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
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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.
Scheduling power plant maintenance during winter in a country where it gets that cold seems a tad, uhm, insane?
I don't think it was scheduled maintenance. Something broke
Sometimes circumstances leave you little choice...
Wait til you find out about the Enron scandal
That happened because winterproofing windmills and power plants is expensive and no one was forcing the companies running them to do it.
Which, from this thread, sounds like what's happening in Finland.
Not quite the same. Their demand has outstripped their capacity, the same as happened in Texas. But since they could import from other regions, the supply was still there. So people won't be dying from widespread power outages, and some people who chose more risky fee structures will be paying exorbitant prices.
We're actually importing as much as the lines from Sweden to Finland are currently able to support.
Guess what country is on our east side? Yeah.
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.
