How Sweden balances emission cuts with economic growth – DW – 08/12/2024
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Sweden has cut 80% of its net emissions since 1990 and still managed an impressive economic growth. What's the secret?

The Scandinavian country has some natural advantages. 70% of Sweden is forest land. And forests are very useful when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions because they remove CO2 from the atmosphere. The country is also blessed with a great deal of wind, as well as mountains, streams and lakes — perfect for renewable energy.

But it wasn’t just hitting the natural resources jackpot that got the country to where it is now. Sweden realized its natural potential early on and started investing in renewable energy sources much earlier than many other countries.

“Sweden has had hydropower for more than a century,” according to Goldmann.

They also cut out fossil fuels from their energy mix back in the 1970s, when the global oil crisis hit. When countries were looking for other sources of energy, Sweden substantially built out nuclear energy.

Today, almost 70% of Sweden’s electricity comes from renewables, especially hydropower and wind. The rest of its electricity demand is met by nuclear power. This means their greenhouse gas emissions for electricity production are almost zero right now.

“So, they are almost not using any fossil fuels for producing electricity. If you compare it with other countries, that’s a whole other world,” said Jorre De Schrijver, an energy expert from the European Environment Agency.

And it’s not just electricity that’s now produced without fossil fuels in Sweden — that also goes for heating and energy-intense industrial processes.

  • IcebladeEnglish
    11•1 month ago

    By 1990 the electricity mix was already clean. Those 3 TWh are from backup power plants. For context, the electricity production of Sweden in 1990 was 145TWh and 160 last year.

    The main transition in the grid was 1970-1990, but that time period isn’t on your graph. Ourworldindata unfortunately doesn’t have stats for electricity before 1990, but we can instead look at the total energy consumption of the country. Fossil fuels went from representing ~70% of total energy consumption (360TWh) down to a mere 35% (230TWh). This was achieved by the introduction nuclear power (190TWh) and expansion of hydropower (+90TWh) - i.e a mix of Nuclear and Renewables.

    https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-country?stackMode=absolute&country=~SWE