08:43
The problem is probably that geothermal heating and air heat pumps also risk costing astronomical sums if the electricity price skyrockets according to the worst-case scenario.
Our wooden houses and older houses are actually built to have some draft, that is why they last so long, and since we live in a freezing cold country we had reasonable electricity prices and organized electricity supply.
It doesn’t feel right to blame the citizens for the current situation when it is the Green Party and an S-led government that created it entirely on their own, they shut down paid-off and fully functioning nuclear power, combined heat and power and hydropower.
08:44
Meaning that the electricity bill will be high even with air-water, air-air or geothermal heating.
08:51
Yes, the independent schools were also foreseeable when it happened, let everything be free but do not introduce a functioning control mechanism. Now they are starting to tighten it up with national tests but schools still get to set grades as they want. If the national tests controlled 90% of the grade, the fraudsters would quickly be weeded out from the serious actors.
I have probably always felt that Sweden was the best but in the last 10 years a lot of what made us the best in class has been torn down. Research, schools and ultimately the level of university graduates, maternity care and finally electricity supply. Especially with electricity there is a real risk that our electricity-intensive industry loses its strongest competitive advantage and that would be unfortunate.
Throughout this whole journey I have felt – why do they do this, such obviously bad decisions all of them.
Vattenfall of course, coal power, nuclear power and Nuon, they were completely crazy when it happened.
08:58
The reason they have to service the reactors all the time is that they are old and they will have to keep doing this.
When we had six more reactors there was redundancy in the system and it did not affect electricity prices if a couple of reactors were down for maintenance.
What might be needed is a discussion about whether it is in the nation’s best interest that politicians have been allowed to do this?
Maybe referendums should be introduced for this type of transformative issues.
Now our electricity-intensive industry is starting to lose its best competitive advantage so the damage to the country is potentially enormous beyond what we see on the electricity bill.
08:24
The shutdown of hydropower I got information about a year ago when I was working with dams for another purpose together with a consultant who was directly involved in it. He did like everyone else, complained and followed.
It is indisputable that it is the Green Party that has pushed for this – first came the shutdown of nuclear power, then the tax on combined heat and power plants (the ones that survived the carbon dioxide tax?) and then the review of the regulations for hydropower.
-all our controllable electricity production.
Six reactors were shut down, some brand new combined heat and power plant in Gothenburg was sold to Vietnam for pennies, there was one in Malmö as well, right? and small and medium-sized hydropower plants are starting to be shut down.
This was to be replaced with wind power which is directly harmful to the power grid as it can go from 0-100 over a day, a lot of regulating power is needed to manage it, and that is now shut down.
Texas got to experience how fun wind power was and California as well, in Texas’ case cold/frozen conditions were probably involved.
If you think that only we have gone through this, many countries in Europe have done exactly the same, the Netherlands have shut down huge gas fields, Germany has shut down almost all coal and nuclear power and so on it goes.
At the same time, everyone became dependent on Russian gas instead and Europe is still very vulnerable this winter.
If you avoid pointing fingers, the current government must do a couple of things quite quickly – invest in district heating in the short term and protect it, if district heating is also shut down it will be chaos because then 90% of multi-family houses and industries as well as 20% of houses will have to use the power grid for their heating. There are large economies of scale with district heating.
Then it needs to reverse the hydropower situation immediately, that directive is probably not enforced.
And consider those small Hitachi nuclear reactors, 2-3 in SE3 and 1-2 in SE4 to introduce regulating power.
Finally, regain the control function they lost when six nuclear reactors were shut down by keeping a thumb on the export button and controlling it so we get a proper price, today it is 0.75 SEK/kWh and we probably don’t have much more room to maneuver than a few years ago?
Of course, the EU is not immune and has been influenced by the Green Party and its counterparts across Europe and now everything comes with delay so the best is to do like southern Europe and simply take several years to implement something.