benefiting from grants at the European level.
How not starting any nuclear project now is relevant to the current situation? It’s a strange claim given the time and costs needed to build a single nuclear power plant. It’s would not solve anything in the next 10 years at least, will be the most expensive energy on the market and add a dependency on a external supplier outside of EU (you cannot seriously suggest that we should get our uranium from Africa or Kazakhstan, so it‘s going to be an American one, same terms as LNG?)
You're incredibly defensive when all I have done is point out that saying "the greens aren't responsible for it" is a blatant lie. Especially when your purposefully ignore the next sentence, which still puts the blame on Merkel & Friends for continuing to implement it, in their case because it was lucrative to sign agreements with Russia for gas.(Especially this sack of shit Gerhard Schröder.)
>How not starting any nuclear project now is relevant to the current situation?
Aside from the fact that they have been on the offensive not just in 2024, but for close to a decade now (the Fessenheim closure has been demanded since 2016, green taxonomy started in 2020), because of this:
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE/24h
There has not been a _single_ day, a single month, a single year where the german electricity production has been under 200g eqCO2/kWh. Not a single one. The entire project has been slowly killing the planet, one day at a time, because technically illiterate and incompetent people have been leading your country.
>It’s a strange claim given the time and costs needed to build a single nuclear power plant.
While recent developments in Europe have been funny, to say the least (lol Flamanville/Hinkley Point C/Okilouto), half of these costs are caused by incredibly tight regulations, and another huge part has been caused by a gigantic loss of talent, which tends to happen when you demonize an entire industry for 30 years. There's also the fact that most of the recent constructions are new designs, which, yeah, require discovering flaws, unfortunately. China has 5-year construction speeds for nuclear plants using proven designs.
> It’s would not solve anything in the next 10 years at least
Considering renewables have not been solving anything in the past ten years alone, and will not solve anything in the net 10 years either, how about we start looking a little bit further than our noses and build _both_ ?
>will be the most expensive energy on the market
1/ lol lies 2/ lol renewables literally not working for a whole week in germany last week 3/ lol germany pushing for a common energy market where the price of the energy is based on the most expensive energy source available. Nuclear will never be the most expensive as long as we have gas burners for 400€/kWh.
>and add a dependency on a external supplier outside of EU (you cannot seriously suggest that we should get our uranium from Africa or Kazakhstan, so it‘s going to be an American one, same terms as LNG?)
Aside from the fact that I can _absolutely seriously suggest that_ and that I wouldn't take geopolitics lessons from Germany, thank you, we can also discover new sources of raw uranium (hell, even France is full of it, it's just cheaper to get it from Niger despite the instabilities), we can work forward on reusing and making nuclear "waste" useful (Breeder reactors have been an option, killing Superphénix was a mistake (but also the right choice from a financial perspective), keep it as a research reactor).
Germany has had an absolutely blind and ignorant world view of energy production, making it an absolute catastrophe of an energy market that gets covered by other european countries. It's not renewables OR nuclear. It's never been, and that a dichotomy that's been pushed forwards by morons. It's both. I'll be perfectly happy to turn off every single nuclear reactor in the world the day we guarantee all of our needs are fully covered by renewables ,which is going to require a _lot_ of overcapacity, or a globalized electricity grid (I thought depending on Africa and Russia was a bad idea?).
Renewables aren't the solution. They're part of it, and as it stands, are...
And I didn’t say that. Who is defensive?
> Aside from the fact that they have been on the offensive not just in 2024, but for close to a decade now (the Fessenheim closure has been demanded since 2016, green taxonomy started in 2020)
2016-2020 - Merkel government.
Overall most of what you say here can and should be attributed to conservative/socialist parties which were in charge and use green agenda opportunistically rather than strategically. Making greens as a root source of all problems is a lie, simply because they did not make most of those harmful decisions. Regulation is mostly not on them too. I am not big fan of German greens myself, but things should be made straight on this matter: German problem are not greens, German problem are boomers which do not care about change. Most of mainstream politics in Germany is captured by special interests groups, old dudes from some Verein, Kammer or other medieval guild, lobbying to preserve their moats and privileges. Nuclear power has lost the game to Fukushima fears and Chernobyl fallout, but it is a secondary matter. It could have been useful or not, that’s a matter of calculations deep in strategic documents. Last document I saw considered them unpractical. You are right, we do need energy strategy, but honestly I think Germany is incapable of producing it. EU should take it over, it has more momentum and political diversity to figure this out. And it makes sense anyway, not just to regulate the market, but to build.
Regarding the uranium production, yes, there are some expensive deposits in Europe. We have high population density so even if environmental concerns are addressed, they will cost a lot. Post-processing of the waste is going to cost a lot. It is by no means the same price as 20-40 years ago. Can it fully replace gas? I doubt so. Is it the only alternative? I doubt so. We are talking about 20-30 years, the horizon on which we may really see the effects of nuclear scale-up. The renewables will be much more advanced by then, grids more robust and efficient. We may not have the same problems as we have now to be solved by nuclear. So the question is really, does it make sense to commit to fossil fuel for another 50-70 years again?
I now see that you have been arguing in bad faith since the beginning and should not have wasted time, down to repeating exact arguments from the greens that have, so far, proved to be wronged and dragged Germany into one of the worst emitters of Europe.
Good luck with your dreams, knowing you're dragging all of us down with you.
I‘m not acting in bad faith, I just don’t see how is your argumentation relevant to my original comment above. What I would expect to agree with you is the causal link making greens primarily responsible for current situation. As I pointed out, I do not see it simply because other parties were long enough in the government not only to undo things, but to build something on their own.
And I honestly, being relatively familiar with the topics, cannot see how nuclear power industry could save us if it were restarted couple years ago. The reports from German research teams show otherwise. If you have more data on viability of this approach, please feel free to share.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please avoid tit-for-tat spats in the future, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are, and please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post respectfully and thoughtfully in the future. If you had edited out the swipes from your comments, as the rules request, they would have been fine.
Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit from now on? We'd appreciate it. Also, please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42433724 downthread.
A nuclear reactor takes much longer than she's been at the office to build, and the Germans would still siphon off most of that electricity driving the price high nevertheless.
Wind obviously wouldn't solve it (since, you know, the energy prices were so high because the wind didn't blow).
The other actual solution would be something drastic like break away from EU energy market, is that what you're suggesting?
Either way, she's responsible. The Germans are not. Their actions are an external factor she should have compensated for.
She is not at fault for Swedens disastrous energy politics.
Especially if the country shut downs their nuclear power plants in middle of energy crisis, while there are laws in place that mandate energy exchange between different EU and EU adjacent countries(Norway).
Did they have time to handle it? No, adjusting your grid to be resilient to such bad actors takes more time.
When war in Ukraine started and sourcing cheap gas has become a problem - energy is is more than just electricity, although some of gas was also used for that.
Please, don't tie your economy to cheap gas from one source and try to bring everyone down with you when the access to it is constrained.
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.)
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.
Then they could have chosen to refund their own consumers, if that's what they wanted.
China is happy to fill in the void.
I mean granted, China's push to expand their solar panel production has led to affordable solar panels for a lot of home owners and communities, massively boosting solar / renewable energy adoption to the point that local energy grids are at capacity. Likewise, their push to expand production of batteries and cars has led to an influx of more affordable cars into Europe.
But isn't that the wish / goal? More renewable energy, less dependence on petrol and gas and the like? It's just that both the US and Europe didn't invest and scale up as much and as fast as China was able to.
China is investing in power generation almost as much as the rest of the world combined. That energy is used by their massive and growing manufacturing industry. Bye bye EU manufacturing like cars.
Note China wasn't even a significant exporter of cars just 10 years ago and now they are becoming dominant.
Germany and the EU dug their grave. It would be hard to undo the damage now.
Sustainability is just incompatible with capitalism
Energy, water, sewage treatment. Nationalize all of it.
Nuclear power is basically taking a loan (national security and trash which has to be stored at least thousands of years) with a huge risk (nuclear disaster like Chernobyl or worse).
It's France 9th biggest export.
Now imagine infinite uranium and everyone using nuclear power. Where would they export now?
This kind of misguided thinking has stopped us from utilizing nuclear power properly. It is a greatest stopgap we have before we find a way to store energy properly and can pivot to renewables.
CO2 isn't a problem of renewables.
In Germany, the problem with renewables is massively scaling green gas production. Storage exists plenty fairly cheap, even for hydrogen (Underground).
Renewables aren't available 24/7, as they work in cycles in most cases(sunlight, tides, waves, wind - geothermal and hydroelectric is an exception, but latter also has problems with damages to ecosystem, and handling sediment travel along the rivers) - this is the most basic problem with them. Grid demands electricity in a way that does not align with the renevable's production, so you need buffers.
So you need to build both energy storage, and energy generation - both are source of pollutants, and eRoI over the whole lifecycle isn't actually that impressive. It is a way to go though, but we are far off from fully transitioning to it.
if you genuinely have to ask that question, you need to read more about energy before you start discussing it. and especially about modern nuclear reactor designs, and how catastrophe in Chernobyl happened(forced orders from above, basically a human failure)
even low efficiency (e.g. hydrogen) is tolerable when renewables otherwise would go to waste
also the amount of storage you have to build also damages the ecosystem.
It's not even close in the same ballpark.
An not every materials production implies inherent co2 emissions.
the amount of storage build for spent nuclear fuel+energy buffer vs buffer for just renewables aren't even in same ballpark. Just do a simple fermi estimation. Btw - the white "smoke" coming out from cooling towers of nuclear power-plant are pure water vapor.
And that's not even going into MSFTs or other reactor types. just traditional ones.
Honestly, such blind faith is actually hurting renewables movement by giving climate change deniers more ammo to pummel the movement with.
I meant the amount of concrete needed (nuclear ppl vs energy storage)
> such blind faith is actually hurting renewables movement by giving climate change deniers more ammo to pummel the movement with.
what faith? renewable vs nuclear debate has nothing to do with the question of the existence of climate change
Sweden's energy mess is all about 'free markets'. Back in the old days the state-run energy companies in Sweden produced an overabundance of electricity, mostly from hydro, making Sweden one of the cheapest electricity countries in the world. It was really common to replace wood burners with direct electric radiators in old houses across Sweden.
Then the British conservative party (equiv to the current Swedish administration who the article is about), heavily into privatisation, started selling the public utilities. One thing they did was split network ownership from supplier, so you have one company owning trains and another owning track, and the same for electric net vs generation etc. This created a kind of artificial market, because you can't actually choose with your feet what company has power lines to your house etc. So they invented energy markets and mock auctions and things.
Of course in hindsight all those privatisation thingies are no longer popular. But at the time the rest of Europe thought 'oh that's a good idea!'
Within Sweden the electricity is generally generated in the north and consumed in the south and the socialist governments with their nationalised utilitieshad a fixed cost in the whole country.
Interestingly it was the Danes who complained because they border the south of Sweden and can't generate electricity nearly so cheaply so the cheap cost of Swedish electricity was 'unfair competition'. In 2011 the Swedes had to scrap their fixed one-price policy and introduce 'energy zones' that get increasingly more expensive as you approach Denmark.
Fast forward to today and we have Sweden producing more energy than it consumes, but the utility companies get more money from selling that abroad than at home, meaning the Swedes have to buy their electricity from abroad! We basically logically from a market perspective have electricty flowing out of Sweden to be sold by the utility companies and then back into Sweden to be consumed by households.
And we wonder why there is another winter fuel price shock warning in the offing!
Can anyone name a public utility that was privatised in western Europe and for which a clear case can be made that it was a good thing to do (from the perspective of the country and the public)?
The water companies in regions across the UK were privatised.
Lots of big international companies borrowed lots of money to buy these companies.
The water companies then borrowed large amounts of money, secured against their ability to extract rent from their customers, and the owners used that money to pay of the debt they had incurred in buying the water company, and also paid it as dividends.
So basically the debt burden moved from the buyers to the company they had brought. Neat!
Now a couple of decades later you have these water companies with silly amounts of debt, the technical debt of not maintaining and investing in the infrastructure (they keep blaming the Victorians, but that is just blame spin) and an owner who would be happy to cut ties and let the water company flounder to be rescued by the taxpayer...
There are problems with a lot of things in the world, for instance the rentier economy you mention here. But I don't owe anyone a solution to that just because I want to know which privatisations are the cause of the Swedish energy production and price crisis.
> This blame game is all about supporting current political narratives about nuclear power etc. It's not really about the energy crisis.
In Norway there's a push for nuclear, but I also feel some of it is not honestly about solving anything related to energy. A vocal (minority I hope?) is mostly muddling the water as they're against anything green, so they know this will just stall other things for decades while things are being planned. Or they're against windmills and thus try to push this instead. It's a weird debate, where I certainly can see why nuclear is beneficial or why some people are against, but many of the arguments aren't in good faith.
I don't understand why the Germans closed down nuclear power plants without also building a viable alternative. There are lots of people in Sweden and Norway that don't have a lot of money, and have to skip showers and live in the cold because they can't afford to spend more on electricity.
We were promised a balanced market where the cables would be used to cover temporary spikes and drops in power production. Now it seems that we are subsidising bad German politics instead, and they have not delivered on their part of the deal.
That is what you get when strategical choices are done by ideology and not based on scientific facts.
Germany has a lot tchernobyl-traumatized boomers still associating anything tagged "nuclear" to the doom days from the cold war. These are a significant part of the electorate, specially among the Grunens.
The decision of phasing out nuclear was not rational nor strategical, it was a political choice to please a minority of voters.
Renewable energy with large scale gas power plants (and lots of other types of storage/temporary energy sources and coal for now).
It's just that energy is cheap when renewables are strong and high when they are not (and have to be filled with gas (green in the future), nuclear and coal, which is expensive and partly will be even more expensive in the future, thanks to CO2 pricing (which is good).
> the utility companies get more money from selling that abroad than at home
I don't understand how both statements can be true.
Cables connecting zones (or countries) are limited and move only part of the cheap electricity bids to the next zone. Thus more expensive bids make it raising the price. And there's a cascading effect how cheap energy gradually gets more expensive.
There's a live europe-wide electricity price map showing network events as well. It's very interesting to see how prices grade. And how big difference shows on one side if some connection between regions is down.
Local example here in Lithuania. We have quite fragile connection to Poland which seem to require a lot of maintenance for some reason. If Germany's renewables are doing good and link goes down, our energy prices go up. But if renewables are off and Scandinavian hydros are doing great, then same link going down means very cheap energy here...
The national electricity transmission network in Sweden is still a public utility so the cause for the imbalances in the Swedish electrical grid is not due to privatizations but rather political decisions such as not investing sufficiently in transmission capacity, shutting down nuclear power plants and making it difficult to get approval for wind energy etc.
The main issue is that on occasion the markets get out of whack, the price is cheap because a lot of renewable energy is produced in the north, but there isn't enough capacity to transport it to the south. There they then have to fire up e.g. coal plants but this gets paid with other mechanisms and doesn't affect the price. At the same time they refuse to invest in grid upgrades, so they have low transmission costs as well, and also block windmills etc. So in a lot of ways they get to have their cake and eat it.
Also swedish government: "Please don't vacuum or do laundry on cold days when everyone has extra heaters on"
Also swedish government: "Everyone's income is public record!"
Also swedish government: "We'll give money to people with large homes. The larger the home the more money they will get, because they have more costs for heating."
Also swedish government: "This money is not income and not public record."
Sweden is a very corrupt capitalist country that is still riding the socialist image they created long ago. But that sweden died with olaf palme. Sweden today is a completely different thing.
Remember that the "corruption index" things are about perception, so if you have a good marketing department (and a police that never arrests anyone for corruption) your citizens will generally not know corruption exists.
I live in sweden. I've seen how police investigates corruption: "pin everything on the immigrant cleaner and pretend the managers who signed the budget didn't know anything about it" is the strategy.
Also the widespread racism that makes most people believe swedish people are inherently honest and immigrants are genetically dishonest helps to sell the story :)
Before you downvote me, go live 10 years in sweden, learn the language and meet people who are born there.
I live in NL and a lot of what you say about Sweden sounds very similar.
Also western supremacy (the notion that western culture is superior in the world) is not the same as white supremacy.
Why do people do desperate things such as robbing other people?
I ONCE met a dutch person who admitted that being a tax haven is nothing of great merit and it was so refreshing :D
I remember arguing with a (racist and violent) dutch guy who claimed portugal is a mediterranean country. I kept saying that you need to be ON the mediterranean to be a mediterranean country. :D
What I don't understand is how the people living here can't see this. It's absolutely incomprehensible how naive they are. I don't know how the state could make it any clearer that it does not share their values and is not what people seem to think it is. That Sweden died long ago.
This is the biggest cultural shock for 100%-eastern-european-me when I'm exposed to western europe. Why would people trust governments, media and so on? I'll never understand it. Do your own due diligence, prepare for the worst and brace for a beating from government which wants to sell you out. Is it a good way to live? Probably not. But looks like it's the natural state.
I'm with you. I came fro the US. Trust is earned.
Meanwhile in Sweden, although I'm no expert of it's history, it looks like government itself decided to do good for shit and giggles. And then happily stuck to it's promise for generations. I've a similar feeling about other somewhat naive countries, e.g. Germany. It was outside forces after WW2. And even for mid-19th century one could argue that uniting German lands under Prussia was a somewhat outside force from perspective of a large chunk of Germans.
So governments had to do social reforms to avoid revolutions.
The fact that now communism is no longer considered a viable option by most people is why now capitalism can go unchecked and reveal its true face.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltsj%C3%B6baden_Agreement
> Meanwhile in Sweden, although I'm no expert of it's history
Stick to that intuition. Your story is far from accurate.
Agreements like above are important to labour rights, but it’s little compared to struggles other parts of the world came through. Just like labour rights are little compared to much bigger societal things like attempts to eradicate or assimilate whole ethnicities or force all sorts of social experiments on parts of the society. Where Sweden also has some history too, but it touched very small part of the society. And that society has very similar hostile feelings as far as I know.
Compared to 2022, the spot market prices in Germany are lower in both 2023 (significantly) and 2024. [2]
Seems a bit odd that the nuclear exit in Germany did not create large issues, but is wrecking havoc on Sweden.
[1] https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
[2] https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_average/chart.htm?l=...
It didn't have any effect until the nets and markets were connected. They couldn't outbid us before that.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_average/chart.htm?l=...
Remember how solar and wind were considered too expensive for a long time, and all of a sudden they were the cheapest thing available with their construction booming? We're on the verge of that happening with storage as well.
What about energy storage systems, e.g. using green gas?
There seem to be more green options than nuclear power.
As long as there is enough production capacity (using fossil fuels), it isn't a serious problem, even though not ideal.
Storage systems are economically viable only if there is a high price difference, especially when you have to pay twice the network fee (recently temporarily dropped in Germany).
CO2 pricing will increase the price difference with time (renewable energy stays cheap and fossil backups will be more expensive, making room on the market for businesses storing energy)
I bet on gas or liquids.
Except... it was not.
Here.
And somewhere, the sun is shining.
People need to _stop_ thinking energy production is hyperlocal when, in reality, it is not.
And never has been.
Now, swedes are complaining, germans (i.e. me) are buying energy and raising prices. There will be a time, when they will import energy from us. Just as much as we exported energy to France when half their atomic powerplants have been shutdown due to no cooling water available.
Is it helpful to beancount each and any time more energy has been exported than imported or the other way around? No, i don't think so.
And yes, the next big challenge is to build grid-level energy storage.
Yes, with batteries. No, hydrogen is not the answer. Batteries it is. Get moving, stop complaining.
Sweden is pretty self-sufficient in power generation, most times I've checked the electricity interchange maps we are exporting electricity, never caught a moment where we imported significant amounts of it.
I'd very much like to not pay exorbitant prices because Germany's energy policies have been misguided, I understand suffering it during a time of crisis (like the Russian invasion of Ukraine) but right now it hurts on many fronts: German's proto-recession (caused in part by high cost of energy) affects Swedish exports since Germany is one of our largest importers; extremely high energy prices shuts down our industry; consumer spending goes down because people get uncertain about prices and buffer more against this uncertainty.
I really like Germany, and have been impressed by the rapid push to renewables after you got fleeced by believing in Russia but it's hard to shake the feeling of resentment on how slow moving your bureaucracy is because of industry's power over your politicians...
what makes you say that?
About energy storage systems, they fall into "risk investment", i.e., something that venture funds would go for. There is risk capital in Sweden but it is a boutique thing: small amounts, hard to find. The average Sven who can invest wants to invest in something safer. Since the government takes the majority of wage-earners' income in taxes[^1], and thus there is not much disposable income, it's up to the government to step in and finance big and even medium-sized infrastructure, and the same applies to risk profiles.
[1]: 63 cents (öre) on every kronor above the amount equivalent to approx 5000 USD/month that an employer would set apart for wages, including self-wages for self-employed people.
Fwiw, nuclear phase-out was a bad call in both Germany and Sweden. New nuclear construction is an equally or worse choice at this moment, with where renewables and storage are today and the trend they are on - prices are already beating nuclear by a large margin and are plummeting, while nuclear keeps getting more expensive each year.