Mildly Infuriating

I get the joke, but in contrast to heating, you can easily just... not run demanding games while the electricity is insanely expensive for a day.

What do you mean? I can run my 4090 to heat the house instead of my furnace

Part of it was faulty pricing from a Norwegian electricity exporter. Also, they have almost finished the new infrastructure, so they do not have to import as much in crisis situations. I think a new nuclear power plant goes online and lots of renewable stuff. The problem OP is maybe talking about seems to be very well handled by the state and already solved. https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/24708-electricity-prices-in-finland-return-to-normal-levels-in-2023-down-64-from-previous-year.html

Lucky you. 175 square meters, 25cm styrofoam on walls and 30cm rock wool on ceiling and I pay 200€ per month in winter for gas heating in Poland. Solar panels are not economical in current regulations and billing rules have changed so those with heat pumps pay at least twice us much in coldest months.

We are fucked from every angle.

About 30% do

We've had negative 20 temperatures for over a week which happens about once every 10 years so the demand is extremely high and on top of that few of our powerplants are out of service for maintenance so that electricity has to be bought from abroad too.

Few cold days in a row is not an issue as buildings still have heat stored up in the structures but when it lasts for a long time the demand for more heating goes up drastically.

I unfortunelately don't have a fireplace in my house. It was removed when the house was renovated in the 80's

It’s a Christmas scented ash they leave behind, most unsettling

-49.9°F is insane. A couple of years ago in the upper US Midwest, we set our record for around -45°F (-42.7°C) but that was with wind chill, the base temp. was something like -30°F (-34.4°C). People who've never experienced those kinds of temperatures really cannot comprehend how miserably cold it is and just how extremely dangerous it can be. I know there's probably arctic dwellers that are used to those kinds of temps regularly, but it blew my mind when I had to go out into it and still got cold under 3 layers of clothes.

what kind of regulatory distopia do these laws come from?

/s

Probably because it's about -35C outside.

Dude is basically living on the set of The Thing at this point.

That's a perfectly normal number for any home that isn't very new and perfectly insulated.

My 37sqm appartment needs approximately 5000 kWh in natural gas per year, 876 kWh last December, so 28 kWh per day on average. The building is admittedly old and not perfectly insulated but it's also not a log cabin out in the open in Finland, but instead a flat enclosed within 3 other flats in the middle of cosy, never below -8C Germany.

21 kWh in a log cabin in Finnland actually seemed pretty low to me. It's sort of obvious OP is using a heat pump and the cabin must really be absolutely tiny.

50kWh and closer to 90kWh on days like this. It's a log cabin and I'm keeping my root cellar and insulated shed above freezing aswell. Even running a 1kW heater all day would result in a consumption more than 21kWh and that wouldn't keep any house warm.

A tiny heater running all day would do that.

1kw is a small heater. 0.8kw is a tiny one. 0.8x24 is 19.2. Assuming they have other basic appliances, that's already more than enough to account for their usage.

Hydro =/= hydro. The plants in Finland are tiny in comparison.

Older houses burn oil for heating the house and water but even most of them have heatpumps installed. New houses usually also have heatpumps or geothermal so direct electric heating is more and more uncommon. Apartment buildings generally all have district heating and even some private homes do.

Yes it's expensive but so is everything else too. Our houses are way better insulated than in most places though so that helps a little.