The tricky policy for Sweden’s sea wind – POLITICO
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STOCKHOLM – Offshore wind should be the uncontroversial renewable energy – green, clean and largely out of sight – but some Swedish towns are so opposed to wind towers that stand over the waves that they prefer to build new nuclear reactors.
“Do we want a beautiful coast – where people want to live, with a fantastic tourism industry – or do we want to destroy it with steel structures, with helicopters flying above to de-icing turbines?” said Lars Beckman in the center-opposition party Moderaterna during a debate last week about building two new wind farms outside Gävle, a couple of hours drive north of Stockholm.
During the debate, Beckman raised his party’s view that nuclear power, not wind, should be expanded. Nuclear generates about a third of Sweden’s power.
In many countries such as Germany and Poland, offshore wind is seen as a way to expand renewable energy without getting setbacks that turbines encounter on land. But this is not always the case in Sweden, where offshore wind is quickly becoming a polarizing issue ahead of next year’s parliamentary elections.
And the fight is likely to get much worse.
According to a recent Report of Swedeenergy, a business lobby group, Sweden may need to more than double its electricity production by 2045 to meet the growing demand from industries such as mining and steel when they abandon fossil fuels.
The current government of the Social Democrats and the Greens puts much of their trust in the wind. Sweden’s wind power production on land has increased sharply in recent years and rose 40 percent only between 2019 and 2020.
“We have seen a rapid expansion of renewable electricity in Sweden, but to meet the acute challenge of climate change, we must accelerate this expansion,” says Minister of the Environment Per Bolund told reporters at a briefing to announce a plan to make offshore projects cheaper for developers last month. “Wind power at sea has enormous potential.”
Existing applications for offshore wind projects in southern Sweden alone correspond to 350 terawatt hours in new production, or approximately two and a half times Sweden’s total electricity use in 2020 of 134 TWh, said Minister of Energy Anders Ygeman at the same press conference.
But the best and cheapest areas for new wind projects are Often quite close to the beach, which triggered growing resistance.
In Smögen, a fishing village on the west coast, the local center-right mayor Mats Abrahamsson is against sea winds near his municipality and says that buildings as tall as the Eiffel Tower in the sea would be foreign to his community.
“This is just not what you associate with this place,” he said told Sveriges SVT. “Sea, sun, fish and shrimp, that’s what we associate with this place.”
Applications for new projects must be approved by municipalities and environmental courts, which leads to political and legal battles throughout Sweden. In many cases, the same objections are now used that have traditionally been used against land-based wind power – that the turbines are ugly and noisy and damage natural habitats and prospects for tourism – against offshore projects.
This happened in Gävle, where opposition politicians such as Beckman managed to postpone the decision on two parks outside Gävle – Utposten 2 and Storgrundet – for a month by requesting more information about funding.
Money vs. sea view
After the meeting, the Social Democratic municipal councilor Jörgen Edsvik, who backs the projects together with most other local legislators, said that the arrangements could have a major impact on the economy in Gävle – where companies, among other things. Microsoft demands large amounts of clean power – and also increases efforts to combat climate change.
– Every planned new development affects, and it is unfortunate that some individuals can sometimes experience that their immediate environment changes, says Edsvik. At the same time, we municipal legislators must look after the interests of the whole society, for everyone who lives in Gävle.
The fight in Gävle is part of a broader battle over the role of nuclear power and wind in triggering Sweden’s electricity grid.
The moderates have led attacks on the government over the shutdown of a nuclear reactor at the Ringhals plant in southern Sweden earlier this year, and in a much-watched television debate At the end of October, representatives of the largest parliamentary parties clashed hard on the issue.
Academics have worried that it will distract the country from the greater effort to combat climate change.
– We have an enormous demand for electricity to meet, says Lisa Göransson, researcher in energy systems at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. “There is too much focus on disagreements instead of what we agree on.”
For the rest of Europe, tensions in Sweden over energy policy are a sign of what is to come, with legislators forced to weigh the growing voters’ concerns about climate change against local concerns about renewable infrastructure. There are similar battles in Germany over a proposed power link connecting wind power from the North Sea and southern industrial regions, with locals worried that the project would destroy beautiful alpine views.
In Sweden, the focus of this struggle has now shifted to the coast.
In Trelleborg, in the far south, the center-right mayor Mikael Rubin said that wind turbines on the horizon would damage his municipality’s tourism industry.
Swedish law allows cities to veto plans for local wind farms, and the municipality of Trelleborg has exercised that right, despite the latest measures from the government to create financial incentives for communities that allow wind farms.
“Money is not everything,” Rubin said sa.
In Gävle, the debate on Utposten 2 and Storgrundet will begin again at the end of November.
The Social Democrats’ council Edsvik believes that the project will go through, and on election day next autumn, voters will support his party’s position as it will ensure that local industries get the clean electricity they need while contributing to national efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
– It is important that Gävle does its role, he said.
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