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Norway (where I'm from) is somewhat complex, because the country is divided into five regions, and the northernmost regions have poor transfer capability to the
by TrackerFF 4y ago
Norway (where I'm from) is somewhat complex, because the country is divided into five regions, and the northernmost regions have poor transfer capability to the southern regions.
The southern regions, however, have quite good transfer capacity to export (to European countries), so those regions often have to compete with export prices.
What this means, is that the prices can vary significantly withing Norway. While we up in northern Norway paid around $0.0005 / kWh last summer, my relatives south paid something like $0.3-$0.4 / kWh. It's been a pretty big deal for the past years.
Our energy production is almost purely hydro, with wind and solar as very distant second and third source. All our LNG is more or less sold off to Europe.
- sokoloff 4y ago> we up in northern Norway paid around $0.0005 / kWh last summer Is that figure accurate? It’s so crazy low that it would lead me to expect the area to be saturated with aluminum smelting and other high electric consuming operations.
- yuuuuyu 4y agoTransport issues extend to goods too.
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoHydroelectric power is pretty stable as a baseline but can only scale so much. At some point higher-cost energy would have to come online to meet demand, at which point the savings would be gone.
- TrackerFF 4y agoFun fact: We've had negative prices, a couple of times. In which case you actually get money for the electricity you use. But those are very rare moments, and only last a couple of hours her and there. Not unique to Norway, but basically what happens is that there's huge amounts of downpour, coupled with little demand / usage - typically something you see in periods where people are away, and if the weather conditions are there.
- sokoloff 4y agoI pay $0.20/kWh. At your rates, my electric bill would be less than the stamp it cost to mail me the bill. I assume that everything is electric powered in homes in your area?
- napoleongl 4y agoWithout having studied the Norwegian grid, the Swedish one that it is connected to also experience negative prices som nights when there’s a lot of wind and we generate some 10 GW of wind power. Coupled with the nuclear plants in Sweden that still are online and we pretty much have an issue with too much being generated… Then again things freaked out in the opposite direction when two of the plants went a offline, the wind was basically zero and we had freezing temps all over the country.
- simfree 4y agoThose hydroelectric dams need better grid infrastructure to enable easy export!
- switch007 4y ago> $0.0005 / kWh A typo, surely?
- TrackerFF 4y agoIn July 2022, the average price I paid was 0.0192 NOK / kWh - so that's around $0.0018 / kWh. But that was the monthly average price, the daily minimum can be much lower.
- dougSF70 4y agoNow I know where to build my LLM focussed data-center
- EntrePrescott 4y agoIf only there was also a country where GPUs are cheaper by the same factor.
- Symbiote 4y agoFacebook have three datacentres in Luleå to use the cheap power.
- magicalhippo 4y agoKeep in mind this is just the price for electricity, in addition you have to pay to be connected to the grid. Where I am that's around 0.5 NOK/kWh.
- johannes1234321 4y agoWith Norway's energy there is some "fun" I learned about recently: Apparently people in northern Norway got contracts for "normal" electricity. Due to the power grid and energy production the electrons there are however mostly from renewable energies. Now here in Germany people have contracts with "renewable" electricity. This then works the way that German energy suppliers virtually buy the Norwegian renewables, while the Norwegians virtually buy the non-renewable from Germany. Thus Germans think they pay for renewables and do something good, while Norwegians think "oh, all plants here are renewable all is fine" but in the end only the companies benefit.
- polygamous_bat 4y agoI _hate_ when saving the world from climate change becomes an accounting game for scum-of-the-earth MBAs to exploit while stuffing their pockets.
- rasz 4y agoDont forget to mention people living in the north dont love the idea of investing in transmission infrastructure as it will only make them pay more for electricity.