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Comment by reedf1 | Hacker News Reader

We can pretend that international trade and energy price arbitrage doesn't exist to make us feel nice and happy; but the reality is a Watt spent in Sweden increases the marginal cost of energy by the same amount as a Watt spent in Texas. These things are tied together by foreign exchange, imported energy intensive goods, petroleum products and directly imported power. It's time we stop being naive about total energy use.

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Sweden is not grid connected to Texas, well, nor is also any other grid in the USA actually. Smelting was placed near cheap hydro resources (and why Boeing built planes in Seattle) for good reasons. Just replace cheap watts with clean watts.

Because Sweden's clean energy capacity is fixed. Which means a "clean" Watt spent on inference is taking away a "clean" Watt that would have been spent on heating or steel. Which means Sweden needs to buy energy or energy intensive goods on the global market, which raises prices, which means Texas is being paid.

> "Sweden's clean energy capacity is fixed"

This is a weird assumption to make. Why would you assume they wouldn't just build out more capacity as demand increases?

They certainly aren't buying electricity from Texas, this feels like a tortured argument you're just making to retroactively support whatever opinions you have on the pros or cons of clean energy.

> this feels like a tortured argument you're just making to retroactively support whatever opinions you have on the pros or cons of clean energy.

My opinion that reality should take precedent over feel good lies?

There's only so much hydro power to build out, and nuclear takes forever. Solar only works in summer that far north, and without insane batteries wind power just becomes greenwashed natgas.

In a country with 40% hydro you can balance less flexible nuclear and wind easily.

> Because Sweden's clean energy capacity is fixed

By what?

You're treating electricity as a globally-tradable good. It's not.

It is.

> It is

No, electricity is categorically not. Exhibit A for this is persistent regional variation in unlevered pre-tax prices. Even in well-integrated power markets, only a fraction of electricity is listed, and that's before we get to off-grid power.

Perhaps they are mistaking Sweden with Norway (whose nearly 100% hydropower system is constrained)

Most of electricity in Sweden is produced by:

1. Hydropower 40%

2. Nuclear 27%

3. Wind 22%

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/sweden#what-source...

You can’t ship and store electricity without inefficiency and capital costs. They can only smelt so much aluminum and they are exporting that also, so there are costs associated with that. In comparison, an AI result just needs a network connection to send.

> you can’t ship and store electricity without inefficiency and capital costs

This per se doesn't make something non-traceable. Plenty of perishables operate on a global market.

Power being hyper-perishable, hyper-regulated and opaque (lots of off-grid and unlisted-on-exchanges power) sort of destroys the international power market. (Regionally, power markets are also pretty efficient in most parts of the world, at least in the short term. That makes profiting with a ship of capacitor carriers hard if not impossible.)

I'm a bit confused. For one I am not sure why this must hold for something as difficult to transfer as energy, and I am not sure why it matters. Not all energy is the same, hence the title.

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