Europe is in an energy crisis and Finland isn't left out of it with the government having proposed tax eases for high electricity bills.
High prices are blamed on "greedy capitalistic" electricity companies and the companies blame it on Putin. I'm not kidding. I'm literally quoting Helen's (the electricity transit company of Helsinki) CEO from a note that I got on mail: "--energy crisis, the root cause of which is the war on Ukraine".
Root cause? Yes, we're no longer getting supplementary energy from Russia, but we would've not needed it in the first place if we produced it ourself...
It's easier to point fingers though.
Just a few years ago the government subsidized the scrapping of peat burning machines which produced electricity. Getting rid of coal is also on the (green) agenda, unfortunately our new nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto 3, is still after more than a decade of construction not working on full capacity to replace that baseload. Soon™. That clusterfuck is a topic on its own, but I believe it was caused by poor knowledge and bad management.
But the basic idea here is that we have caused this onto ourselves because there's not enough reliable energy produced.
Look at Germany.
They have thrown hundreds of billions of euros into wind and the end result was the price of electricity going parabolic.
And Finland isn't that far off. Just from my near circle I've heard of monthly bills up to 2000€ with electrically heated homes. 2 year contracts used to be 5c/kwh. Now the cheapest I found from Helen was 22c/kwh. They were up to 40c/kwh month or so ago.
I was lucky to lock in a 2 year contract at 15c/kwh in the beginning of the summer – which is kinda crazy to say because it's still a 3x price to 1,5 years ago. Though our consumption is moderate since we have district heating which doesn't cost any extra on top of rent. So we dodged the bullet on that one.
Wind and solar are unreliable energy sources. The more of the grid is unreliable energy, the bigger the day-to-day volatility of the price of electricity is, because there's no solutions to store energy during high-production low demand and off load during low-production and high-demand.
Because the grid can't balance itself, now electricity companies try to balance the grid by incentivizing people to balance the usage according to production by offering deals where some of the price is determined according whether the electricity was used during high or low demand. Buss stops also have adds promoting to decrease everything by "one degree". As if that is going to solve the problem. Thing is, everyone has a fridge and many houses have electricity heating, so there's a necessary baseload you have to use no matter what the price.
Furthermore, having to constantly follow the price of electricity just sounds like additional stress and waste of time and attention when we could just not think about it and focus on something else, like we've done for the past decades.
To put it bluntly, rising energy costs is the regression of civilization.
How did we get here?
Have you noticed how every company is virtue signaling with their reduced carbon foot print and usage of renewables? Reducing carbon in the atmosphere has become a fetish. And I get the logic: climate will change, however the apocalypse narratives where all the food and water will disappear from the world, because it gets warmer I'm sceptical of. I mean, there's no rational analysis about benefits on warming: you can probably grow food further in the north, for example. Also, less people dying of coldness. It's all just hysteria and end of the world if we don't stop fossil fuels now. And it has been ongoing since the 70s.
Taken this narrative to the extreme, it would mean you'd have to kill yourself, because you're emitting carbon with every breath you take. Here you can imagine quite the dystopia where an entity starts to decide who deserves to live and not.
Let's see when Klaus Schwab includes this to his great reset agenda...
Wind and solar are incentivized by tax eases (conversely, fossil fuels are taxed for the carbon emissions) and I doubt they would've gotten as big of a share on the market without manipulation. They might have their niche uses in offgrid setups, but a modern society can't function with those alone without energy storage solutions which just aren't there yet.
The most dumbfuck thing about green agenda is that the solution to reduce carbon while producing reliable energy has already been invented dozens of years ago.
There's nothing in principal that wouldn't allow us to produce all the needed electricity with nuclear. It produces less radiation than burning coal (yes, seriously). Emits zero carbon and it's statistically the safest form of energy. And the nuclear waste management has already been solved.
Unfortunately, mental images around Tsernobyl and Fukushima have for decades influenced politics around nuclear with, ironically enough, Green parties having been opposed to it the strongest. The Green party in Finland seems to have shift sentiment though, after seeing how energy prices have gone haywire with unreliable energy sources. Germans keep shutting their own reactors even though they're in the middle of a crisis though – mental.
France already produces more than 70% of their electricity with nuclear. Quick google also says that their electricity prices are 25% lower now than average Europe country's. It's probably somewhat elevated among others just because they can export a lot of it for a good price now.
Yeah, let's decrease the amount of carbon (and more importantly particles from burning coal near human settlements) but let's not cut our legs and rely on hope to grow wings while doing so. Catastrophizing global warming has resulted in hysteria where we are convinced that some kind of mass event is going to wipe all of us out if we don't cut all fossil fuels immediately (which is impossible btw, if we wish to not return to a feodalistic society). If we stop thinking our actions comprehensively through second and third order effects, our methods for cure are going to cause more harm than good. Looking at you, covid-lockdowns.
Also, while focusing so intensely on carbon, let's not forget to not shit our waters with fertilizers and hormones, for example. And keep the fish clean of heavy metals.
That's about all I've got to say about this energy clown fest we've gotten ourselves into. Let's hope we'll build some more nuclear that we actually know how to build.
