Yes. But that is money the consumers don't see.

Electricity prices go up when you have access to customers who are willing to pay more. If grid connections to other regions are limited, people in regions with a lot of cheap generation (such as Norway) pay low prices. But if you add grid connections without increasing generation capacity, prices start equalizing between regions, as every power company tries to sell to the highest bidder.

Norway could power itself fully with domestic hydro. But it chose not to, as the power companies make more money by importing foreign power when it's cheap and exporting hydro when it's not.

> It seems like Norway just wouldn't have power if they weren't connected to other sources, not that they'd have more cheap power.

This is not the case as Norway and neighbouring Sweden have plentiful hydro. It's especially valuable as it can be regulated to complement wind/solar fluctuations, essentially replacing storage.

Obviously the presumably large amount of money spent to interconnect could have been spent adding local production and storage. It would be a waste of money if there was a reasonable path to local energy independence that was neglected.

It’s basic supply and demand. And by linking to other grids, you increase demand since there’s now more customers for your supply. What they have (comparatively) less is supply since the supply in those markets is shite in comparison to what Sweden and Norway have for their local demand.

But where? In Finland, at least, the land is relatively flat when compared with Norway and Sweden, and with a large rural population there aren't really any good locations.

In my local area, we had major flooding this spring because the hydro plant operators were sleeping on the job (or whatever they did instead of regulating water levels). And that was a simple 2m increase in water levels.

NO/SE have some more geographically suitable locations, but last time I checked, flooding them was considered too environmentally destructive too the local environment.

> You could use the ocean for the bottom level and an artificial reservoir for the top level. You're not going to noticeably affect ocean levels.

Then you have to deal with the problem of sea water corroding everything it touches.

> You might pump 10 billion litres of water, which is .02% of the volume of Mjøsa.

It's not the amount of water that you pump, it's the amount * the elevation delta. Where are you planning on getting the elevation delta from?

Neither of these challenges is technically insurmountable, but this is a field where capex + opex/KWH is everything.

I imagine the thaw/freeze cycle would be hell on the equipment to run pumped hydro storage.

Are there extant succesful examples of pumped hydro in cold regions?

They tried in southern Finland not long ago. At great expense and spending a lot of time they managed to drill down 6-7 km until they figured out that the porosity of the rock down there was so poor that it was impossible to make the project economical, so it was cancelled. The idea was to pump this heat directly into the district heating grid.

Either fusion or drill baby drill is necessary. Watt’s steam engine was absolutely horrible, but it was the worst steam engine ever built. If Finland builds the worst deep geothermal ever that still works, we can hope for better ones.

Yeah I know drilling through ~8-10 kilometers of rock is kinda hard… they know, they tried, maybe it now is a good political climate to try again?

I think this is exactly right, and people are focusing on the wrong risk with nuclear. It's financial risk, not safety risk, that is the biggest burden for more nuclear.

Finland was very very wise and savvy to get a fixed price contract for Olkiluoto 3. The final cost was far far far above its price, and France ended up paying that price. I'm not sure if you'll see a builder go down that route any time soon again.

Note that even if Central Europe did have sufficient energy for export it wouldn't really help during crisis. To get the energy to Finland it would need to either go thru the Baltic Sea via undersea cables or via Northern Sweden. We have seen that it's not necessarily good idea to rely on the former during the crisis as those lines can easily be cut, they have been multiple times in just past year or so by certain commercial ships "accidentally" dropping their anchors.

As for latter Sweden, doesn't currently have capacity for it and I don't think they have been very interested in increasing it, currently Finland often benefits from the fact that there isn't enough transport capacity between Southern and Northern Sweden electric grids so Finland gets some cheap electricity from there.

That's true, but it doesn't matter. It's not something we can change.

I don't think it's necessarily a failure of the EU for member states to prioritize stability and independence of their electrical grid.

Texas having their own grid is not a failure of American federalism.

You don't even need to open up R or Pandas to understand that solar is not viable in the winter.

Here's the official meteorology insitutions sunshine data: https://www.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/1991-2020-auringonpaiste-ja...

Here's some solar production data over the seasons in visual form: https://profilesolar.com/locations/Finland/Helsinki/

What is also important to know is during the winter is that while production on average shows numbers every day, in practice that production comes only during the few actually sunny days in December when the panels aren't covered in snow.

Go even a bit up north from Helsinki and unless you keep your panels clear of snow manually, you'll hardly make anything between Nov and April.

EDIT: Here's a reddit thread where someone shares real production data: https://old.reddit.com/r/Finland/comments/1i6onkk/solar_ener...

In case people want to play with a toy model: https://model.energy/

We have the problem of stable high-pressure polar air masses potentially parking over the country. Whenever that happens, we get 2 weeks of dead calm, coinciding with the coldest weather that occurs in the country. At the time of the year when there is no solar.

Not really, we're currently borderline. If OL3 goes down, and it's simultaneously cold over the nordics + northern germany and the baltics, and no wind, our industry will have to shutdown.