The Energy Agency decided, based on a complaint by the owners of the Olkiluoto nuclear power plants, that the so-called system protection is entirely the responsibility of the grid company Fingrid. Until now, the owners of the power plant have been responsible for the arrangement.
Energy Agency has decided that the grid company Fingrid must fully take care of the backup system caused by a possible failure of the Olkiluoto triple reactor.
According to the decision, grid protection is the network operator's special protection system, which is the responsibility of the grid company.
In its decision, the Energy Agency considers Fingrid to have unjustifiably transferred its obligations related to the grid protection system to Teollisuuden Voima.
The Energy Agency requires Fingrid to submit a proposal for principles for covering the costs of protection for the Energy Agency to confirm. Until now, TVO has paid most of the costs.
It is important to start the short-term and long-term development work of grid protection immediately so that nuclear power plants can be run at full power without unreasonable costs. TVO is committed to supporting Fingrid in this development work.
It's about is in an arrangement from which already agreed on Olkiluoto in the design phase of the triple reactor twenty years ago. The owners of the power plant committed themselves to ensure that a possible disruption of the power plant would not result in a maximum power drop of 1300 megawatts in the electricity system.
The power plant has a capacity of 1,600 megawatts, so the owners had to ensure that 300 megawatts were managed with their own backup arrangements. This came to be called system protection.
In practice, it meant that the engines of the forest industry were connected directly to the power plant so that if the power of the power plant drops, the engines automatically shut down.
At the time the arrangement was agreed upon, the largest owners of the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant, Fortum and TVO, also owned the grid company Fingrid. Therefore, it was easy to agree on the arrangement.
Today, the national grid is owned by the state and pension companies. During the construction period of the triple reactor, the electricity market has changed so that electricity consumption flexibility has become valuable. Industry could sell the consumption power tied to system protection to the electricity market, often at a good price.
The owners of Olkiluoto have been trying to get rid of the expensive arrangement for a long time and have the costs of system protection paid by Fingrid and thus the entire electricity system.
Fingrid has not been willing to do this. Therefore, a year and a half ago, the owners of Olkiluoto complained about the activities of the grid company to the Energy Agency, the authority that supervises the sector. They claimed, among other things, that Fingrid was neglecting its task as maintaining the stability of the grid.
In last Friday's market situation, system protection increased the price
System protection causes indirect costs for the electricity system even now. For example, the market situation on the first Friday of January makes this very concrete. In practice, the system protection increased the spot price of electricity significantly.
The industry had to keep the engines running for 300 megawatts so that the triple reactor could be kept at full power. So the engines were running in case there was a sudden failure in the plant and by turning them off the power grid would be prevented from falling over.
If engine owners could have offered the engine consumption flexibility to the Friday spot market, electricity would likely have been significantly cheaper. In a very tight demand situation, even a difference of a couple of hundred megawatts can mean a big price difference.
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