For reference, the price for fixed-cost plans is around 10c/kWh.

As someone who’s been constantly running an electric heater in the garage while painting my car, I was quite lucky with the timing.

It’s not literally free, though. Transfer prices are fixed, and there are taxes and some other minor costs associated with it, so where I live, it still adds up to around 6c/kWh even when the price drops to zero. The cheap prices are due to an excess of wind power, but once the wind dies down, prices usually spike hard.

  • zergtoshi@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    It’s a great example to show electric energy based on wind, water, solar is the way to go - not only because it’s more environmentally friendly than fossil fuels of any kind or nuclear, but it’s economically better as well.
    Thanks for sharing!

    • RobotToaster
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      1 month ago

      It’s more of an example of how we don’t have anywhere near enough storage for existing renewables.

      • BeautifulMind ♾️@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        This is actually an area that’s developing quite quickly. In 2023, California managed to put almost 14mw worth of storage on the grid; if they keep building out at that rate, peaky/transient power sources like wind and solar will have someplace to park until someone needs that energy. Almost 12mw of that was utility storage; it’s like the utilities have the chance to get out of the business of producing power themselves and into the role of renting storage (or buying surplus energy then selling it later when it’s needed)

        Granted, 14mw isn’t a lot in the scale of California, but the rate of growth in grid-storage over time is humongous

      • zergtoshi@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        It’s fair pointing out the lack of (sufficient) storage for electric energy, but I’d say the average price of electricity in Finland for the past week indicates both capabilities of renawables and lack of storage.

    • ContrarianTrail@lemm.eeOP
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      1 month ago

      I have nothing against nuclear energy personally. I wish we’d build more of it. Currently about 2/5th is wind power, 2/5th nuclear and 1/5 hydro. When there’s no wind and it’s cold outside we see prices in the 30 - 70c/kWh which is insanely expensive. If we had huge storage capacity and much, much more wind turbines then maybe it could work.

      • zergtoshi@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Compared to fossil fuels I tend to prefer nuclear as well, because even though mining uranium has quite some ecological impact including emitting carbon emissions, running a nuclear power plant doesn’t have carbon emissions and that’s important.
        What worries me is that there are nuclear power plants around the world and despite the first nuclear power plant having been built 70 years ago, not a single ultimate disposal place for the radioactive waste has been found/created.
        Having “cheap” electric energy for 3-4 generations and putting a burden on the next 40,000 generations just does sound like a bad deal to me.
        Until we have more wind and hydro, keeping nuclear running might be a price we have to pay.
        Not being able to dispose of some more (thousands of) tons of radioactive waste is making the problem only quantitatively worse and not qualitatively.

        • ContrarianTrail@lemm.eeOP
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          1 month ago

          not a single ultimate disposal place for the radioactive waste has been found/created.

          Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository

          Also something to keep in mind is that high level waste which is the spent fuel is only about 3 - 5% of the total radioactive waste from nuclear power plants. Majority of the waste has way lower levels of radiation and it’s things like reactor parts and safety equipment.

          • zergtoshi@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            I stand corrected regarding ultimate disposal and apparently they are planning to use it in a clever way.
            Thank you for letting me know!