That massive spike of 50c/kWh at the left looks tiny compared to today even though that’s already insanely expensive
Honestly doesn’t seem that bad if it’s just for one day. Maybe invest in something more sustainable in the future?
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I think he was joking, like making look like a bad investment instead of a electricity bill
Maybe invest in something more sustainable in the future?
Like what?
And with what money? It’s all going to electricity at the moment!
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.
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.
50 Euros a day is insane. That’s a good portion of what I pay for a whole month.
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.
Get a space heater.
Mine was $15 at Walmart, heats my room like it’s Spring, and only adds $5 per month to my electricity bill.
Come Summer, I’m going to get a dehumidifier and see if I can use it in place of my A/C.
Bruh, a space heater is the least efficient way to heat a space, unless electricity somehow costs less per MWh than gas (that is insanely cheap and only true in a few key places in the world).
Also dehumidifiers… don’t do what you think they do? They are basically an A/C unit, that dump the hot air in the room they sit in. Literally worse than nothing.
*Re-*humidifiers have marginal benefits in (very) dry weather as evaporation is endothermic. As soon as the air is even somewhat humid though, they’re literally worse than nothing again.It’s not inefficient if it makes you feel warm. Often you don’t really need to warm everything in a house to be comfortable. It might make sense to do so in a situation when electricity goes out/grid is unreliable and you don’t have a thermal battery to ride on for a few hours, or you want to keep your water pipes warm enough so they don’t freeze.
But I know a lot of people who choose to forego so much heating, keeping their space to like <15/59, and have a heated blanket or space heater/fireplace entertainment center.
Feel like this works best in a shared living situation though, like an apartment or town home. For detached situations, maybe it does make sense to keep things relatively warm in case of emergencies.
They were talking about consistently heating a whole room though. I guess there’s a case to be made if the thermostat for the central gas heating is in another room and can’t be moved… But you should probably organize your heating so that this is a corner case (which is why the thermostat is typically in the living room in detached living. Other rooms don’t usually need to be kept particularly warm).
Of course if you have a badly insulated house and no way to properly distribute the central heating or to pay to heat the whole space to 18 °C, use resistive if you must. But that goes against everything that central heating is supposed to be for.
Also you really should not let a building go under 15 °C. It depends on the specifics (insulation, ventilation), but you’re liable to get mold or other kinds of water damage due to condensation.
Good points. There are a variety of houses/buildings built during various periods of time according to various codes and standards, but if you’re within city limits (US/Canada) then your house was probably built after the 70s/80s and has decent insulation. If there is an issue with the central heating in that kind of home, I 100% agree that there’s an issue that you might want a GC to fix. If your house/building is old, or if landlords don’t want to fix shit (and complaints are too much of a hassle), then I can also see that space heating can be a reasonable bandaid: at least until you get out of that situation.
Condensation is something I also forgot. That’s important for you electrical system too. In my experience in electric distribution/collection, usually we’d want to keep termination points around 20/68, but thermostats could drop to as low as 10/50 before kicking in. Certainly keeping a house colder than 10/50 is a bad idea, but between that and normal 20/68 I’d think would be fine. You also have the risk though that your thermostat is a single point of measurement for the system. Other parts of a house might be cooler/warmer, so I’d agree with the advice to keeping your house warmer than 15/59, unless it supports multi-unit dwellings.
Good convo, cheers
wow! i paid 220euros for gas heating and warm water in 78m2 flat in poland for all last year.
Yeah I lived in flats before, it’s a totally different story, unless your flat is on the last floor or on the corner there is not much heat loss assuming your neighbors also use the heating.
not really… my flat is in corner. Gave 3 sides, nirth, east, and south. No other flatsconnected with mine. And to this, flat under mine is empty, nobody is living there.
Then I don’t know why, but I am sure over 30% of heat in my house escapes through the roof.
hey, whats the price for gas per cubic meter in Poland?
Invoice from yesterday for December 2023. I used 201 m3 of gas, calculated by provider as being equal to 2224kWh of power for which I paid 682.81 PLN (157 € to be exact) in total including taxes and surcharges. So 3.397 PLN or around 0.78 EUR per m3.
December was one of the coldest months this season. Last year I used maximum of 250 m3 per month which happened to be January/February. This then exceeded 200€
This includes both warm water and heating using low-temperature floor heating. Current thermostat settings give me 22C on the base floor and 20C on the first floor (where most heat escapes, obviously). I also have mechanical ventilation with recuperation.
Shit’s expensive.
With current prices of electricity, the same heating power with perfect constant COP of 3 (not possible with December temps for air heat pump) would cost me 666 PLN. (Nice). How can I offset the cost of installing it in the first place LOL.
i hear you, current rate in Lithuania is 0.87 eur :(
I will never complain about paying 33¢/kWh for 3 hours a day in the summer ever again.
Many are going to pay 200€ today
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
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.
Oh, definitely! That’s why I said how extremely dangerous it can be. I had to shovel my driveway during that cold snap (when it warmed up maybe 10 degrees, so it was still like -20F with even colder wind chills. Even with my full winter kit on with only my eyes barely exposed (had my scarf positioned over my face so that my breath went upwards towards my eyes), my eye lashes were freezing together every other blink and my legs were numb after about 15 minutes despite 2 layers (1 pant layer, 1 thermal underarmor I still have from my time in the army).
Moral of the story: Don’t tempt fate when the elements are that extreme.
Eyelashes freezing together… yeah, been there. 😉
I remember walking to school at -29C when I was young thinking it’s really bloody cold only to find out school is closed and walking back. Checked the temperature only when I got home.
Had this happen too. Grew up in Alaska. My sister and I got turned around and told to go home by the cops because the schools were all closed. I have no idea how cold it was but it was cold enough that exposed skin started to burn a few seconds after stepping out the door.
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.
It truly is the definition of hell, in my opinion. I’ve been in extreme heats in Kuwait during peak summertime when it’s 125+ F, and extreme cold is still far worse to me. I know they’re both dangerous and deadly, but the cold is just painful whereas the heat makes me feel restless and a sense of malaise, maybe.
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.
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.
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.
-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.
At least you can quick chill a beer!
I can’t drink…
At least you can quick chill a soda!
There’s that, I’ll admit.
Well after lighting the styrofoam you won’t feel cold anymore
But I like feeling vijif!
Lol I don’t know how that got autocorrected. Dutch is a funny language, but that isn’t a word…
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.
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
So you’re BigDickEnergy in a granny cottage, heating the place with your wood to get off grid. Nice!
I unfortunelately don’t have a fireplace in my house. It was removed when the house was renovated in the 80’s
In a place where it’s regularly cold? Whose brilliant idea was that?!
When I said my house is tiny I truly mean that. I don’t even have space for a medium size house plant let alone a fireplace. The attic was converted into living space and I believe the fireplace used to be where the stairs are now.
I have a wood burning sauna on a separate building though
Have you looked at anything like this? They are extremely tiny wood stoves that are perfect for little spaces. https://cubicminiwoodstoves.com/
Yeah I have considered it. There’s just no good place for the chimney either. It would need to go thru the wall and past the eaves on either of the two sides of the building that the roof is not sloping towards to because else falling snow is going to rip it off in the winter.
I know it’s not uncommon for the chimney to go through the eaves for more support, if that’s an option for you. I know someone in Alaska with a tiny house that did something like that, with a wall mounted tiny stove and it was pretty impressive!
You could heat it from a fire outside with a boiler and a radiator. I’m not sure if they have those for sale in Finland but they’re a thing in the US.
That’s fairly typical. WTF would you do in an outage?
Shiver uncontrollably.
Back up generators if the expected outage is to last more than one day - and sometimes it can.
I hear this a lot since we converted to heat pumps. People don’t realize basically every heat source these days other than wood needs electricity. We kept our oil system as a backup for very cold days but it also doesn’t work with no power.
That sauna sounds like a candidate to hook up to the heat pump if you ask me.
Diesel heater set up properly maybe the way, just not sure how well it would work kept outdoors at those temperatures.
At 50 bucks a day it would pay for itself pretty quickly. Not sure what prices are by you but here you can get a brand new stove with auto-temp and a catalytic converter and everything installed for 10k to 12k, or get a decent used stove and have someone install it for 5k ±
Today is highly unusual. Never before in recorded history has the price climbed anywhere near this high. Last year we had record high electricity prices due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and even then the average price for the year was 18c/kWh. This year it has been around 12c/kWh I think.
That’s akin to our rates, im about 13c/kwh delivered. I use about 1.2 to 1.5 mwh per month (with natural gas furnace and wood stove), so 2.50$/kwh would make me shut my house off at the breaker and call it camping.
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.
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.
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Geothermal is expensive and not worth it financially in many countries but when you are looking at 2.35€/kWh it seems like a great investment.
He doesn’t mean geothermal in large scale but home level geothermal. It is actually very cheap and efficient technology.
Over half of the new houses in Finland are build with geothermal. It costs roughly 18 000€ to construct.
He doesn’t mean geothermal in large scale but home level geothermal. It is actually very cheap and efficient technology.
I understand, but it’s not cheap when compared to solar
Solar panels doesn’t provide heat, it produces electricity. Also it is quite common on Finland to have solar panels + geothermal heating, because both of them pay for themself in 5-10 years. Unfortunately solar panels do not provide us enough electricity to be only source, not even with batteries.
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.)
Heat pumps have been commonplace outside North America for a long time. We call them “reverse cycle air conditioners” in Australia and they’ve been around for at least 20 years.
It’s not new technology. Your fridge is also a heat pump for example.
I was talking about the old-fashion one. It’s really common across France even though modern housing have heat pumps. Oil furnaces have almost completely disappeared and the gas one are in the process of being replaced as well. Electricity is cheaper here than in most countries (thanks to nuclear power plants).
What’s the renewable energy like in a Finland during the winter? Solar, wind, or geothermal common and working?
Finland is too much north to hope for efficient solar energy.
In the winter, yes.
I’m summer Finland gets same amount of solar radiation as German
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I’m sorry. At least when it gets to negative 40 you won’t have to translate it from C to F.
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.
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.
My heatpump is about 3x more efficient than electric radiator.
what the fuck?
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.
