Norway worries about winter power supply

NORWAY - Norway's oil and energy minister said he was concerned about electricity supply this winter due to lingering troubles at Swedish nuclear reactors and low reservoir levels at hydro power plants.

Last year spot power prices reached all-time highs in the Nordic countries due to lower-than-usual temperatures and unexpected outages at some of Sweden's nuclear reactors.

Terje Riis-Johansen acknowledged that it was a concern that some outages at Swedish reactors occurred unexpectedly or were longer than anticipated.

"We have been in continuing contact with the Swedish authorities about this," he told Reuters on the sidelines of a conference on renewable energy in Norway.

"The Swedish authorities are impatient on the situation around Swedish power stations," he said. "There is a lot of activity at a political level in Sweden about this, so that things happen as quickly as possible."

He added, "It is a real challenge with the coming winter it is a situation that should be different than it is."

Riis-Johansen said the amount of water in reservoirs at hydroelectric stations, which supply around half of the Nordic region's total power supply, was also lower than normal. In such a situation, prices often tend to spike during the winter months.

"The prognosis for the reservoirs is not good," he said.

Spot electricity prices on the pan-Nordic power market have hovered between 48 and 51 euros per megawatt hour since mid-August, compared with highs above 100 euros at the start of 2010.

Riis-Johansen said that one of key reasons Swedish nuclear reactors have had problems with maintenance is a lack of new recruits in the sector due to earlier plans to phase it out.

Early this year Sweden's center-right government, which won re-election this month, agreed to replace aging nuclear units with new reactors, but there has been little clarity about the details.

"What we see in Sweden is that they have a challenge with competence in the nuclear sector since they had initially planned to phase out nuclear power stations," he said.

"So they have not trained new people in this sector, and so it takes much longer on maintenance projects than planned."