Today in Denmark: A roundup of the latest news on Friday

Pinse long weekend set to be warm and sunny

Temperatures this weekend could reach 20 degrees in some areas, and aside for a short period of rain on Saturday it looks like the long pinse weekend is set to be sunny and springlike for most of Denmark, the country’s weather agency DMI said.

Friday morning will be cloudy, although the clouds are expected to dissipate later in the day.

“In most areas it is cloudy and in many parts of Jutland it’s even foggy, but in most areas it’s set to clear up and be sunny,” DMI’s on-duty meteorologist Hans Wanner told the Ritzau news wire.

“It will be 15-20 degrees and it won’t be as windy today either,” he added.

On Saturday and Sunday, he said, temperatures look like they will be around 20 degrees.

Danish vocabulary: pinse ‒ pentecost

Electrcity prices set to plummet this weekend due to weather

Electricity prices will be very low during the day this weekend and into next week, even free at some points, due to forecast sunshine and wind, according to energy company OK.

“It looks like that will continue for most of next week due to a lot of sunshine and quite a bit of wind,” the company’s head of product, Troels Skipper, said.

“There’s a high chance that you’ll be able to charge your car for more or less nothing in the next few days, if you make the most of the sunny midday hours.”

The low prices are due to a large degree to high production form solar panels, as well as the fact that usage usually drops during public holidays ‒ Monday is anden pinsedag, which is a public holiday in Denmark.

Although prices will on paper be free for some hours, you’ll still have to pay energy tariffs and taxes.

Danish vocabulary: strømpriser ‒ electricity prices

Citizens’ proposal for cheap petrol to be debated in parliament

A citizens’ proposal for cheap petrol has been signed by more than 50,000 people, which means that it will be debated in parliament.

The proposal, originally launched by the Danish Peoples’ Party, includes cutting taxes and VAT on petrol and diesel as a result of high prices following the war in Iran.

“Fuel is a necessity for many Danes ‒ not a luxury. But still we pay some of the highest prices in Europe,” the proposal reads.

“Not because oil is more expensive in Denmark than in Germany, but because Denmark has very high fees and high VAT on petrol and diesel.”

More specifically, the proposal would cut fees to the minimum EU level ‒ 2.68 kroner per litre of petrol and 1.8 kroner per litre of diesel ‒ as well as cutting VAT from 25 percent to the EU’s minimum, 15 percent.

The proposal does not state how the tax cuts will be financed.

Danish vocabulary: borgerforslag ‒ citizens’ proposal

Experts critical after Nets outage yesterday

Payment provider Nets suffered another outage yesterday, the second major outage the provider has experienced in less than a year.

From around 9am to 2pm, many people in Denmark ‒ and people abroad with Danish bank cards ‒ were unable to use their cards for payment in shops.

According to Nets, the outage was caused by an “internal error”. In July last year, Nets also had a major outage caused by “a rare component failure”.

Carsten Schürmann, professor at IT University of Copenhagen (ITU), told public broadcaster DR that he was surprised by the second outage on Thursday.

“If Nets haven’t learnt their lesson after last year then that’s quite serious because this is critical infrastructure. This shouldn’t happen so easily. So personally, I’m a bit surprised that we’re seeing the same situation we saw in July last year,” he told the broadcaster.

Both Schürmann and computer science professor Ivan Bjerre Damgård raised the question of whether Nets’ backup systems are sufficient.

“It’s a bit odd, because in well-designed systems you often have backup systems which you can use instead so you don’t need to shut everything down,” Damgård told DR, while adding that these backup systems are often expensive.

Danish vocabulary: nedbrud ‒ outage