Liberalisation of electricity market in Finland as a part of Nordic market

The Finnish electricity market is a part of the physically interconnected Nordic market which also includes Denmark, Norway and Sweden. All countries are nowadays deregulated in slightly different ways, and the central co-ordination of power generation is replaced with the market based power exchange NordPool. In Finland, the deregulation was performed step by step, so that first the customers above 500 kW were allowed to change their supplier in November 1995. From January 1997, all customers were free to select their suppliers provided that they had a remotely-read hourly meter. Since November 1, 1998 all small customers (below 3×63 A, about 45 kW) have been able to change their supplier without any extra costs. As a result of competition, most of the larger customers have changed their suppliers or negotiated new contracts with their existing supplier. Of the 2.2 million small customers, only about 3%, have changed supplier, but the electricity prices for all customers have decreased