Finland set to become first country to ban coal use for energy | Hacker News Reader

Finland set to become first country to ban coal use for energy

newscientist.com

310 pointscsdfg785698 comments

Meanwhile, the new US president plans to create jobs with "clean coal"[0] (in a contest of oxymorons that one would win) and also "relax" environmental restrictions choosing Myron Ebell, a climate change denier as the head of EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) [1]

But it's the democratically elected president, so we must only watch as he destroys the world for at least 4 years for the sake of new jobs; we all know there is nothing more important for our future than creating jobs.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/energy-environme...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

"Creating jobs" was his mantra, because he says whatever people need to hear to give him what he wants.

I'm afraid Trump might be a relatively sucessful psychopath* whose primary goal is taking delight in crushing personal enemies ("losers").

*in the clinical sense

As the world heads to the future, America heads for the early 1900s.

China will become the leaders of the world by default.

> we all know there is nothing more important for our future than creating jobs.

I know you're being sarcastic, but it probably is. With a huge and growing percentage of the populace feeling left behind (no/bad jobs, no recession recovery, no hope), be happy that's all that happened so far is Trump was elected. Trumps rhetoric was all snake-oil (coal is not coming back b/c of nat gas, factories are automated, etc...), but the problems he, and Bernie for that matter, touched on are much bigger issues in the short term than climate change.

That's the whole issue though, isn't it? That he prioritizes short term policies over any long term thinking?

If we get to the point where climate change is a short term issue, we've already lost unless by that point we're advanced enough to colonize other planets.

No. There is no point where colonizing other planets is easier than fixing this one.

For people who lost their jobs because of moving production to China and illegal immigrants going to Mars is not really important issue. It is not going to return any profits in their lifetime.

I hope Trump works effectively on the issue of fading working class employment in America. He's been busily appointing billionaires(not 1 billion, plural billion!) to his cabinet. I think this shows what his policy focuses will be. Let's hope in 4 years I am proved totally wrong!

The current US President pushed clean coal too: https://www.grist.org/climate-energy/how-obama-went-from-coa... (until he didn't). During the third debate against Romney they fought over who could be more pro coal.

The clean coal issue is bigger than one person. Coal isn't just an energy source, it's a way of life for a significant chunk of the country. Not just jobs, but something the whole economic infrastructure is built around. Appalachia without coal is Silicon Valley without computers.

That's true about Appalachia, and it's gonna need to change.

That's true, but sort of misses the point. Most regions have a dominant industry, and these industries change over time. Silicon Valley, to take your example, used to produce actual silicon devices. Los Angeles used to be a major petroleum exporter. Those jobs left, but no one cared.

People argue over "appalachia" and make false promises about coal (coal is dying whether anyone wants it or not -- other sources are simply cheaper now) because it workers a swing demographic in presidential elections.

People shouldn't make false promises about industries that are not (and should not) come back. My point is that there is a huge incentive to do so, and Trump doing it isn't some dramatic change from what's come before.

Let me guess, you also think that putting a global warming denier as the head of EPA is also not a "dramatic change"?

Indeed before Silicon Valley they used to grow apricots in huge orchards in Santa Clara Valley. [0][1]

[0] http://www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org/ [1] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54c17ee8e4b0fe251ef64...

That's the artifact of electoral college. It is frustrating that the whole country policy is dictated by several thousand votes in couple swing states.

> That's the artifact of electoral college.

"Artifact" implies that this is an unexpected, or unwanted result—a bug, if you will.

But the inability of just a few big states to dictate national policy to everyone is the entire purpose of the electoral college. It's entire existence is to produce this "artifact".

For example, Clinton is winning the popular vote—in California, by ~3 million votes. If you exclude CA and instead look at the other 49 states (plus DC), Trump is winning the popular vote by around 1 million people (and the electoral college, too—CA or not).

That's just one reason we don't have a popular vote for the presidency: one state can absolutely dominate the rest of the country—effectively making their votes irrelevant.

I live and vote in CA, so while it would make my vote for president a lot more valuable to do away with the electoral college, I'd much rather let everyone else have a say, too, and keep the Republic intact—even if occasionally other states don't vote the way I'd like.

Other states' votes aren't irrelevant without an electoral college. They're just directly proportional to their population. Why is it fair to make Californians' votes worth less than those of residents of other states, just because more people happen to live inside its borders?

Perhaps we should subdivide California into hundreds of "states" to give its citizens more voting power.

It would be great if it was just Trump, but basically all the sensible enviromental moves made by America in the last decade or so have been done in such a way that they bypass any Republican controlled body.

Things that the corporations, cities, states or President can do without needing Republican buy in have progressed, everything else has been stalled and killed.

Trump's coal nonsense is a symptom, not a cause.

"Clean coal" isn't an oxymoron. Coal has (once sourced and delivered to a power plant ready to burn) two huge problems, one of which the stack of technologies known as "clean coal" does largely resolve:

1. Coal burning power plants produce particulate pollution that directly impacts human health. Modern coal plants pre-treat fuel to minimize pollutants and filter output to remove them from their emissions. The stack of technologies that does this is most of what the industry is referring to when they talk about "clean coal", and it does appear to work.

2. Burning coal releases large amounts of CO2 and contributes to global warming --- about a quarter of the US carbon footprint comes from coal. Supporters of "clean coal" allude to carbon capture and sequestration technology, but it's unclear how effective it is and unclear how widely deployed it will be.

My understanding is that it's reasonable to be skeptical of clean coal as an answer to (2), but not as much for (1). Problem (1) is enormously important: hundreds of people die every year because of PM10 pollution from dirty coal plants. So it's probably best not to adopt the rhetoric that "clean coal" is somehow fake.

> once sourced and delivered to a power plant ready to burn

This is the reason "clean coal" is an oxymoron - burn it as clean as you want, but enormous environmental damage has already been done to get it out of the ground.

No, it's a reason why "clean coal" doesn't fully address the environmental problems of coal. Perhaps you'd prefer the (unassailable) term "cleaner coal".

If "clean coal" is the right term for coal that is not as toxic in one of the steps of using it, then we may call "good hitman" to the ones who don't kill children nor woman; or we may call "positive genocide" the massive killing of only convicted criminals.

My grandfather remembers 'clean coal' being pushed in Scotland 70 years ago. Basically they washed the coal with vast amounts of water. Then at night they pumped the very dirty water into local streams.

Methods change, path stays the same.

Hundreds of peoples lives are saved from PM10 toxicity, &c &c.

Would have saved a lot more if they had never use coal tho.

In 2015, Finnish electricity production was as follows [1]:

  - 33.7% nuclear
  - 16.6% fossil fuels
  - 44.9% renewables
  - 4.4% peat

Wikipedia says that all the fossil fuels are imported (except peat) but does not cite a source. With a fifth nuclear reactor under construction (Olkiluoto 3), the import of fossil fuels would probably diminish at some point anyway.

The renewable electricity production mostly comprises hydropower (25.1%) and wood-based energy (about 15%). Solar power is not an option--during winter, every Friday is black Friday here. Wind power would hardly be profitable without the feed-in tariff [2].

Given the ecological issues with hydropower, the limited nature of wood-based power and how inapplicable solar and wind power are here, I personally consider nuclear power to be the most environmentally friendly option if we're to produce more electricity.

[1] http://pxnet2.stat.fi/PXWeb/pxweb/en/StatFin/StatFin__ene__s...

[2] https://www.energiavirasto.fi/web/energy-authority/feed-in-t...

> Solar power is not an option--during winter, every Friday is black Friday here

Isn't total "total daylight time per year" constant across the earth?

Probably, but transporting and storing energy are two things that are still very expensive and bad for efficiency.

With few hours of daylight in winter times you simply don't generate enough electricity to cope with the demand. It's a hard thing to solve too, the darker and colder it is the more energy people need (light and heating).

> It's a hard thing to solve too, the darker and colder it is the more energy people need (light and heating).

I believe peak electricity use is during the bright, hot summer when everyone needs to run the A/C.

In warmer climates, yes. Not in Finland, however. Here's a graph of power use and generation in 2015:

http://www.fingrid.fi/EN/ELECTRICITY-MARKET/LOAD-AND-GENERAT...

The way I read it, OP was claiming that in any given place electricity demand goes up precisely when solar generation goes down.

Which may be true in Finland but is false in general.

Almost nobody in the Nordic countries has A/C. Facebook even built a data center in northern Sweden since a lot of the server cooling requirements can be handled by just pumping in cool outdoor air.

Same thing by Google in Finland but using the sea water from the Gulf of Finland which doesn't get that warm even during the hottest of summers. They used an old closed paper mill so they had large structures ready to make it cheap too.

https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/ha... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VChOEvKicQQ

Weirdly, there's also projects that extract heat from the water in Finnish Fjords:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-31506073

If only power storage were simple.

> Isn't total "total daylight time per year" constant across the earth?

More or less (depending on how you measure).

Issues:

1) Storage. If you live at lat 65 you need extreme amounts of heat and lighting in winter, and you need almost no heat and lighting in summer. Massive seasonal energy storage solutions such as aquifers do exist but they are expensive. This is why hydro is so good - it's both renewable AND is perfect for seasonal storage.

2) Incidence. Total daylight that has a good incidence for catching isn't constant across the earth. A lot of the "extra" sunlight that northern finland gets in the summer is in the wee hours of the night. It's not exactly scorching from zenith then. When the sun sits ON the horizon for a few hours, even a small hill on the horizon will ruin your solar power.

I would also hazard a guess that the closer to the horizon the Sun is located, the more atmosphere it needs to cross to reach you (because of the lower angle) which results in higher absorption rate before it reaches you (simply said, it's a bit darker the closer you get to the poles). I'm mostly guessing though, so please correct me.

ps: I remember seeing the sun in northern Norway at midnight in the summer long time ago when I was visiting. Was just a little bit brighter than the moon usually is.

pps: This is the same effect as what the sun looks like just before sunset around the rest of the world.

> Was just a little bit brighter than the moon usually is.

I think that the difference between the minimum brightness of the sun (at the horizon) and the full moon is still a factor over 100.000 :)

Eyes are remarkably nonlinear.

I guess in autumn and winter the sky in Finland is often covered with clouds and the sunlight is reflected back to space. So you cannot get as much energy as some southern desert gets.

Solar power (heat/electricity) might not be huge during the winter, but the solar power levels produced in the southern parts of Finland are similar to the ones produced in Northern Germany. http://ilmastokatu.fi/en/solar-power-apartment-buildings/

This article paints it as if we're replacing it all with wind power. Actually we have quite big nuclear power plant projects underway. Still, sunsetting coal power is a great target and can't come fast enough.

Also, it's important to remember the electricity is a small proportion of total energy use, which is dominated by heating and transport; heating's usually gas or heavy fuel oil, transport is usually petrol or diesel. And by 'dominated', I mean about 2/3 of all energy use goes towards it.

Yes, migrating to electric heating and transport is possible. Over-unity fuel pumps are teh awesome, and electric transport is almost workable (but not quite yet for anything more than short distances); but we're still going to be talking about a massive increase in electricity consumption, and most countries' electrical grids can't handle that.

So, I agree with you --- coal is foul stuff, it needs to die, this is an all senses a good thing; but it's still just a small step on the path to getting off fossil fuels.

electric transport is almost workable

By this I guess you mean electric road transport? Because we've had electrified rail for quite some time now.

>electric transport is almost workable (but not quite yet for anything more than short distances)

You mean in use in every single country for trains since the 60s ?

Auckland NZ was using diesel trains until 2015

Wellington has been electric for decades hasn't it? I think they even used to have electric buses running on overhead wires.

In Wellington our commuter trains have always been electric. Auckland has finally caught up :) We still have electric trolley buses, but sadly their days are numbered. Apparently keeping up the overhead electric infrastructure is too expensive.

Pretty sure we still are as I recently saw some down at at the port. We love to point out that Auckland is actually ahead as we have the most x per capita. A Reddit thread on this phenomenon recently concluded that Auckland has the most per capita per capita.

As a Swede I was shocked when I moved to Scotland and found out that they have a lot of diesel trains.

Sweden has a whole bunch of not-yet-electrified lines - just not where most people are: http://www.jarnvag.net/component/customproperties/tag?cp[omr...

Yeah I probably have some confirmation bias having travelled mainly inside the Stockholm/Sörmland region and from Stockholm to Gothenburg. I was very surprised to see that Edinburgh to Glasgow is not electrified for example.

Work to electrify Edinburgh to Glasgow is already in progress. Electric trains will be running by 2017.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_to_Glasgow_Improveme...

You have diesel trains in Sweden too. On small lines like Kristinahamn to Ludvika and in the north. Various places where there is too little traffic to make it economic to electrify. Same here in Norway in the north.

The difference in the UK is that significant, high traffic lines are still diesel as well.

The Great Western [1] line from London to the west of England and South Wales is a good example that is finally being electrified, but is still years behind schedule.

The UK is still catching up after decades of underinvestment in rail infrastructure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Western_Main_Line

I know. And I find it personally very dispiriting as I come from Swindon and my grandfather worked a steam hammer in the forge when the railway works was still the biggest employer in the town. The old GWR had some world leading ideas at times and the modern organizations that bear the name don't compare.

Sorry, my bad: I mean road transport.

Electric trains work really well, and there should be more of them. (I live in Zurich now. Every time I go back to Britain I look at a diesel train and think 'how quaint.')

But there's an awful lot of bulk transport that still goes by road.

We (Finns) still use diesel engines for the more remote/less used lines. Mostly for industry or seasonal routes (think lapland during the winter etc.). Just not economically feasible to electrify all the less used routes.

If Finland is anything like Sweden, most heating is either electric, increasingly with heat pumps, or municipal central heating. The latter is often from gas or oil fired plants, but can be replaced with bio-fuels, garbage incineration or industrial waste heat if available.

Indeed. Most apartment buildings and some houses in cities use municipal central heating. Otherwise it's common to have electrical heating (though older houses sometimes use oil), and people tend to heat with wood stoves in addition.

Instead of "fuel pumps", did you mean "heat pumps"?

I did, yeah, sorry.

Here's the government's current projection for total energy consumption in Finland between 2015 and 2030 (if the link works): http://www.hs.fi/webkuva/taysi/560/1479969511874?ts=73

It's in Finnish I'm afraid. The legend from top to bottom is as follows (sorry, some terms used are unfamiliar to me):

-Oil, incl. biocomponent (?? Biodiesel etc?)

-coal

-Coke, incl. gas

-Natural gas

-Nuclear energy

-Net electric import

-Hydroelectric

-Wind- and solar power

-Peat

-Wood fuels

-Other

Basically the changes vs. today seem to be:

-roughly 5-7% increase in total energy consumption

-Cessation of coal use and net electricity imports

-The above are mainly compensated for by increased reliance on nuclear power and wood fuels.

-In percentage terms, solar and wind are projected to increase significantly, but total contribution in 2030 is still projected to be quite small.

"heating is usually gas or heavy fuel ois" is actually false. In fact, over 60% of heating in Finland was produced with renewable energy. Majority of the industrial and district heating is produced with wood and other industrial wood-based excess materials.

Does Finland have a lot of coal anyway? It's easy to ban something you don't really have. Also easy for a rich country to ban coal use, but you can't expect poorer countries to do the same, especially if by coal is how rich countries built their industries. And now they are being told to get rid of coal and replace them with wind or solar power, usually conveniently offered by foreign companies.

A lot of poorer countries are doing this voluntarily. Coal is not a necessity to becoming industrialised

We have none whatsoever. Geologically, Finland rests on the Baltic shield which consists of very old rock, and it's top has been scoured clean of any newer rock by successive ice ages. If you dig down 50cm from the surface soil on which I'm standing right now, you get to granite baserock that is almost two billion years old.

Rock this old does not have any fossil fuel deposits, since the first such deposits were formed some ~360M years ago.

The closest thing Finland has to fossil fuels are peat bogs. And those are currently rated "slowly renewable" by both the Finnish state and the EU. This is half true -- they do replenish, but only at a rate of millimeters per year. Typically, it would take some 4000 years for a harvested peat bog to return to it's original thickness.

IMO peat really should be classified as a fossile fuel.

That is a good suggestion, it sort of implies it's almost a fossil even though it was likely a typo.

A coal ban by 2030 would not make Finland the first country to do so. France is closing all coal-fired plants by 2023, and the UK by 2025.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/09/britains...

Closing all plants isn't the same as a ban though, technically. If the plants close because of e.g. poor profitability/tax penalties but without a ban, they are still free to reopen (or one is free to build a new one).

In the UK case, at least, it is an actual ban. Coal-burning power plants are legally required to close by 2025.

(Although it's likely that most or all of the remaining plants will have closed before 2025 anyway)

Technically that's not correct about it being an "actual ban", as your own article link explains, but it's close enough to correct that it's probably not worth quibbling about.

Iceland already uses no coal for electricity...

From googling around it sounds like there are a number of others too, though most of those that don't burn coal seem to burn a lot of oil instead. Iceland just uses hydro power and geothermal energy, though.

Electricity grids in countries like Norway and New Zealand run almost entirely on renewables. In fact, in Norway it's something like 99%. But of course, what those countries have in common is relatively small populations with lots of natural resources to draw on.

France is over 75% nuclear with another 20% being met by renewables.

The UK reached 46% from nuclear & renewables in 2015, with most of the rest being met from gas turbines.

New Zealand is at about 80% and that's just for generating electricity.

Large countries like the US also have abundant natural resources, between wind, solar, and nuclear we should have no energy concerns.

Unlike small countries the US also had the ability to diversify where power is generated and had more physical space for wind/solar farms.

I think all the electricity production in Sweden is either Hydro or Nuclear (+ token amounts of wind), but our hydro also acts as a buffer to Denmark's wind power, so sometimes we get Danish coal power imports instead to make up for it...

Sweden in 2014 produced about 64 TWh (42%) from large hydro and 62 TWh (41%) from nuclear. The rest came from wind 12 TWh (7.9%) and from other 13 TWh (8.5%), other being mostly biofuel and waste.

https://bjelkeman.wordpress.com/2015/04/17/sustainable-energ...

The electricity use is only 123 TWh of a total energy use of 379 TWh (2011). Of which 127 TWh is still coal and oil products. So still a lot of work to be done, primarily in transport.

https://bjelkeman.wordpress.com/2014/12/10/sustainable-energ...

Meanwhile, that same new energy strategy announced by the government also effectively halts wind power construction until an "inpartial", "objective", "thorough", etc. study investigating why wind power causes people to become sick is done. Also, bats. Yes. One of the parties in the current government is a "conservative populist" party where party representatives have been claiming that wind power causes bats to explode. Yes, really.

EDIT: Slightly less inflammatory..

Wind power isn't doing very well here in Finland though. It is 100% propped up by subsidies. The government will pay them 85,30 €/MWh for the electricity generated by wind power even though the market price is somewhere around 30 €/MWh so they basically get more from subsidies then from the electricity they actually sell. The current projection is that with the current subsidies wind power will have cost the tax payer around 3 billion euros by 2030.

Though the True Finns have a very wrong approach to this (trying to ban building wind power because it causes "harm" to people and other unscientific bullshit) instead of just dismantling the harmful subsidies (or at least lowering them to something sensible). Or the most sensible approach of taxing the things we don't want (polluting energy. coal etc.) and let the free markets sort the rest out.

The (spot)-market price on Nordpool is mostly related to variable costs, and doesn't really cover construction and other fixed costs.

That energy generators need a higer price than spot-price doesn't really warrant calling it "subsidies".

In Denmark land-wind is the cheapest (LCOE) energy.

Ok but why are we building nuclear power with 100% private money and subsidise wind? It literally makes no sense. The system should work the other way. Tax what we don't want and let the free markets work the rest out. Now we are grossly propping up a form of electricity that doesn't work very well here in Finland.

If we can do multi billion euro nuclear power projects with private money in other energy production ways why can't the wind?

As a side note the guaranteed price ends after 12 years. Do you know what happened when the first wind company that got to that 12 years did? It went bankrupt the same day. There is literally no way they can compete with the other wind power companies that get the subsidy. Basically we are going to get a nice "start wind power company" -> "take subsidies for 12 years" -> "go bankrupt" -> "start a new one" loop.

Finland doesn't guarantee prices for nuclear for some period? That sounds unlikely. The Hinkley Point plant in the UK was recently guaranteed a very high "strike price" to get it built

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

And those "subsidies" are free market! In Denmark power generators submit competing bids on the lowest required guaranteed price when building new wind power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horns_Rev#Horns_Rev_3_offshore...

No we don't. The heavy industrial corporations and some of the larger energy corps got together and formed a company called TVO. TVO got a few billion euros of loan and started to build nuclear plants (the current one under construction is Olkiluoto Unit 3). Only subsidy I know of is for the insurance in case of a nuclear accident. Though TVO already owns Olkiluoto 1 and 2. As I understand the third reactor on the same site doesn't have any effect on the insurance.

The nuclear plants in Finland are built for a real need (cheaper electricity) without any viable alternatives if we want to limit reliance to other countries (ask the east block countries how fun it is to rely on Russian gas for your electricity/heating during the winter). In some countries you would probably use coal or gas but as Finland doesn't have any of those (literally 0 natural gas, oil or coal reserves) we have had to rely on nuclear (for which we have fuels to burn in the bedrock). We have already built dams pretty much everywhere we can so hydro cannot be expanded in any meaningful way. Solar and wind just don't work as baseline power for heavy industry in Finland (at least not yet. The battery technology just isn't there). Solar is useless during the winter and wind has too much variance.

Also due to the delays in construction of the new reactor (thanks Areva and Siemens) we have been very close to actually running out of power (with the connections to Sweden and Russia maxed out) and have had to resort to reserve gas power plants with MWh prices in the hundreds of euros as most plans for the grid have included the new reactor being done in time.

In Finland the subsidies for wind power is just flat selling price into the grid. You can take subsidy on building too but then you cannot get the one for selling electricity (which is much better with the current prices)

Well, I looked up "Mankala model", so for TVO and Olkiluoto the investors and the consumers are largely the same - which means that the investors/consumers will just directly over-pay for the electricity, by having a larger total cost (mostly the capital costs) than what they could have paid by buying the electricity on Nordpool. Or conversely, they will never recoup their investment if they just sell the energy on Nordpool.

Them overpaying doesn't always happen (They don't use the Mankala model for the fun of it. It adds risk due to the capital investment but has been worth it over the long term up to date at least). As I understand both Olkiluoto 1 and 2 have been cheaper then buying from Nordpool to the owners (one of the reasons they wanted the third one). They of course also sell any energy they don't use into Nordpool. These are mostly private companies. They wouldn't do it if there is no profit in it. Why take risks of billions of euros if they stand to gain nothing?

In Finland 40% of energy produced is done under the Mankala model. Out of wind energy the percentage is 57% (so over the average).

Also one of the reason why the price in Finnish Nordpool has been so high lately is the delays in Olkiluoto 3. The actual estimated cost of production (so cost of running) is 3€/MWh. With the price in Nordpool around 30 to 50 €/MWh they stand to make 25 to 45 €/MWh of profit. If they can offload a good chunk of the capital costs of building the reactors to the people buying from Nordpool and get their own power needs at a very big discount (basically the 3€/MWh + (whatever their share of the capital costs is - money made out of selling into the grid) it is profitable to the owners even if the plant itself didn't make money directly.

Well, the Mankala model is not a problem.

And most likely Olkiluoto 3 had a reasonable business case before the cost overruns. So the question is more or less: is the real price of nuclear the price that was hoped for Olkiluoto 3 or the actual price that will be paid? (maybe mostly by Areva and not TVO). The "strike price" of Hinkley makes me think that it is probably the latter.

And while the trends look favorable for solar and wind, they seem less favorable for Nuclear - cf.

Historical summary of EIA's LCOE projections (2010–2016) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

The question is what happens to _all_ the central power plants once the cost of transmission is more expensive than the cost of generation of solar power.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxryv2XrnqM&feature=youtu.be...

For most countries this will first happen with wind. The locations of power plants will still be used because they connect large parts of the grid. So if we have batteries that allow using purely renewables (capacity high enough to overcome days with little production), they could be placed at the former plant sites, probably easiest for the grid.

Batteries would then of course also play a large role to control demand (in-house batteries to even out spikes), but there's likely still need for utility companies to balance out supply/demand for some parts of the day which would likely lead to large battery arrays at these locations.

Cost of transmission already more then the cost of power in many places in Finland. Though I think that is mostly due to the subsidies in generation side being much larger then transmission.

For example for me transmission is 0.022€/kWh while power itself costs 0.03€/kWh. This is with a 2 year contact. With 1 year contract it would be closer 0.04€/kWh

This is with 1x25A (quite common for apartments/flats) connection. The transmission fees go up in some networks if you have more (like the very common 3x25A for houses)

I happen to live in one of the cities where the city still owns the company that owns the networks so I have one of the cheapest transmission fees in the country. For example my parents who live ~50km away from me have to pay 0.0398€/kWh for transmission. They used to have it cheaper then I did but the network was bought by a foreign owned company (Caruna) which is now pumping out the legal maximum amount of profit from transmissions (it is regulated) by gaming the system by taking stupid loans (paying multiple times market rate in interest) from their parent company to make the company never make profit (price hikes are partly connected to profits)

Privatisation of the electric grid (the transmission part) is just plain stupid. It is a natural monopoly as nobody is going to build a second grid where an existing one already is available and I really don't believe capitalism is any good in that situation. The solution for power generation here in Finland is good as you can buy your electricity from anyone but you still have to use the local grid and thus pay to the local (monopoly) power grid company for transmission. This is one of the things where I think we have failed here in Finland big time. Should have just kept the network public and outsourced the maintenance and building to private companies trough competitive tendering.

edit: And solar is just plain stupid in Finland. Basically for half the year it is between ok and great. For the other half it is somewhere between bad and 0 electricity generation. And the time when you get 0 energy from your solar panels is the time when it is the coldest and need the most energy. So building solar here just leads to having to build double energy production and hikes the price of electricity up for no good reason.

Some thoughts about recent developments which may change your mind about solar panels being useless in Finland ...

Hydrogen production is now possible with renewable energy. There are some trains going into service in a few days in Germany that use Hydrogen instead of diesel. I also saw many hydrogen Toyota cars whilst in Japan. The technology is here, and works.

The break through in Hydrogen production happened in 2014. Just after which the hydrogen train started being designed. Only Toyota have been able to make the technology work in a cost effective way for smaller vehicles as far as I know. However, it's a simpler thing to do with larger vehicles like buses and trains.

Also, directly using the energy for things like Aluminium smelting does not require batteries. This is already happening in Germany. Even if it only works for half the year, the energy savings are massive. Without needing batteries, solar power is hell cheap.

When you can convert all the wasted extra power from renewables into Hydrogen, you can use that energy to power much of the transport and heating. This may make it cost effective to install the solar for summer months, but still have all the extra power generation ability for when solar is not producing. This is because now using excess power is now profitable, and it doesn't have to be thrown away.

I'll also note that the energy revolution 2 in Germany has produced massive savings in energy use. Apparently every euro of energy saved is worth three-five euros of cheaper energy generation. These energy analytics systems are now starting to be sold world wide.

I think there's still 20 years whilst existing infrastructure is being replaced, but we are already at the point alternatives are significantly cheaper. Even if we don't assume technology gets better every day.

Even in countries where the government is owned by the coal industry (Australia) coal mines are being closed down to be replaced by cheaper alternatives. Much of the world is without electricity, and they can get electricity for a much smaller investment with renewables, as renewables scale. Coal, nuclear and other older technologies don't scale down to the low end. At the high end they now can't compete on cost (even ignoring health and other pollution costs they don't get charged for in many places).

Editing the comment doesn't work for some reason.

s/coal mines/coal plants/g

Also I meant to make a point about how renewables have access to a much larger market than fossil fuels. Because big funds are divesting, because countries are banning them. There is a bigger market on the demand side for renewables because of the scaling. The market is also a lot bigger on the supply side because less capital is needed to supply renewable power.

Also the big advanced tech countries (Germany, China, Japan) are switching off producing fossil fuel using technology. Which will result in the prices for this type of technology increasing, and more advancements going into renewables.

Problem with the "would be cheap for half the year" is that you would still have the capital costs of building the grid for 2x (actually you would need 4x the grid as the energy usage during winter is roughly 2x of the amount in summer in Finland) the use as you want to run your factory during the winter too. Even if solar is cheap I doubt it is that cheap to offset a capital cost like that.

Most of central Europe is a quite useless comparison for a place like Finland for energy production. The weather is just very different. ~2 hours of sunlight and -30 weather isn't that rare even in Helsinki (which is quite a bit father south then a good chunk of the country). Pretty much whole of Finland is outside of the "makes sense to build solar here" zone. I don't see that many people building big solar plants in Alaska so why would you in Finland (roughly the same latitude)

Australia has mostly been digging coal for export. It is quite natural that they would close mines if the demand internationally (mainly in Asia) goes down.

Canada also announced this same goal: https://www.thestar.com/business/2016/11/21/federal-governme...

I only hear good things about the nordic countries and that news just tops it.

Lately I've been researching Tesla's solar roofs but it seems to me that it will be a difficult thing to pull off in UK due to building control and all kinds of other arcane systems that prevent use of modern building practices.

This is akin to saying

"The USA bans all burning of moon rocks for power"

That's ok, as they can afford building new nuclear reactors ([1]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Finland

Which nation will be the first to mandate citizens walking around with one hand tied behind their backs? Literally, rather than just as a metaphor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com