Comment by pebbly_bread
5 hours ago
>Batteries are coming, and will solve it, but it will still take time for them to be come cheap enough.
How long is the hope those batteries will last? There's surely no way Finland can run off battery power for even one month, much less a whole winter.
edit: perhaps I misunderstood and your comment on batteries was more related to the reliability of wind?
Yeah, the batteries are for wind. There are some days when the wind barely blows at all. That's when electricity prices really spike.
Finland's power grid stats are open to the public. You can click the month view to see how the different power sources fluctuate.
https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/
Also fun fact: a lot of solar panels in Finland are mounted vertically to walls rather than rooftops. That's because we're so far north that the sun just hangs around the horizon rather than going directly overhead. You end up catching more sunlight pointing directly south.
Budgeting for over a month without power is unheard of. Extreme scenarios ("dunkelflaute") are measured on the order of hours, maybe days, and they get shorter and less frequent the larger the grid is.