The price of electricity will drop below 10 cents per kilowatt-hour only on Thursday night

Exchange electricity the price has remained high in recent days.

Since Tuesday, the price of electricity has never dropped below nine cents per kilowatt hour. As recently as Tuesday morning, stock exchange electricity with value added taxes cost just over zero cents per kilowatt hour.

At this point, it also seems that the price of electricity is not going to drop below ten cents per kilowatt hour before the night before Friday.

The price spikes have hardly caused gray hair for users of exchange electricity. At least there has been no need to heat even more with electricity, because the temperatures have been quite high throughout the fall.

However, winter is inevitably ahead. It’s already in Finland this week predicted night frosts except for the southern parts of the country.

Exchange electricity price fluctuations are influenced by several factors.

Expensive hours started hitting consumers after the second reactor of the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant had to be shut down in early September due to a fault in the turbine plant.

At the same time, the second unit of the Loviisa nuclear power plant has also been under maintenance. In addition, a large part of the transmission connections between Finland and Sweden has been out of use due to the main network works.

However, the biggest single reason for the price fluctuation of stock exchange electricity is the growth of wind power.

When the nuclear power plants have not produced electricity at full power, the importance of wind power has been emphasized even more. The production of wind turbines, on the other hand, varies according to the wind, while nuclear power plants usually run at a constant power, except for maintenance breaks.

“On a quick note, electricity production is now short of 1,400 megawatts of nuclear power. This is of great importance”, states the director responsible for the electricity market of the Energy industry Pekka Salomaa.

“And when there is little wind, Finland has to bring electricity from Sweden. However, imports have been hampered this fall by grid works that limited transmission capacity.”

Finland and Sweden, the maintenance and construction work has progressed so that it is currently possible to import electricity from Sweden to northern Finland without restrictions.

Instead, the capacity of the connection bringing electricity from Central Sweden to Finland will be further limited so that instead of 1,200 megawatts, the transmission capacity of the connection will be around 400 megawatts.

According to Fingrid, the backbone works should be finished in mid-October.

Before long, the end of maintenance and repair work at nuclear power plants will also bring relief to electricity price spikes.

Currently annual maintenance is carried out in the first unit of the Loviisa power plant. The second unit, which was previously undergoing annual maintenance, has already returned to production.

Fortum on Monday told that the annual maintenance of the first unit will be extended by about four days. According to the current estimate, the maintenance work should end next Saturday.

Teollisuuden Voima, on the other hand, announced last week that the second unit of the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant is to be returned to electricity production on October 6, i.e. next Sunday. At the same time, however, TVO toldthat the second unit produces electricity for several months at low power after it starts up.

Olkiluoto’s second unit’s electricity production has been stopped since September 9 due to a fault in the turbine plant.

Thorns in the price of electricity on the stock exchange, they will certainly be commonplace in the future. However, Salomaa does not believe that there are any particular risks associated with the price of electricity at the moment.

“Of course, if something were to break, the view could change. Now, a lot of maintenance work and the repair of Olkiluoto kakkonen have been scheduled for the same time. Together with the low production of wind power, they have had an impact on the price of electricity on the exchange.”