Price of electricity in Finland peaks at 2.35€/kWh today. Keeping my tiny granny cottage warm costs me over 50 euros for a single day. It's negative 25C (-13F) outside.
That massive spike of 50c/kWh at the left looks tiny compared to today even though that's already insanely expensive
RIP to those running a 4090 on their rig.
I get the joke, but in contrast to heating, you can easily just... not run demanding games while the electricity is insanely expensive for a day.
Nah, it'll keep the house warm!
I kept the main room of my condo warm for a winter by having two rigs running 24/7 while I didn't have a baseboard because I was doing renovations!
Imagine the OC potential at those low room temps!
50 Euros a day is insane. That's a good portion of what I pay for a whole month.
Part of it was faulty pricing from a Norwegian electricity exporter. Also, they have almost finished the new infrastructure, so they do not have to import as much in crisis situations. I think a new nuclear power plant goes online and lots of renewable stuff. The problem OP is maybe talking about seems to be very well handled by the state and already solved. https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/24708-electricity-prices-in-finland-return-to-normal-levels-in-2023-down-64-from-previous-year.html
Lucky you. 175 square meters, 25cm styrofoam on walls and 30cm rock wool on ceiling and I pay 200€ per month in winter for gas heating in Poland. Solar panels are not economical in current regulations and billing rules have changed so those with heat pumps pay at least twice us much in coldest months.
We are fucked from every angle.
Many are going to pay 200€ today
I will never complain about paying 33¢/kWh for 3 hours a day in the summer ever again.
Tomorrow is back to normal. Even the 37c/kWh spike hardly registers on the graph compared to today even though that's still pretty expensive.
Are you actually paying the daily spot price? Not a flat amount with the utility provider taking the hit? That's how I know it from any other country, unless you have a specific contract where the user made an informed decision to opt for market rates.
Mainly the reason is that many countries do not have hourly capable meters, so calculating the price for each hour is not possible. Flat rate is needed when you just have the cumulative read once a month.
In Finland the meters communicate automatically once a day, and send the 24h values to grid company. The next generation meters which are now installed can communicate once a hour.
30% of Finns are on spot.
Spot is quite normal in the Nordics. Over all it's the cheapest, but some days suck obviously.
This summer we had days with negative prices. My bill for July was 78 NOK (about $8). Might have been August when I think about it...
Yeah about 30% of Finns have a plan lile that. It's bit of an gamble, but on average it'll be cheaper on the long run.
Do most Finnish people pay spot prices for electricity?
About 30% do
Time to install a wood stove.
Is there a specific reason the price spiked that much? That's a 950% price hike within four hours.
We've had negative 20 temperatures for over a week which happens about once every 10 years so the demand is extremely high and on top of that few of our powerplants are out of service for maintenance so that electricity has to be bought from abroad too.
Few cold days in a row is not an issue as buildings still have heat stored up in the structures but when it lasts for a long time the demand for more heating goes up drastically.
I'm don't know how energy contracts work in Finland, but in Germany you usually have a fixed price per kw/h. That price may change frequently, but it has to be announced and you have the right to cancel the contract each time.
The graph OP showed looks like the price development on the spot market, that's where energy providers buy energy short-term, apart from their long-term contracts. Spot-market-energy is naturally more expensive than the long-term one. That price may also be very unstable, as for example an unexpectedly cood winter week among several regions/contries can let it hike up pretty drastically.
AFAIK, this short-term price is an option for the private consumer as well. It has the advantage of being much cheaper most of the time when demand is low/normal but the disavantage OP shows here.
If you're in a granny cottage then just burn wood instead? Doing this rn and am very happy to go off-grid for ca. 48 hours
I unfortunelately don't have a fireplace in my house. It was removed when the house was renovated in the 80's
How about a small propane heater, like a Mr Buddy type unit? Those can be connected to a extension hose and a 20lb propane tank, and are safe to use indoors with adequate ventilation.
I got one for emergency heat, and it can take 2 of the 1lb propane cylinders directly, or the 20lb tank with a hose. The 20lb tank could provide heat for over 24 hours but IDK how expensive propane is there. It cost me $18 for a 4-pack of the 1lb cylinders, and I think the 20lb ones are about $50 range.
So you're BigDickEnergy in a granny cottage, heating the place with your wood to get off grid. Nice!
Have you tried burning reindeer?
It’s a Christmas scented ash they leave behind, most unsettling
Hang a few blankets or bubble foil against the windows for isolation insulation.
What about for insulation?
No no, it's for insolention. Fuck them HOAs.
what the fuck?
Someone said -45.5 °C
-49.9°F is insane. A couple of years ago in the upper US Midwest, we set our record for around -45°F (-42.7°C) but that was with wind chill, the base temp. was something like -30°F (-34.4°C). People who've never experienced those kinds of temperatures really cannot comprehend how miserably cold it is and just how extremely dangerous it can be. I know there's probably arctic dwellers that are used to those kinds of temps regularly, but it blew my mind when I had to go out into it and still got cold under 3 layers of clothes.
Miserable is a huge understatement. It's fatal when not properly clothed. As a kid I recall going to check our mail at the communal mailbox and it was -66C (-86F) with the windchill and every TV channel had a banner saying you WILL get frostbite with 30 SECONDS if skin is exposed. I know people who have lots fingers/toes in warmer temperatures than that so it's straight up fatally cold.
I got to -20f with very strong winds last year. Froze half the pipes under the house, even through insulating layers. We had to tape up plastic sheets in some parts of the house like one of those walk-in freezers to try and keep the important places warm..
This house is a cheap ass 70s prefab. It was not made for 0F, let alone -20 and blizzard conditions.
in the upper US Midwest, we set our record for around -45°F (-42.7°C) but that was with wind chill, the base temp. was something like -30°F (-34.4°C).
I really can't imagine how cold that is. I'm from Australia and currently live in California, so 10C (50F) is cold to me lol. I've never lived somewhere where it snows and have never had to winterize anything.
I've been to New York City during winter and felt extremely cold but I think it was 'only' -5C (23F) at the time.
wow that is crazy. my bill for December was $77 in the US.
Wouldn't there be a price cap in events that the wholesale market has anomalies like this? That's standard in most jurisdictions. The wholesale price is still "real" because there's some system or market condition reflected in this spike, it's just not normal for ratepayers at the distribution level to not have a price cap protection. It's like the opposite scenario if the price isn't high enough to cover the cost in actually delivering the energy and running the grid, so a Global Adjustment would come in to effect to cover the difference. There can even be surplus conditions where the price is in the negative.
what kind of regulatory distopia do these laws come from?
/s
We have price caps in the UK. They're not perfect but they have stopped us from paying a lot more than we would have this past year. And the UK is definitely no (did you mean to say?) utopia. Or do you think a price cap to protect consumers is something from a distopia?
Big part of the price was that Finland was close to needing rolling blackouts, because there wasn't enough electricity. All transmit lines were fully utilized, and all available power plants on, so only way to get the consumption down was with the price.
It worked, Finland dropped the electricity consumption almost 10% and we got through quite easily.
I guess with my knowledge of energy markets, a situation like that would result in higher prices just by the way the market functions, responding to supply and demand. The graph here appears to be a market clearing price rather than a price after adjustments, where a lot of incentives would be brought in like an intentional price hike.
We were in the opposite situation though where we were running into surplus overnight during a period of energy transition. You'd see these stupid misinformed articles being like, "the government is giving away YOUR electricity to the US!" Was like during the 2003 blackout where we needed to bring large loads online carefully alongside generation, people were freaking out how casinos and industry got power before them. The need for dispatchable loads connected to the high voltage transmission grid in that situation wasn't as headline worthy.
How are you using 21kWh/day heating a small home? Do you have any insulation at all?
Probably because it's about -35C outside.
Dude is basically living on the set of The Thing at this point.
That's a perfectly normal number for any home that isn't very new and perfectly insulated.
My 37sqm appartment needs approximately 5000 kWh in natural gas per year, 876 kWh last December, so 28 kWh per day on average. The building is admittedly old and not perfectly insulated but it's also not a log cabin out in the open in Finland, but instead a flat enclosed within 3 other flats in the middle of cosy, never below -8C Germany.
21 kWh in a log cabin in Finnland actually seemed pretty low to me. It's sort of obvious OP is using a heat pump and the cabin must really be absolutely tiny.
50kWh and closer to 90kWh on days like this. It's a log cabin and I'm keeping my root cellar and insulated shed above freezing aswell. Even running a 1kW heater all day would result in a consumption more than 21kWh and that wouldn't keep any house warm.
A tiny heater running all day would do that.
1kw is a small heater. 0.8kw is a tiny one. 0.8x24 is 19.2. Assuming they have other basic appliances, that's already more than enough to account for their usage.
I’ve got a small 1200w heater that kicks on in the morning to bring the living room space up to 69. I live in a 40 year old house that’s insulated fairly well (I just had the attic redone last year to r-49) and it’s 45f outside right now. That little heater has used 6kWh since kicking on this morning getting the house up from 63f to the near 69 it is now.
On a day below freezing that heater will got for a lot longer through the day to keep temps up.
I like to keep my bedroom a cosy 1600 degrees C
Outer walls in new homes in the Nordic countries are often 25-30 inches thick filled with insulation. They will keep out some cold (and some heat).
Heat pumps aren't designed to function in this low of temperature. The problem is they need a real heater instead of a heat exchanger.
This is such an outdated information. Modern heatpumps work just fine even in temperatures of -20C and below. Ofcourse the efficiency gets worse the colder it is but even at worst it's still 100% efficient. On a typical year there's only a handful of really cold days. It doesn't make sense not to get a heatpump just because it's inefficient for few days. It's not like it stops heating or something. It just effectively turns into electric radiator which is what my house was heated with before I got the heatpump anyways.
There are heat pumps that exchange heat with the ground. Those can function well in more extreme temperatures. Also you could/should have alternative heating methods for extreme situations even if they are much more inneficient
Is heating with electricity common in Finland? That seems like it would cost a fortune even in good times.
Older houses burn oil for heating the house and water but even most of them have heatpumps installed. New houses usually also have heatpumps or geothermal so direct electric heating is more and more uncommon. Apartment buildings generally all have district heating and even some private homes do.
Yes it's expensive but so is everything else too. Our houses are way better insulated than in most places though so that helps a little.
Overall electricity is relatively cheap in Finland. Historically they were oil heated, which is not very cheap either.
We do not have gas lines in Finland, so we cannot use that like other parts of Europe. This is now of course better because we are not depending on Russian gas.
Previously we got parts of electricity from Russia, but that shutdown after the Ukraine war.
Pretty common here in France and it's cheap enough. Why would you think it would be expensive? And expensive compared to what?
When you say it's common, are you talking about heat pumps or old-fashioned resistive heating? I'm not very familiar with heat pumps since they weren't common at all when and where I bought a house, but at least where I lived it was normal to have either an oil or a gas furnace for heating. Resistive electric heating cost a lot more to operate and so it was generally used only where it would be too difficult or expensive to install a furnace and hot water pipes or hot air ducts. For example, some friends of mine lived in a 19th century house which was meant to be heated by a wood fireplace and they also had electric heaters in the bedrooms, whereas my own house was built in 1980 so it had an oil tank, a furnace in the basement, and hot-water radiators.
(My own house also had a modern wood stove in the living room and buying firewood was even cheaper than buying heating oil, but the problem was that the wood stove took a lot of work and it only heated the living room since it wasn't connected to any mechanism for spreading the heat to the rest of the house.)
i keep a pile of coal in the cellar for the extra cold days
And then you just burn them in a pot on your table and breathe the exhaust?
Finland has more than 330 hydro power plants, with total capacity of over 3,100 megawatts in 2022. Hydro accounted for 18% of Finland’s total installed power generation capacity and 22% of total power generation in 2021.
WTFINLAND
Hydro-Québec Production main power plants (2020) Total Others (49 hydro, 1 therma) - 13302 MW
Hydro =/= hydro. The plants in Finland are tiny in comparison.
Finland is flat, no possiblity in hydro if you don't have the mountains with water in them. Norway gets all the hydro, and Finland buys it there.
Canada has 85% of the worlds freshwater. There are a crazy amount of big rivers. Its not really a fait comparison.
This is Québec only. Other provinces that have more water and hills still have less hydro.
I don't think the fact that Finland is north and cold and icy is a factor either. A lot of Québec's power generating stations are in the desolate north, with some of the biggest ones on rivers flowing into the Hudson's Bay, and they were built in the 70s.
However looking at the relief and hydro and topo maps of Finland, while there's plenty of lakes, there's no strong rivers. Couple this with an apparent ban on new hydro, and we got the answer.
I wonder how they'd fare with geothermal.
That is an insane price, and it feels like it should be illegal.
Further integration at an EU level would allow energy supply to be less influenced by local issues.
Spot rate pricing for electricity is uncommon among households for exactly this reason. The price is most likely the result of energy market conditions, rather than nefarious actors in the market intentionally manipulating market conditions.
Usually there's a company that would be absorbing that risk of price fluctuations by charging slightly more than the baseline normal so that they can afford to charge households at a loss for the short periods where the price spikes as insanely as this.
Ouch.
Meanwhile, in Portugal, my peak energy price will be around €.10, with the minimum at around €.06
To what degree is your house insulated already?
Normal energy price in Finland around 0,04€ - 0,10€/kWh. Last year average was 0,068€/kWh
That's extremely cheap, compared to 0,35€ in Germany.
That is really nice.
40 is eye buggingly cold. You could have a styrofoam house and I would still worry about being cold in it, plus y’know, the giant fire hazard.
Saves a pretty penny on refrigerating stuff but makes for a hard time to have a decent night of sleep.
And your remark on styrofoam hits hard with me.
I have an old house, nearly 100 years old, with a very poor score in thermal efficiency, that really needs some improvement but the idea of glueing highly combustible materials to the walls does not go well with me.
It's crazy. I've been doing all my insulation calculations based on a delta of 20 (20 inside, 0 outside).
To hit the same heating requirement, I'd need to triple the amount of insulation for -40.
It's a log cabin with 5cm added fibreglass insulation on the inside.
That's a lot. And being a log cabin I wouldn't add anything on the outside that would hide the wood. That is really harsh weather to endure.
What was the price before the Ukrainian war?
You could get fixed price plans for around 5c/kwh. However take into account that yesterday was an anomaly. The average price for the last 28 days is 12.65c/kWh. During the summer time it was around 1 to 3c/kWh.
How's the heat pump gang doing in that kind of temperature?
It's what I exclusively heat my house with
They are mostly ground source over there, which shouldn't be affected by cold snaps.
What’s the renewable energy like in a Finland during the winter? Solar, wind, or geothermal common and working?
Last 12 months Finland had electricity 87% with low carbon sources and 43% with renewables (source: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FI )
During winter it stays pretty similar, because nuclear is 45%, wind 17%, hydro 17%, biomass 8% and solar is only 0.03%.
Coal is only 8%, but produces 58% of all CO2, which shows how bad it is.
Finland is too much north to hope for efficient solar energy.
In winter yeah but we have long ass days in the summer and even in early spring they work surprisingly well as solar panels are more efficient in cold temperatures.
In the winter, yes.
I'm summer Finland gets same amount of solar radiation as German
Get her a space heater, you won't even notice the difference in your bill.
I recommend getting one that blows air instead of one that just heats oil. I've used both types, and the one that blows air is way more effective.
Staying warm is not the issue. It's the price for that comfort. Running a 1kW space heater for 24 hours at yesterday's prices would have cost a little over 26 euros.
/s
No, I'm talking from experience.
It's the difference between an additional $5 and $70 in my electric bill every month.
Crazy how it is with dynamic electricity price. Must be extremely inconvenient to monitor and react!
Here a border away in Saint Petersburg, Russia, we have electricity at a fixed rate of 4,9c/kWh in daytime and 2,7c/kWh in the night. There aren't any variable price tariffs in here, so the bill is always about the same.
We also have central heating (part coal/gas, part nuclear) that goes for 21€/Gcal (1,8с/kWh), so there is no need to expend electricity.
I'm sorry. At least when it gets to negative 40 you won't have to translate it from C to F.
It peaked there right? So the rest of the day it was lower wasn't it? Still very expensive!
Average price for the whole day was around 1.1€/kWh
Calls on Foam and Mineral Wool?
Polyurethane is better insulator, doesn't absorb moisture and doesn't require a vapor barrier but is also much more expensive. It's what I insulated my shed with so that I can let it get cold if need be and will not have moisture problems later.
I always underestimate oil biproducts in the market, but maybe that is the play.
What's the average price during normal times? In Germany we are usually paying a fixed price, so fluctuations on the market do not reach the customers. However, this price is somewhere between 30 and 40c/kWh.
On average winter days it's around 10 to 15c/kWh and in summer like 5 cents or less. Some days in the summer the price literally goes negative.
I honestly don't understand. Isn't Finland one of the countries who should have figured out how to heat a home efficiently a long time ago?
Yukhh
If you voted Liberal, you voted for this. #Leopardsatemyface
Honestly doesn’t seem that bad if it’s just for one day. Maybe invest in something more sustainable in the future?
Maybe invest in something more sustainable in the future?
Like what?
And with what money? It's all going to electricity at the moment!
You need to seriously need to rethink your home. First off, consider getting a radiator heater. These heaters have no fan and are filled with oil to passively heat the air. They are pretty efficient and can heat a small space.
Next make sure you have blinds covering all windows. Windows loss a lot of heat even if they are double paned.
In the spring time it may be worth getting some insulation blown in.
My heatpump is about 3x more efficient than electric radiator.
You're talking to a guy living in Finland. I think it's safe to say they know how to efficiently stay warm in winter.