STOCKHOLM, Dec. 9 (Xinhua) — Swedish households may sometimes have to go without electricity, the government said Friday, urging the public to use electricity sparingly.
“Many Swedes have saved electricity because of the cost and now we want to ask them to save electricity to minimize the risk of interruptions,” Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said at a press conference on Friday.
Should an interruption occur, this would be a first for Sweden, a country that in 2021 was a net exporter of 25.6 terawatt hours of electricity, according to the Energy Agency.
– We don’t want to create panic, but we want to say that it is a big problem and that there are big risks, says Kristersson.
According to the Radiation Safety Authority, around 30 percent of the country’s electricity comes from nuclear power plants. However, three of Sweden’s six nuclear reactors will either be closed for maintenance or run at half capacity over the weekend.
To reduce the risk of outages, fossil fuel-fired power plants have been ordered to stand by until mid-March, a spokesperson for the national grid company Svenska Kraftnat said at the press conference.
Since Europe was thrown into an energy crisis by the effects of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, people in Sweden have also faced record high energy prices in recent months, with peaks close to eight Swedish kronor (78 US cents) per kilowatt hour (kWh).
Source: sn.dk