– In my 25 years in the market, I have never experienced such a skewed distribution between the resources in the north and south of Norway. That’s what analysis manager Tor Reier Lilleholt at Value Insight says. Støre has announced changes to the current electricity subsidy for households. It assumes that the support will be increased to 90 per cent when the electricity price rises above 70 øre per kilowatt hour from 1 September. The backdrop is the extreme price situation for electricity. The government has been given one week to come up with a timetable for the various electricity measures. At the same time as it is being discussed whether there is a need to urgently convene the Storting to take action on the electricity situation, the contrasts in our country are becoming clear. Power analyst Marius Holm Rennesund in Thema Consulting points out the differences in the degree of filling in our water reservoirs right now: – In Northern Norway we are now up to the highest levels we have seen. While in southern Norway we create new minimum levels week by week. In the water reservoirs in the south, the amount of water in the reservoirs is lower than it has been in 20 years. This in turn leads to record high electricity prices. Here from Blåsjø in Agder. In the north, the reservoirs are overflowing. Nordkraft warns about traveling near rivers that flow in and out of the reservoirs and prices are historically low. In week 30 with a weekly price of 2 øre/kWh. Full water reservoir at Balvatn in Nordland. Warns against traffic near water reservoirs Marius Larsen, production director at Nordkraft, tells about full reservoirs in Narvik. – There have been large amounts of snow this winter, combined with a lot of rain throughout the summer. The result is a full magazine. Marius Larsen, production director at Nordkraft says that people who travel by waterways must be careful. Streams have turned into rivers in several places. Photo: Frida Brembo / news On Sunday, they issued a message asking people to be careful of the extreme amounts of water in the magazines. They warn against traffic on the waterways. – People are not used to such quantities of water. Rivers have appeared where there usually aren’t any. In Narvik, Nordkraft produces what it can. It is to regulate water quantities, even though the prices are very low. – This is not usual. We have not seen this in the last 10-15 years. Driest in 130 years The situation in the south is very different, according to head of analysis Tor Reier Lilleholt in Value. – With more water resources, the prices would also have been more similar, says head of analysis Tor Reier Lilleholt. Photo: Asbjørn Odd Berge / news – Here we have the lowest magazines we have seen in over 20 years. Some local waterways are experiencing one of the driest conditions we have seen in 130 years. Blåsjø in Agder is by far the largest magazine in the Nordics. It is a so-called multi-year magazine, and Statkraft operates the system. – You can really see the extremities there today. What you see there now, you usually see in what is called “springtime”. Just before the snow starts to melt, says Svendsen in StormGeo. The problem is that there has been a lack of snow in the mountains here in the south, which has meant that there has been no supply. The water reservoir in the Blåsjø reservoir is 30 meters below the highest regulated water level. Two years ago the magazines were overflowing. Photo: Gunnar Morsund – There hasn’t been so little water in Blåsjø in 20 years, says Bjørn Sandvik, power plant manager for Statkraft’s Ulla-Førre plants. But in 2020 it was the opposite situation. Then the reservoirs to Blåsjø overflowed, and the electricity was expensive in the north and cheap in the south. – Then it was the south that could not help the north, now it is the opposite. It is a bit special that we are both at the top and at the bottom in a two-year period, says Svendsen. Bjørn Sandvik, power plant manager for the Ulla-Førre plants in Statkraft says that the situation has turned upside down from what it was 20 years ago. Photo: Gunnar Morsund He believes it will be important in the future to make power production more predictable. – The possibility of looking at the hydrology of the whole of Norway as a whole will reduce the risk of more dry year crises. Difficult to predict There are also high filling levels in central Norway, where the records for high filling levels were touched a couple of weeks ago. Before it has since flattened out. Rennesund describes the contrasts between north and south as “extreme”. – Definitely. – You have so much water in the north that you cannot export the power you want. Neither directly to the south in Norway nor via Sweden. Then you get locked-in power, and the prices you can enjoy in Northern Norway now. Power analyst Marius Holm Rennesund in Thema Consulting describes the contrasts between north and south as “extreme” Photo: THEMA Consulting Group Senior power analyst Pål Svendsen in StormGeo believes that the contrasts you see between north and south in terms of degree of filling are historic. – I have never experienced it as low as now. – The warehouse levels we have now are due to a combination of extreme drought and the fact that the producers have been willing to produce at the enormously high prices that have been seen. In part, they have produced too much too soon, he believes. At the same time, it is difficult to know what the future holds when the plans are set. In other words, it is easy to have hindsight. The consequence is anyway that the price of power will be higher, to prevent more exports than absolutely necessary, Svendsen explains. – You have to price yourself up against German and British prices. Otherwise, the export goes full steam ahead. He points out that Western Norway has received a lot of rainfall during the summer. This is how the degree of filling and electricity prices in Norway look now In south-west Norway, the weekly price was a record high of 322 øre/kWh in week 30, i.e. the last week in July. This was an increase of five percent from the previous week. In South-Eastern and Western Norway, the weekly price increased by 13 per cent. The power price was still clearly lower there than in south-west Norway in week 30. According to NVE, there are bottlenecks in the Norwegian power grid which mean that there are price differences between the municipalities in southern Norway as well. South-west Norway is more strongly affected by power prices on the continent than south-east and west Norway. Prices in Northern and Central Norway still remained at a very low level in week 30, but a weekly price of 2 øre/kWh. The degree of filling in the magazines in southern Norway increased by 1.3 percentage points last week, but is still at a low level for the time of year, according to NVE. At the end of week 30, the filling rate in Norwegian magazines was 66.5 per cent. For comparison, the median value for the filling at the corresponding time is 74.9 per cent for the years 2002-2021. Mid-Norway (NO3) had the highest magazine filling with 88.4 per cent, while South-West Norway (NO2) had the lowest filling with 49.3 per cent. – The situation is much closer to normal down towards Agder. But there is such a large capacity between the systems that Western Norway and central Eastern Norway lie between the price levels we see in Sweden and Agder. Right now there is a marked difference from Dovre and further south. – Could this situation have been foreseen? – It took a lot to predict a pandemic, a subsequent situation where Asia bought a lot of the gas, war in Ukraine and dry years in southern Norway – at the same time, says Svendsen in StormGeo. What could be predicted were price differences between north and south. And built infrastructure between north and south. – The system in place with price ranges provides an incentive for industrial companies to establish themselves in the north. At the same time, it shows that one should invest in production capacity in the south.
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Extreme differences – news Nordland
