Swedish minister eyes energy crisis steps, blames German nuclear phase-out

https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/swedish-minister-open-to-new-measures-to-tackle-energy-crisis-blames-german-nuclear-phase-out/

by EvgeniyZh • 2 years ago

28 126 2 years ago

euractiv.com

wkat42422• 2 years ago

Easy to blame someone else. None of this is new, she's had more than enough time to compensate and Sweden is in the EU energy market by choice.

708145_• 2 years ago

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.

jamesblonde• 2 years ago

Sweden has not phased out nuclear. A large portion of electricity generation is still nuclear.

willvarfar6• 2 years ago

There isn't an energy shortage in Sweden?

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?

jillesvangurp3• 2 years ago

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.

InDubioProRubio2• 2 years ago

And they can opt out by choice. Bitter infighting ensues in the russian gas addict frack den.

rrr_oh_man• 2 years ago

Bitter infighting ensues in the russian gas addict frack den.

Can you explain?

MortyWaves• 2 years ago

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.

alecco3• 2 years ago

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.

ivan_gammel5• 2 years ago

[flagged]

lawn4• 2 years ago

Enough time?

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?

wkat42422• 2 years ago

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.

Xelbair8• 2 years ago

yeah, extremely so.

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.

tcfhgj19• 2 years ago

Who shut down nuclear within of an energy crisis?

Ekaros2• 2 years ago

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...

jillesvangurp3• 2 years ago

Probably requires many billions of investment that somebody has to budget for and pay for.

hurril4• 2 years ago

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.)

lawn4• 2 years ago

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.

jsnell• 2 years ago

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.

Ekaros2• 2 years ago

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.

markvdb• 2 years ago

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.

knorker• 2 years ago

Would have been a great opportunity to make money then by exporting their own nuclear power... if they hadn't shut a bunch of it down.

Then they could have chosen to refund their own consumers, if that's what they wanted.

alecco3• 2 years ago

The green coalition governments across the EU are leaving a huge mess behind. De-industrialization at a pace never seen before at peace times.

China is happy to fill in the void.

Cthulhu_2• 2 years ago

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.

tcfhgj19• 2 years ago

Maybe this shows the beginning of the end of capitalism.

Sustainability is just incompatible with capitalism

tcfhgj19• 2 years ago

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).

Faelian2• 2 years ago

France is literally making billions by exporting in electricity. https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/electricity/r...

It's France 9th biggest export.

Xelbair8• 2 years ago

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.

Havoc• 2 years ago

Think must people agree it was a mistake but blaming infra country difference on another country seems a bit much

mikl• 2 years ago

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.

hagbard_c• 2 years ago

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).

willvarfar6• 2 years ago

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!

hurril4• 2 years ago

Which privatisations are the cause of this energy conundrum?

willvarfar6• 2 years ago

Perhaps we can spin the question around:

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)?

pelorat5• 2 years ago

When infrastructure is privatized, they become for-profit enterprises. Things like energy and clean water should not be for-profit.

matsemann2• 2 years ago

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.

willvarfar6• 2 years ago

(In Norway is it the government making the money or private energy companies? Where do the profits really go?)

throwawayno03• 2 years ago

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.

adev_• 2 years ago

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.

tcfhgj19• 2 years ago

Germany has a viable alternative.

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).

pif• 2 years ago

... and introduce 'energy zones' that get increasingly more expensive as you approach Denmark.
the utility companies get more money from selling that abroad than at home

I don't understand how both statements can be true.

mantas6• 2 years ago

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...

svartor2• 2 years ago

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.

wewxjfq• 2 years ago

Title is misleading. She criticizes Swedish energy policy. Her gripe with Germany is that they only have one price zone.

locallost2• 2 years ago

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.

guappa5• 2 years ago

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.

AndyMcConachie• 2 years ago

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.

pelorat5• 2 years ago

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.

guappa5• 2 years ago

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

guerrilla6• 2 years ago

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.

mantas6• 2 years 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.

locallost2• 2 years ago

In 2022 Germany's nuclear plants produced 32.8 TWh of electricity, which was 6.4% of the load in that country [1].

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=...

guerrilla6• 2 years ago

Seems a bit odd that the nuclear exit in Germany did not create large issues, but is wrecking havoc on Sweden.

It didn't have any effect until the nets and markets were connected. They couldn't outbid us before that.

svartor2• 2 years ago

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.

https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_average/chart.htm?l=...

pelorat5• 2 years ago

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.

occz2• 2 years ago

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.

dsign2• 2 years ago

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 .

tcfhgj19• 2 years ago

What about wind power which is strong in winter?

What about energy storage systems, e.g. using green gas?

There seem to be more green options than nuclear power.

pelorat5• 2 years ago

I think that's a problem everywhere in Europe. We build wind and we build solar, but we don't build storage systems to go with them.

karmakurtisaani• 2 years ago

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.

dsign2• 2 years ago

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.

occz2• 2 years ago

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.

Swedish minister eyes energy crisis steps, blames German nuclear phase-out

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