Here in Estonia, two problems we face are that the two Estlink cables connecting us to Finland (which has a nuclear plant! yay!) are sometimes down for maintenance, and also they’re sometimes fully saturated in the winter. In fact when that happens, power prices go up a lot because our national consumption can reach 1600 MW (actually new record this February was 1723 MW) and when the main shale burning plant is down for maintenance (which is about once a week for 8 days at a time in the winter when it would be useful) we’re pretty much at the mercy of wind and and the Finnish nuclear plants. Oh and since we’re the bridge between the rest of the Baltics and Finland, we don’t really keep all of what is transferred over Estlink, the Latvians and Lithuanians are part of the same grid so their demand gets added to ours.
Point being, our grids might not be closed, but particularly when talking about overseas connections, there are bottlenecks.
How good is the link?
Here in Estonia, two problems we face are that the two Estlink cables connecting us to Finland (which has a nuclear plant! yay!) are sometimes down for maintenance, and also they’re sometimes fully saturated in the winter. In fact when that happens, power prices go up a lot because our national consumption can reach 1600 MW (actually new record this February was 1723 MW) and when the main shale burning plant is down for maintenance (which is about once a week for 8 days at a time in the winter when it would be useful) we’re pretty much at the mercy of wind and and the Finnish nuclear plants. Oh and since we’re the bridge between the rest of the Baltics and Finland, we don’t really keep all of what is transferred over Estlink, the Latvians and Lithuanians are part of the same grid so their demand gets added to ours.
Point being, our grids might not be closed, but particularly when talking about overseas connections, there are bottlenecks.