Today it’s an extremely cold day in Sweden. Down to about -40 in some areas and in Stockholm it has been -20. This has put a big strain on Swedens electrical grid. Also a couple of nuclear power plant’s is down for maintenance. And even thou today approx. 7-8% of Swedens electricity is imported from neighboring countries supply still have a hard time meeting the demand. So Swedish newspapers have been warning about the issue and are recomending people to conserve energy. Also a couple of emergency power plants have been ordered to power up to try to meet the demand of electricity. This means starting to burn oil to produce electricity.
The solution is quite easy. And even reduces emission of greenhouse gases. Build some more more nuclear power plants and at the time increase transmission capacity to our neighbors. This way we have some headroom for cold days. If that’s not enough we could import more electricity when needed. But it works both ways, when not using the extra capacity we could export cheap and clean nuclear power to Germany and other countries that use a lot of power plants using coal as a source. And if we use the thorium reactors i mentioned the other day we could actually get rid of our nuclear waste at the same time.
Unfortunately it takes so long time to build new power plants that Sweden would face this issue many times before they are operational.