In the dead of winter, Finland can be a miserable place. Temperatures often dip below minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit), and in the darkest months of the year, Helsinki gets less than six hours of light a day.
To fight the elements, Finland has become the most energy-intensive economy in the EU. But with winter approaching, the country is bracing for rolling blackouts, planned in response to Russian energy cuts. Although Russian energy only made up a small fraction of Finland’s total supply, its loss threatens to have a huge impact, and Finns are being forced to choose between bad options.
If the planned outages don’t take place, said Arto Pahkin, a network operations manager at Fingrid Oyj, which oversees the country’s electricity grid, there would a national large-scale disruption and “people could die.”
