To be honest I was surprised a connection like this didn't exist already! I know many "green" electricity tariffs in Germany are sold with some 60+% hydro power - which can only really come from Norway. I know it's not physically linked, but for the "balance sheet" method of greenwashing used here; I had assumed would at least have a decent link between the grids.Our isolationists are loosing their shits over it, of course, they are rambling about it as if it was 1940 and the sky was full of Heinkel. But, I'm not worried about it. You have to see it in long therm, maybe, we'll get more expensive electricity for a shorter period of time every now and then, but on the flip side we greatly improve our power supply redundancy by adding more possible power sources to the mix, as Germany is getting more and more renewables online. This also means we can export a lot of our hydro power when we have a surplus, which is most of the time.
The opposite of cables like this is a very, very bad idea, as demonstrated by Texas this winter.
I saw some scandinavian already go ape-shit in the reddit thread I stole the picture from... not quite the NAZI INVASION!!!!11 type of thing, but they were convinced suddenly their energy would get ridiculously expensive for some reason. I can honestly only see positives: we'll ditch our surplus wind & solar (but mostly wind) to Norway at negative prices and import hydro when we manage to throttle the crappy coal enough. The only time I can see this interconnect actually raising Norwegian prices is in the case that there's very low renewables available and a very high consumption driving market prices through the roof. However, in that case, I think Nordlink i simply too small to even make a difference, as peak for German electricity production in 2021 so far: 78.5 GW, max. import/export: 13.5 GW (so at least in this case, it's a solid 10% addition). [source]
That's the thing though... that'll be a long way to go now, the way the market has been developing so far. It's a good idea (because it'd prevent the crazy-price horror stories journalists often experience, because they're clueless), but I don't see it happening...There has to be standardized plugs, and equal prices for every customer independent of what car they drive.
The thing is, and I think it's been stated nicely already: if you wait for the legislation to be there first, you will never get anywhere. And when you wait for legislation to catch up (like now), you end up with a bunch of players in the market getting screwed over or angry at least. Example here: Germany just mandated credit card terminals (full terminals, no software solution blabla) for all public chargers from July 2023. It's ridiculous, as it's gonna make building and operating them even more expensive... and nobody actually needs that, as:
The EU mandated the standard plug and a "non discriminatory access method" for anyone just arriving at the charger. So you don't have to have a pre-existing contract (i.e. get a charge card beforehand), you can just arrive and somehow pay for your charge. This somehow is open, but the German interpretation of the law basically allows any one the following: a coinslot (yes. Germany.), a card terminal, a web-based payment system. Because of cost and operational considerations, basically everyone (except very few high power chargers who will actually have a CC terminal) will go with the latter option. Just set up a simple website to pay via paypal/cc that remote-authorizes the charger. Mostly simple and easy. Unless you don't have a smartphone, ofc...Didn’t the EU do that??