Yes, you just purchase your electricity with a market price contract (usually with added margin) and every day the next day prices are published around 3pm Finnish time (perhaps 12 UTC). Then just use the free APIs to load data and use the data to adjust when you spend electricity on what. E.g. to charge EV on cheapest hours, or load batteries, or when you fire up your electric Sauna...
These days the price is different for every hour, in near future they move to 1/4 hour pricing.
About 10% of finnish household contracts are market price contracts. Most of the contracts are kinda continuous (price changes every 12 months) or fixed (e.g. a two year fixed price contract).
In north Norway the electricity costs:
0.75 c/kWh
In south Norway the electricity costs:
307.00 c/kWh
In Latvia it costs:
1,240.00 c/kWh
It is like that every day everywhere in Europe. In Finland the transfer line to Estonia means a lot to our local prices. If we cannot get that line fully utilised (in normal non-windy day, and I bet producers want it to stay around 99%), it means that prices are fixed to Estonia (which you can see in that picture). If we get the line fully loaded, Finland divides to its own market and prices drop considerably.
In Norway and Sweden you can see multiple prices inside a country. It is because their internal lines are not sturdy enough to transfer enough electricity to south (in nordics it is common that electricity is made at north (e.g. a lot of rivers), but needed at south). The random energy (wind) has made this quite crazy. On windy days, the electricity price can even be negative. But wind energy is not reliable at all. But nobody builds or wants to run anything else as wind is easily the cheapest on windy days, and it is not that easy to always start and stop other facilities, which operate with losses on windy days. In general Germany jumped to a dwell, and everyone followed, and now we are where we are.
It's not that the energy is made in in the northern parts of Norway. Most energy is from the south west of Norway, but the southern parts of Norway has connections to other parts of Europe and is affected by the energy crisis in Europe.
But the part about capacity internally is true, so the average price in northern Norway today is 0.00061 EUR/kWh(yes, you read that correctly) while it's 0.35 EUR/kWh in the south. That's 574 times as expensive!
Norway is making a ton of money on energy export now.
I am not sure what you mean about static fences? Reindeer is semi-wild. They gather them for sure (with helicopters and stuff these days), but outside that the reindeers basically go anywhere they want. Yes, they have ”areas” where they should be, but they are, as mentioned semi-wild animals. I have cottage in Lapland and it is very common to see them on my property almost daily. I like it, but I understand locals do not like it that much, as basically they eat everything you want to grow for yourself (and at north, it is already hard to grow anything).
Christianization no doubt clashed with shamanism, and diminished its practices. Also made some of the Saami dialects written languages, and brought temperance - both hugely positive for cultural survival.
”It is alarming how quickly this has shifted to open acknowledgment”
The mask have been taken off. All we see is the cold face of war.
Something like that said the president of Finland. And the diplomatic paths were tried for months already.
We (the west) all know that sanctions are going to hit ordinary Russians, but also people outside the Russia. Nothing to compare with horrors in Ukraine. But it looks like we have currently no other option. Are we sliding to a new world war. That is what we try to avoid. We are already sending weapons but non-acting would seem we support the war Russia has started. Putin has went so far that it is unlikely that he will stop. We hope the change comes from the inside, and that he is stopped. I know, it is a naive thought.
This is a lose-lose situation for everyone.
At the same time we are in danger of escalating energy crisis, banking crisis and the climate change.
You lose something like 70% of the thermal output of the reactor in the conversion to electricity. Also the capacities a nowhere near large enough. Nord Stream 2 alone can transport something like 63 GW worth of gas. This is more than the total electricity consumption of Germany.
And for a home heater, 80% of the heat from the gas you burn goes up the chimney.
Larger energy capture devices can be more efficient. One highly-efficient fuel burning plant providing power to a hundred thousand electric resistive heaters can produce more useful heat per unit fuel than a hundred thousand small-scale self-maintained home furnaces.
Combined cycle power plants can be 64% efficient [1] at turning heat into electricity. And if that power goes on to run a heat pump, 1 watt of electric power can deliver 3-4 watts of heating.
And modern gas combi boilers can be 92-98% efficient [2].
The days of people throwing away 80% of the energy they pay for are long gone.
Could you give some examples for nuclear power plants that are using a combined cycle turbine? I was under the impression that the operating temperatures of BWRs or PWRs are nowhere near high enough for that.
I think you got your numbers wrong. Even in the US, you are not allowed to sell gas furnaces with less than 80% efficiency. High-end ones reach over 99% efficiency.
In the UK, air source heat pumps are pushed as a 1:1 replacement, with running costs basically the same as gas, in GBP.
I can’t verify that easily, but this doesn’t seem disputed, so the retrofitting is maybe not so much of an issue. There is of course the initial installation cost, but also presumably lower maintenance costs.
Yes, of course you can heat with electricity - and using heat pumps this is definitely the future. However, the amount of nuclear available would make only a small difference here. It should be much easier to just buy gas internationally and push forward with renewables.
You can also use the heat directly (district heating) without having to go to electricity and back. This limits the electricity output efficiency but increases the overall efficiency of the plant. It requires changes to the turbines and the buildout of a district heating system though.
Sure you could heat with nuclear directly. Actually that sounds like something that should have been done when nuclear was in fashion. But you would have to produce a lot of new infrastructure and most of all, new nuclear plants. None of the existing nuclear plants is suitable for that.
And that is sure, while keeping the remaining nuclear power plants in service a little bit longer might be a consideration (though unlikely), investing in new nuclear infrastructure for sure isn't. There, renewables are the way to go.
As you can tell from the map that's not really an issue. Nuclear power plants aren't in the middle of nowhere, they need access to an educated workforce.
They aren't in the middle of nowhere, but usually quite a bit away from city centers, for safety reasons. Too far for a hot water line to be practical.
https://waerme.hamburg/presse-media/pressemitteilungen/erneu... <- This is one such plant at the western edge of Hamburg, being remodeled for that use-case. Having recently seen workers from Statnett
climbing the masts in the rain to put pilot wires to pull new wires(80MW upgrade) on one half of the masts, while hearing the 50hz-buzz about 25 to 30 meters below. Crazy Vikings! :-)
But if you use that gas furnace to heat radiators in a fluid-born (usually water) heating system, you only need to install an electric heater next to your furnace and re-route the pipes to/from the furnace to use that heater in stead. Not all that humongous an operation.
Green hydrogen derivatives would make that theoretically possible. This is receiving quite a lot of attention in the EU at the moment. In practice, the stress is more on industrial processes and other primary energy use scenarios.
”The gallium was easily recovered for reuse after the reaction, which yields 90% of the hydrogen that could theoretically be produced from reaction of all the aluminum in the composite.”
”Although gallium is not abundant and is relatively expensive, it can be recovered and reused multiple times without losing effectiveness, Singaram said.”
Maybe? PTFE (Teflon) has a melting point around 325 °C; this plastic could be higher. The point of my comment was to qualify what the person above me stated.
