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https://www.europesays.com/dk/80254/
> Sweden has ordered the expansion of a key power interconnector to Denmark to be halted after failing to reach agreement with the European Commission over bottleneck fees.
The interconnect already exists as Konti-Scan 1 and 2. Konti-Scan Connect, when built, will replace them.
What are "bottleneck fees"?
https://swedenherald.com/article/surplus-from-electricity-cu...
> Bottleneck revenues, or capacity fees as they are also called, arise when there are large price differences between electricity areas, often between electricity area 2 (southern Norrland) and 3 (Svealand and northern Götaland). The price differences arise when the capacity in the network is not sufficient to transfer the electricity surplus in the north to the south where the supply is too small. When Svenska kraftnät handles this, revenues arise for the authority corresponding to the price differences.
In the UK, which has a single electricity market for the whole country, we have curtailment fees. There is insufficent grid capacity between Scotland and England. When lots of power in England is needed, Scottish wind farms could provide it, but the grid can't deliver it. So the grid operator pays twice -- a curtailment fee to the wind farms to ask them to dump their energy, and a fee to English power stations to switch on the gas turbines and provide the power England needs that it can't get from the bottlenecked grid connection to Scotland.
I have the suspicion that Sweden fears having to pay the equivalent of curtailment fees to Denmark. The EU agreed that wouldn't have to happen... but the EU still wants to constrain Sweden into using its collected bottleneck fees to upgrade its grid infrastructure, hastening their demise, rather than use it to subsidise power production.
> In March, the Commission agreed that Sweden would not have to share bottleneck fees paid to Svenska Kraftnät with other EU countries. But a new conflict has blown up over some of the Commission’s other proposals. According to TT, the Commission will not agree to let Sweden use the bottleneck fees to fund power production as well as grid expansion.
To state it again:
1. The intranational powercables means that German demand raises electricity prices in southern Sweden, which means businesses and consumers pay a premium vs what they would have paid without the cable
2. The extra charge is captured by network operators as what is called bottleneck fees and it's billions of euros per year, very large sums
3. The EC first wanted to confiscate these funds, which come from Swedish consumers and businesses. Now they want to rule about their use. Obviously this is completely unacceptable and nothing more than a bureaucratic powergrab, and no country would accept it.
This sounds... exceptionally uninteresting. Am I missing something here?
Or is this just a dog whistle for the HN crowd who like to complain about anything related to EU regulations?
The free market in EU caused the high electricity prices in Germany to be partially transferred to Swedish consumers, despite Sweden being a net exporter.
From a political POV, Sweden couldn't really stop this (or the government didnt want to as they were making bilions on transfer costs). And this cable would make things significantly worse for the swedish consumers
Britain is often suffering high prices, likely due to lack of capacity in connections with the mainland EU.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DK-DK2/live/fifteen...
Renewable, net zero energy requires massively expanding the grid to regions that cannot supply enough from regions that can. I.e. hydro during Dunkelflaute.
Here, we find yet another type of stumbling block in setting up such a system.
Yeah, not super riveting stuff, I suppose...
Only topped by the number of people who love to cheer for US vs China while living in neither.
Is that something that really requires that much more regulation? If there's one thing markets tend to be good at solving it's arbitrage.
Why is it so crazy that the facilitators of getting the resource moved get compensated?
That you don't understand financial markets doesn't mean the realities of those marks won't hurt you really really badly if you try to adjust it with communist misapprehensions.
There's a strong tradition of a Jewish Left fwiw.
The point is that banking is something you remove at your peril.