So a bureaucratic dispute between Sweden and the EU has led to an infrastructure project being paused.

This sounds... exceptionally uninteresting. Am I missing something here?

Or is this just a dog whistle for the HN crowd who like to complain about anything related to EU regulations?

throwa356262 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

From an economical and political point of view this is actually interesting.

The free market in EU caused the high electricity prices in Germany to be partially transferred to Swedish consumers, despite Sweden being a net exporter.

From a political POV, Sweden couldn't really stop this (or the government didnt want to as they were making bilions on transfer fees). And this cable would make things significantly worse for the swedish consumers

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cotillion 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Germany cleverly designed this particular variant of the 'free market' to ensure that access to cheap energy can't be used as a competitive advantage against their industries when they closed their nuclear plants. Having the same price in northern Sweden and Norway in winter as in central Europe is insane.

Now Sweden is stuck in a terrible situation where we're forced to quickly sell our excess energy to Google/Microsoft/Facebook before the EU will force the use of the bottleneck fees to build more cables to Germany.

	▲	yxhuvud 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Northern Sweden don't have the same prices as central Europe or even close to that. The underlying reason is that the transfer capability doesn't handle equalizing it. However, southern Sweden is a lot closer - Sweden is divided into 4 different price regions with insufficient transfer capability between them.

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silvestrov 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is a good live map of how Europe is partitioned into zones and what their prices are. Right now you can see a large price difference between Sweden and Denmark and also with Norway.

Britain is often suffering high prices, likely due to lack of capacity in connections with the mainland EU.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DK-DK2/live/fifteen...

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gpvos 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Europe is scrambling to expand its electricity network, which doesn't have enough capacity. I don't know how badly Sweden and Denmark are affected, but in e.g. the Netherlands it inhibits the move away from fossil fuel for both homes and companies, and even disrupts building developments. So, anything that delays this for unexpected reasons is news. Is it interesting enough for HN? That's for you to decide.

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geon 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Sweden is very well positioned due to well developed hydro, but when germany was forced to give up russian gas, more electricity was exported, causing record high prices.

Interestingly, the hydro plants are located in the north and the national power grid is not dimensioned for massive export, so the export to germany from the south of sweden caused a strong price gradient.

	▲	gpvos 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, I read that in other comments too, and it's the main factoid for me to take away.

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zdragnar 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most of the US isn't online yet, so I would expect this to be mostly people from the East side of the pond voting on it. In any case, onto the merits of the article itself:

Renewable, net zero energy requires massively expanding the grid to regions that cannot supply enough from regions that can. I.e. hydro during Dunkelflaute.

Here, we find yet another type of stumbling block in setting up such a system.

Yeah, not super riveting stuff, I suppose...

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villish 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Or is this just a dog whistle for the HN crowd who like to complain about anything related to EU regulations?

Only topped by the number of people who love to cheer for US vs China while living in neither.

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tokai 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You're not missing anything. Its extremely uninteresting and nothing out of the ordinary in the early phases of large infrastructure projects. I guess EU/Denmark/power generation is a sure thing to reach the HN front page nowadays.

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aaron695 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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