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Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

I'm not ruling out Nuclear in general, but let's remember that:

* Energy can also be carried northward from other areas in the same country or neighboring countries, where there are more sunlight hours or more wind.

* Geothermal energy sources, e.g. https://www.rehva.eu/rehva-journal/chapter/geothermal-energy...

* Increase in solar panel farm area

* Improvements in panel efficiency (which continue)

* Improvement in energy use efficiency

... in some combination, and with decent storage, might get even the Nordic countries to cover their needs.

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1. The southernmost spot in Finland is too far north, and the scramble that happened in EU at the loss of Russian energy supplies made it crystal clear that we can not trust any other country to help in times of need.

2. We have no geothermal sources sufficient for production of electricity, it can only be used to slightly reduce primary energy use during winter, but it will raise electricity use during winter.

3. Helps not at all, because 0 times however large number you like is still 0.

4. Likewise.

5. Improvements in efficiency do not help you stay alive when it's -30°C.

The option up here really truly is "do we use fossil fuels, or do we use nuclear". Renewables do not help. They are nice to have, and it makes sense to build them because they complement the reduced output of nuclear in summertime, and because the lower cost/kWh can help some industry, but that's all.

> The southernmost spot in Finland is too far north, and the scramble that happened in EU at the loss of Russian energy supplies made it crystal clear that we can not trust any other country to help in times of need.

That's the failure of European union

Note that even if Central Europe did have sufficient energy for export it wouldn't really help during crisis. To get the energy to Finland it would need to either go thru the Baltic Sea via undersea cables or via Northern Sweden. We have seen that it's not necessarily good idea to rely on the former during the crisis as those lines can easily be cut, they have been multiple times in just past year or so by certain commercial ships "accidentally" dropping their anchors.

As for latter Sweden, doesn't currently have capacity for it and I don't think they have been very interested in increasing it, currently Finland often benefits from the fact that there isn't enough transport capacity between Southern and Northern Sweden electric grids so Finland gets some cheap electricity from there.

I don't think it's necessarily a failure of the EU for member states to prioritize stability and independence of their electrical grid.

Texas having their own grid is not a failure of American federalism.

That's true, but it doesn't matter. It's not something we can change.

The difference between baseline and peak electricity consumption in Finland is >2x. That's mostly driven by heating. Because renewables make electricity cheap on the average, utility companies invest in cheap heat storage systems such as sand batteries. They use electricity when it's cheap, store the heat, and distribute it when it's needed.

As for nuclear, the challenge is finding companies that are able and willing to build it. Areva and Rosatom both failed at the "able" part. And a power company (I think it was Fortum) recently stated that they would consider building new nuclear reactors with German electric prices but not with Finnish prices.

There is more to that than a power company asking for subsidies. Finland is a small country. Olkiluoto 3 alone generates >10% of the electricity. Newer reactors would likely be smaller but still ~10% of the total. Finnish power companies are too small to take risks like that on their own. They can't build new reactors at their own risk, in order to sell the power in the market. Before a reactor gets built, the power company needs long-term commitments from industrial users and utility companies to buy power for a guaranteed price. Such commitments would make sense for the buyer with German electricity prices but not with Finnish prices.

I think this is exactly right, and people are focusing on the wrong risk with nuclear. It's financial risk, not safety risk, that is the biggest burden for more nuclear.

Finland was very very wise and savvy to get a fixed price contract for Olkiluoto 3. The final cost was far far far above its price, and France ended up paying that price. I'm not sure if you'll see a builder go down that route any time soon again.

> It's financial risk, not safety risk

If that's the case, then why does the indistry demand the repeated renewal of the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act?

Well that covers the financial risk from the safety risks... but even if it were purely about safety it's an act that's part of making the safety not be an issue. Unless it were not renewed, then it would be a problem agai.

> 3. Helps not at all, because 0 times however large number you like is still 0.

Show me your Monte Carlo simulation where wind (which is negatively correlated to solar) and 8 hours of battery storage are factored in, along with small amounts of gas peaking plants.

In case people want to play with a toy model: https://model.energy/

You don't even need to open up R or Pandas to understand that solar is not viable in the winter.

Here's the official meteorology insitutions sunshine data: https://www.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/1991-2020-auringonpaiste-ja...

Here's some solar production data over the seasons in visual form: https://profilesolar.com/locations/Finland/Helsinki/

What is also important to know is during the winter is that while production on average shows numbers every day, in practice that production comes only during the few actually sunny days in December when the panels aren't covered in snow.

Go even a bit up north from Helsinki and unless you keep your panels clear of snow manually, you'll hardly make anything between Nov and April.

EDIT: Here's a reddit thread where someone shares real production data: https://old.reddit.com/r/Finland/comments/1i6onkk/solar_ener...

We have the problem of stable high-pressure polar air masses potentially parking over the country. Whenever that happens, we get 2 weeks of dead calm, coinciding with the coldest weather that occurs in the country. At the time of the year when there is no solar.

That's where inter-country interconnects, storage and gas come in, which can only be reasoned about through simulations.

These weather systems are quite big indeed. It's cold and calm in the neighboring Scandinavian countries as well and typically in Central Europe too.

> That's where inter-country interconnects

Recent experience has shown that we need to have our power generation on our soil. That is not something that can be compromised on.

> storage

Weeks of storage would be hilariously more expensive than just building more nukes.

> gas

Our main source of gas was Russia. Enough said.

Show one where it does work. Even in far souther countries like Poland solar production is 1/4 of what it is in summer. I'd have to fill my entire roof with solar and still would have to get some power from the network to heat my house

>2. We have no geothermal sources sufficient for production of electricity, it can only be used to slightly reduce primary energy use during winter, but it will raise electricity use during winter.

The project for properly deep geothermal for district heating in Espoo was not resounding success. And that is 6,4km deep hole in southern part of Finland. My understanding is that it somewhat worked. But not as good as expected.

>The option up here really truly is "do we use fossil fuels, or do we use nuclear". Renewables do not help.

Hey now - renewables gave us electricity up here long before Einstein started thinking about atoms!

We are very few people here, 250MWh helps a lot, but if we have to chip in to build a nuclear plant we'll be broke before the project planning is done. ;-)

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