So a bureaucratic dispute between Sweden and the EU has led to an infrastructure project being paused.

This sounds... exceptionally uninteresting. Am I missing something here?

Or is this just a dog whistle for the HN crowd who like to complain about anything related to EU regulations?

So congestion revenues are essentially arbitrage?

Is that something that really requires that much more regulation? If there's one thing markets tend to be good at solving it's arbitrage.

The Danish traders are parasites on the energy infrastructure earning billions in arbitrage fees taking advantage of being the transit of Norwegian and Swedish power exports. All I can see from the EU energy market is an enormous wealth transfer from the users to the middle men. The market does not work unless the goal is to enrich the financial elite.

This news is from May 2026.

https://www.europesays.com/dk/80254/

> Sweden has ordered the expansion of a key power interconnector to Denmark to be halted after failing to reach agreement with the European Commission over bottleneck fees.

The interconnect already exists as Konti-Scan 1 and 2. Konti-Scan Connect, when built, will replace them.

What are "bottleneck fees"?

https://swedenherald.com/article/surplus-from-electricity-cu...

> Bottleneck revenues, or capacity fees as they are also called, arise when there are large price differences between electricity areas, often between electricity area 2 (southern Norrland) and 3 (Svealand and northern Götaland). The price differences arise when the capacity in the network is not sufficient to transfer the electricity surplus in the north to the south where the supply is too small. When Svenska kraftnät handles this, revenues arise for the authority corresponding to the price differences.

In the UK, which has a single electricity market for the whole country, we have curtailment fees. There is insufficent grid capacity between Scotland and England. When lots of power in England is needed, Scottish wind farms could provide it, but the grid can't deliver it. So the grid operator pays twice -- a curtailment fee to the wind farms to ask them to dump their energy, and a fee to English power stations to switch on the gas turbines and provide the power England needs that it can't get from the bottlenecked grid connection to Scotland.

I have the suspicion that Sweden fears having to pay the equivalent of curtailment fees to Denmark. The EU agreed that wouldn't have to happen... but the EU still wants to constrain Sweden into using its collected bottleneck fees to upgrade its grid infrastructure, hastening their demise, rather than use it to subsidise power production.

> In March, the Commission agreed that Sweden would not have to share bottleneck fees paid to Svenska Kraftnät with other EU countries. But a new conflict has blown up over some of the Commission’s other proposals. According to TT, the Commission will not agree to let Sweden use the bottleneck fees to fund power production as well as grid expansion.

Why the constant EU bashing on this site now?