09:30
This will be the largest wealth redistribution in modern times – Swedes take all their savings to afford the electricity bill, the electricity underclass is born and the state has no chance to cover the cost, it will be hundreds of billions…
I certainly have 400 SEK/day now in December if you look at historical consumption and assumed price, it’s a sad bill that one would rather not pay.
Reduced consumption by 20% in November but it’s quite weather dependent, a cold December and there’s not much you can do. We have steady 18 degrees indoors and have gotten used to it but it can’t go much lower, there’s already talk of permanent relocation to Portugal.
That the state does not zero VAT and tax December – February is incomprehensible to me.
That the state does not take command over the export tap is also incomprehensible to me.
One can only hope that Surtrutn is right about La Nina because we probably need a miracle here with a warm January and February.
A really wet and windy winter in Skåne would be perfect.
09:34
Question to the thread about the acute power shortage – is it without any export at all or are we still exporting this week?
Someone wrote in the thread that Norway is pushing electricity into SE1 and SE2 and importing electricity from SE4 – that feels like a really bad deal for us?
Follow-up question – would we manage the winter without import now that electricity consumption has dropped 25% in some areas in SE4 and everywhere else one has to guess?
Can we shut off the export tap and survive?
09:51
Exactly Oraklet – if there is an acute power outage this week SE4 has only itself to blame for choosing to live in SE4. They have understood for several years where it was heading and should have moved but they chose to stay – entirely self-inflicted.
Almost makes you hope for an acute power outage in SE4 so we don’t have to export down there and our prices fall in SE3.
We also have almost all nuclear power in SE3, I think we should stop exporting to SE4 – why should we help those who chose to live down there. If they had been smart they would have moved closer to the nuclear power.
I also think all farmers who barely get by have only themselves to blame as well as all electricity-intensive companies – they have chosen to run businesses or farm the land and that is a choice if anything – they could have worked with anything but chose something electricity-intensive.
Not to mention the people from Norrland, if you choose to live up there you almost deserve to be deep-frozen this winter.
Or maybe this is a created crisis and prices have increased tenfold in a few years.
10:05
In the 90s the first wave of insulation came to our area in Bromma in Stockholm, wooden houses and the new black was to insulate like crazy to lower energy costs.
Those who went all-in lived with black mold after that, natural ventilation is quite important and mechanical ventilation probably costs quite a bit now in expensive electricity times I guess.
If you have 15,000 kWh/year in that area you have done a good job.
Not everyone was allowed to have geothermal heat pumps because they didn’t reach the radius to the next geothermal heat pump, solar panels are not allowed to be installed by Stockholm City so almost everyone runs LVVP.
There was talk about district heating but everyone had geothermal heat or LVVP so it was not possible to get enough interested parties when it happened. District heating has struggled a bit against the wind I get the impression.
My mother has a fixed contract and manages, if she had paid the spot price it would have been game over.
10:12
Yes, I understand your point and I also understand that most speak in their own interest.
The thread can be assured that when district heating is connected here in the house I will spend writing time on other things and turn up to 22 degrees 😃
However, there are many right now who are starting to sink. Sure, one might argue that they have only themselves to blame and have no redundancy but many already live on the edge as it is. This is a huge blow for entire groups in society.
I think it is important to highlight how bad it actually is in some places and I see very little reason for citizens to turn against each other. The focus should and must be directed towards those who caused this and then those who now have the ability to do something about it.
10:41
Easy to get stuck in something negative in today’s blog post when scraping ice off the computer screen, it doesn’t work 😃
Want to make a case for district heating. Now I know zero about electricity supply really but I’m learning as part of survival. Also understand that not everyone can connect to district heating.
The discussion has all these years been about geothermal heat, LVVP and solar panels. Where I grew up in Bromma they wanted to connect district heating early 2000s or something but everyone had geothermal heat or LVVP so it didn’t happen. Then they banned solar panels in the area, not quite sure what they were thinking there. Discovered it when we bought our house and I started thinking about energy efficiency.
District heating has worked a bit against the wind as a not so environmentally friendly alternative that above all hasn’t been as trendy as solar panels. Every municipality probably has a district heating plant almost?
In smaller towns quite a large proportion are connected and I think 90% of larger buildings and 20% of villas are connected (from memory and probably wrong).
The fuel is endless, combustible from the recycling center or residual products from the forest industry, surely other cool stuff too. They have filters that absorb some carbon dioxide but of course not the most environmentally friendly on the market.
However, district heating is an alternative energy source that does not compete for available capacity to generate hot water, they don’t use electricity for that.
Right now district heating companies can’t keep up connecting everyone and most have redundancy. It’s just that people have been tricked into thinking district heating is disadvantageous and everything else is advantageous – well done wind and solar lobby.
The truth is that a connection has probably paid off over this winter if you won the district heating lottery and have been connected now. Then you have a steady price of maybe 50 öre/kWh to look forward to.
Two things are happening now – partly the EU is apparently working on some kind of surcharge for district heating I’ve picked up in the thread?
If district heating plants shut down and customers have to go out on the electricity grid to chase heating we all probably understand how that will go – acute power shortage not only in SE4.
A justified concern since today we have shut down – nuclear power, hydropower, and combined heat and power plants in SE4.
The other thing is that if the state guarantees loans for connection and procures contractors for installation to achieve economies of scale but takes no cost, then I believe we would have seen a reduction in electricity consumption already this autumn.
In my home, heating probably accounts for over 80%, and if that can be removed from the power grid, that capacity is freed up.
Pros and cons, but I can only see advantages with this in the short term.
Then there are those who for practical reasons cannot be connected to district heating, and there solar panels, geothermal heat pumps, LVVP, stoves, and all other fun solutions are the way forward as it should be.
Here we have something concrete that the state can start working towards – the big district heating push in 2023 that might save the country from the major electricity collapse in winter 2024?
Then one might have to do like Southern Europe and take 10 years to implement mandates from the EU so that district heating is protected long enough to get this mess sorted out?
Is this enough to become energy minister and get an annual salary of 1.5 million SEK?
11:14
One more question that the thread can probably answer;
LVVP is quite popular, where we used to live almost every house had one installed.
Does it start to struggle at -15 degrees, or is it -20 degrees?
What happens to electricity consumption if all LVVPs simultaneously stop working?
I understand the cost skyrockets for the homeowner but how does that affect the load?
11:19
I’m guessing a bit now but I think they burn regular household waste too if it gets tight?
Supply and demand but now in times of inflation where absolutely everything has gone up and electricity prices have increased tenfold, the district heating plant I asked about will raise prices by 1.3 öre/kWh during 2023.
My thought is that municipalities hold tightly to their district heating plants and do not allow runaway prices because they have local anchoring. Otherwise, it would have been a perfect opportunity for district heating to triple prices in recent years?
11:53
One more question – how does the thread look regarding pausing consumption?
We are preparing for a worst-case scenario and are still hesitating whether to go skiing a few days the first week of January (plenty of room left and prices are reasonable) and trying to get an all-inclusive Christmas at the lowest possible price.
More time is spent finding the Christmas gift at the lowest price than usual and weighing the whole on a gold scale.
I think the electricity worry came early enough so that not all Christmas costs had been taken yet and the media whip up serious concern here so society at large should have acted responsibly and reduced consumption as it should?
After all, Christmas is quite a large part of the turnover for clothes, Christmas dinners, ski resorts, etc.
11:59
Yes, it feels a bit like we are moving towards some kind of solution where citizens are taxed heavily to reduce consumption.
That is how the current government thinks with the electricity support and that is the package solution for everything all the time.
If I may add something to your dystopian scenario, I think it will be an app where you top up kWh in advance and then get a warning when you have one or two days left, and if you haven’t topped up, the electricity is automatically cut off.
We had that in Egypt, and when you forgot to top up the electricity card on Friday a couple of times and sat sulking in the dark all weekend, it became part of the Friday routine.
12:05
I know this is brought up quite often and have wondered if you can disconnect from them if you want?
Or do you sign up for long contracts?
If you sign up for a long contract, it probably goes the other way and you reasonably know the cost?
In my case, we have geothermal heating but the pump is a few years old and needs to be replaced, so we will probably shut down the geothermal heating and if that doesn’t work, it will be a new geothermal heat pump, I think.
09:01
Oops, March 1, 2023 is after the high consumption months and presumably also after the most expensive months.
Can someone explain to me what the national trauma electricity crisis looked like?
When the state had 6 nuclear reactors and the price was 30 öre or whatever it was?
Surely the state then used its regulatory power so the price was low, increasing output when the wind power did not deliver?
What then is the difference between introducing a price cap, they had some kind of price control function two years ago?