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Comment by zhte415 | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating to see the potential use, vs. the actual 'right now' capacity viewing this at 3pm GMT.

And also interesting to see the import/export power figures: How one region supports, though nothing like the capacity needed to substitute renewables' variance.

France is really leading consistency of capacity vs. generation with Nuclear.

France also seems to have 4 times hydro capacity of Portugal, which is interesting given Portugal's recent 100% renewables day but inability to use it today.

Why is Norway consuming 22GW but UK only about 40-45GW, and Germand 60-65GW, given the great disparity in population of Norway?

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> Why is Norway consuming 22GW but UK only about 40-45GW, and Germand 60-65GW, given the great disparity in population of Norway?

Electric heating? Lower temperatures? Oslo is currently freezing (below 0C), neither London nor Berlin are.

Norway is heating houses almost exclusively using electricity, and also has a cold climate.

In addition, a substantial aluminium production and other smelters, as well as running many oil and gas platforms as well as processing plants and refineries on land on electricity. Electricity from hydropower is cheaper than running them on gas or oil.

Norway uses a lot of electricity for energy intensive industries like aluminium production.

Thanks

Perhaps. Both Norway and Finland have a population of a little more than 5 million, but Finland is at about 10GW, so a difference of double. Sweden at around 20MW net which is consistent with Finland pro-rata.

Did Norway just decide to do all-electric heating as vastly all electric power, as displayed here, comes from hydro?

Just idle curiosity.

Yes. Gas heating is for the most part just not a thing in Norway. The cities don't have gas infrastructure (with some minor exceptions), so if you want to have gas heating you need to store it on your property. In addition, the government discourages it. The vast majority of home heating in Norway is electric.

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