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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

The headline implies the Baltic states will have an independent electricity grid, but it's just switching dependence from Russia to the EU (for electricity) and the USA (for liquified natural gas imports).

Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia would be better off eliminating those dependencies entirely by focusing on expanding their domestic renewable energy production infrastructure.

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Estonia doesn't really import any electricity from Russia, it's primarily export. Also these connections in general are for cost and fault tolerance. Estonia has enough domestic power plant capacity (including domestic shale oil mining to fuel it) to cover even peak usage. It's just often cheaper to import from Finland.

There are also a lot of renewable energy projects in progress to replace the shale oil systems, but again - capacity isn't the issue.

Is this an either/or dichotomy? Perhaps both avenues are being pursued, but have different cost and timeframe tradeoffs.

> Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia would be better off eliminating those dependencies entirely by focusing on expanding their domestic renewable energy production infrastructure.

Perhaps, but the time scale for that is much longer than this, and they're very eager to switch ASAP.

Lithuania has more solar installed than Spain or Germany (percentwise) and been hitting 40-60% renewable supply for few months now.

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