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  • Hacker News
  • Sweden bullying Denmark, a tale as old as time.
    by baggachipz
  • The Danish traders are parasites on the energy infrastructure earning billions in arbitrage fees taking advantage of being the transit of Norwegian and Swedish power exports. All I can see from the EU energy market is an enormous wealth transfer from the users to the middle men. The market does not work unless the goal is to enrich the financial elite.
    by christkv
  • Spain tried to kick out all the bankers (in this case "the jews"). It was a financial disaster.

    That you don't understand financial markets doesn't mean the realities of those marks won't hurt you really really badly if you try to adjust it with communist misapprehensions.

    by boxed
  • Danskjävlar
    by Hikikomori
  • Resource is expensive in location A due to too low supply. Resource is cheap in location B due to higher supply. Moving resource from B to A is non-trivial.

    Why is it so crazy that the facilitators of getting the resource moved get compensated?

    by gspr
  • Why the constant EU bashing on this site now?
    by beezlewax
  • Because EU is a socialist and authoritarian project that will lead to war and disaster. Only the nationalist right has realized this, and the people are angry. It's boiling under the surface. The EU will either slowly sink down into irrelevance, or if noting is done, and the evil expands, it will lead to outright war.
    by abc123abc123
  • I'm not sure this is EU bashing, it could equally be Sweden bashing.
    by gpvos
  • Good one. If anything, this is a refreshing change from the daily "look how independent and free Europe is now that the commune of Nowhereaux's planning committee switched from Excel to LibreOffice" article
    by drstewart
  • Ask the Europeans, most of the US wasn't online when this hit the front page.
    by zdragnar
  • There is not EU bashing, there is EU political confrontation between rational and irrational countries. My electricity bill is more expensive because we provide energy to all our neighbors and over that the EC think the french state subsidize its national electric operator too much which slowdown the deployment of new nuclear reactors. That cannot be both, give us our money back by allowing advantageous tariffs in countries with a good energy policy or let us develop our production base without interfering.
    by bdauvergne
  • So congestion revenues are essentially arbitrage?

    Is that something that really requires that much more regulation? If there's one thing markets tend to be good at solving it's arbitrage.

    by contravariant
  • > So congestion revenues are essentially arbitrage?

    There are significant capital costs to moving power. As I understand it, an example within the US is the relationship between the regional transmission operator (RTO) SPP and MISO, who have overlapping territory. In order for move power between certain areas of SPP, it travels over MISO lines. This eats into MISO capacity. As a result the two RTOs are working on a joint project.

    https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news...

    by adolph
  • It does require regulation if you, as the state, find it inconvenient where the proceeds of the arbitrage end up.
    by m101
  • So a bureaucratic dispute between Sweden and the EU has led to an infrastructure project being paused.

    This sounds... exceptionally uninteresting. Am I missing something here?

    Or is this just a dog whistle for the HN crowd who like to complain about anything related to EU regulations?

    by esperent
  • > Or is this just a dog whistle for the HN crowd who like to complain about anything related to EU regulations?

    Only topped by the number of people who love to cheer for US vs China while living in neither.

    by villish
  • You're not missing anything. Its extremely uninteresting and nothing out of the ordinary in the early phases of large infrastructure projects. I guess EU/Denmark/power generation is a sure thing to reach the HN front page nowadays.
    by tokai
  • Most of the US isn't online yet, so I would expect this to be mostly people from the East side of the pond voting on it. In any case, onto the merits of the article itself:

    Renewable, net zero energy requires massively expanding the grid to regions that cannot supply enough from regions that can. I.e. hydro during Dunkelflaute.

    Here, we find yet another type of stumbling block in setting up such a system.

    Yeah, not super riveting stuff, I suppose...

    by zdragnar
  • Europe is scrambling to expand its electricity network, which doesn't have enough capacity. I don't know how badly Sweden and Denmark are affected, but in e.g. the Netherlands it inhibits the move away from fossil fuel for both homes and companies, and even disrupts building developments. So, anything that delays this for unexpected reasons is news. Is it interesting enough for HN? That's for you to decide.
    by gpvos
  • From an economical and political point of view this is actually interesting.

    The free market in EU caused the high electricity prices in Germany to be partially transferred to Swedish consumers, despite Sweden being a net exporter.

    From a political POV, Sweden couldn't really stop this (or the government didnt want to as they were making bilions on transfer fees). And this cable would make things significantly worse for the swedish consumers

    by throwa356262
  • This news is from May 2026.

    https://www.europesays.com/dk/80254/

    > Sweden has ordered the expansion of a key power interconnector to Denmark to be halted after failing to reach agreement with the European Commission over bottleneck fees.

    The interconnect already exists as Konti-Scan 1 and 2. Konti-Scan Connect, when built, will replace them.

    What are "bottleneck fees"?

    https://swedenherald.com/article/surplus-from-electricity-cu...

    > Bottleneck revenues, or capacity fees as they are also called, arise when there are large price differences between electricity areas, often between electricity area 2 (southern Norrland) and 3 (Svealand and northern Götaland). The price differences arise when the capacity in the network is not sufficient to transfer the electricity surplus in the north to the south where the supply is too small. When Svenska kraftnät handles this, revenues arise for the authority corresponding to the price differences.

    In the UK, which has a single electricity market for the whole country, we have curtailment fees. There is insufficent grid capacity between Scotland and England. When lots of power in England is needed, Scottish wind farms could provide it, but the grid can't deliver it. So the grid operator pays twice -- a curtailment fee to the wind farms to ask them to dump their energy, and a fee to English power stations to switch on the gas turbines and provide the power England needs that it can't get from the bottlenecked grid connection to Scotland.

    I have the suspicion that Sweden fears having to pay the equivalent of curtailment fees to Denmark. The EU agreed that wouldn't have to happen... but the EU still wants to constrain Sweden into using its collected bottleneck fees to upgrade its grid infrastructure, hastening their demise, rather than use it to subsidise power production.

    > In March, the Commission agreed that Sweden would not have to share bottleneck fees paid to Svenska Kraftnät with other EU countries. But a new conflict has blown up over some of the Commission’s other proposals. According to TT, the Commission will not agree to let Sweden use the bottleneck fees to fund power production as well as grid expansion.

    by amiga386
  • The Commission will not agree to let Sweden use the bottleneck fees to fund nuclear power production. Or to be more precise, German and Danish high electricity prices financing the expansion of Swedish nuclear sector.

    "Sweden’s center-right government is simultaneously pursuing one of Europe’s most ambitious nuclear expansion agendas, seeking financing frameworks for four large-scale reactors or equivalent modular nuclear capacity totaling roughly 5,000 MW. Half of this capacity is targeted for commissioning by 2035. The government increasingly views congestion revenues as an important funding mechanism to support these ambitions."

    https://constructionreviewonline.com/konti-skan-connect-proj...

    by leonidasrup
  • Hmm, so basically Sweden has a surplus of goods (electricity), but the EU commissions is trying to pay for it with coupons that look like money but can't be used to buy everything, and now Sweden is saying "no, tak".
    by contravariant
  • Oh for Pete's sake, Sweden. Anything to avoid building more North-South connectivity.

    Sweden is currently split into four pricing areas due to lack of grid capacity. All the cheap electricity is typically in the north (hydro) and then the price creeps up when you head south.

    It's too bad the live electricity flow data is offline today, but there's a common pattern where SE1 pricing area in the north sends little under 2 GW to Finland (single zone) and most of it gets exported to SE3 around Stockholm.

    by lrasinen
  • Sweden will not pay curtailment fees, such a thing does not exist. The reason is exactly what you quote at the end.

    To state it again:

    1. The intranational powercables means that German demand raises electricity prices in southern Sweden, which means businesses and consumers pay a premium vs what they would have paid without the cable

    2. The extra charge is captured by network operators as what is called bottleneck fees and it's billions of euros per year, very large sums

    3. The EC first wanted to confiscate these funds, which come from Swedish consumers and businesses. Now they want to rule about their use. Obviously this is completely unacceptable and nothing more than a bureaucratic powergrab, and no country would accept it.

    by try-working