On Monday morning, Finland faced a power outage due to an interruption in electricity production at the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant operated by Teollisuuden Voima (TVO). The fault in the turbine plant was detected unexpectedly and its estimated end time is Wednesday at 01 am. Production power is expected to gradually increase after that.
According to Pekka Salomaa, director responsible for the energy market at the Energy Industry Association, the outage of OL3 will lead to an increase in the price of electricity. As a result of this interruption, Finland had to rely on imported electricity from Sweden and Norway’s hydropower to make up for the shortfall on Monday morning.
The importance of OL3 in stabilizing the price of electricity in Finland cannot be overstated, and this fault came at a critical time when wind power support was lacking as well as it intensifying frost. It is expected that this incident will cause an increase in spot prices with hourly prices for Tuesday’s stock electricity determined at 2 p.m.
There is currently no information available about when production will resume or if it will resume at all, as it depends on the nature of the fault and repair estimates.