Comment by zeristor
20 days ago
Estonia?!
Much has been made of Estonia having a high tech virtual government I’d. So many high tech start ups have come from Estonia, I’m a bit stunned that they have big electricity distribution problems.
20 days ago
Estonia?!
Much has been made of Estonia having a high tech virtual government I’d. So many high tech start ups have come from Estonia, I’m a bit stunned that they have big electricity distribution problems.
This is some kind of totally wrong reporting. Maybe some other country was meant, or the author mixed us up with Elbonia from Dilbert.
We do not have issues with electricity here or planned power cuts or whatever else.
I would like to see where this professor got his data for losses from. Maybe his data is flawed.
i dunno, if you follow the link to https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.LOSS.ZS?end=2024... you see Estonia has high distribution losses?
> Albania, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Estonia, India, Kenya, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and Venezuela
Even if Estonia does have stated electricity distribution loss, it still looks so way out of place in this group of countries by so many criteria. I wonder why not pick Egypt or Libya given that they have the same distribution loss.
Edit: this could be the reason - when you click on "Map" above the graph, for some reason Estonia is one of the blue countries shown on the map. Argentina, Brazil, and Kenya are there too (but not others).
https://energiatalgud.ee/V%C3%B5rgukaod%3A_elekter?category=...
'kaod' is losses, this table shows losses from bruto production.
Either someone has been sending wrong data to the world bank or there is some issue with interpreting them before importing to world bank.
3 replies →
The article also says Brazil's "problems look like Delhi’s 25 years ago", which is very incorrect from what they're describing. Almost none of what is described in the article happened in Brazil 20 years ago, let alone today. Energy theft, for instance, happens here but at a minuscule scale compared to what's on the article.
I also doubt Estonia has any of these issues whatsoever, like energy theft.
It really seems like a vibecoded article with numbers informing incorrect conclusions. Perhaps with a dash of nationalistic pride. Unfortunate from IEEE.
I did query ChatGPT and it seemingly wrong headedly suggested that Estonia had closed lots of Oil Shale power which it did have, I am not too up on this.
I did push back hard saying that that's not the same as what the article talked about at all.
The thing is if the World Bank is making statistics people are basing decisions on this is an issue.
"Oh, you sweet summer child"
Yes, most of the oil shale power plants are closed, some even demolished.
The existing ones are used only when electricity prices are veey high.
As far as I can tell, that number comes from the World Bank and it defines electricity loss as a percentage of domestic production. But Estonia imports a lot of its electricity, and that imported electricity is not included on the generation side of the equation.
It may be that they over-generate currently to account for the excess losses, which would be very costly given current fuel prices unless most of it is from environmental sources.
In Estonia we def do not over generate by that amount.
It doesn't need to be that amount, just a significant amount, to be worth mentioning. Though even if that much were true, you would have unusually high electricity bills at home¹.
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[1] much like we do in the UK, but that is because our national grid is a privatised mess effectively run by external concerns (EDF have their fingers in the pie, for one example) charging us much more than they can get away with in their home markets.
They split from the Russian grid and it is causing growing pains. Generation is limited to oil and comprised of aging soviet era plants. They are upgrading but it takes time.
name one start up