Nature and economics: Sweden has cut 80% of its net emissions since 1990 and still managed an impressive economic growth
Nature and economics: Sweden has cut 80% of its net emissions since 1990 and still managed an impressive economic growth
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.
Would you look at that, turns out a mix of renewables and nuclear is an incredibly good idea.
In 1990 Sweden generated 3TWh of electricity using fossil fuels. That happens to be the same as last year. So they did not get the emissions reduction from that. Instead it comes from having district heating system, which Sweden turned green by using biomass, large heat pumps and other renewable heating system. Also a massive adoption of electric cars and actually changing industrial processes. So they did not change the electricity mix to lower emissions.
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.
That's true. It is also true that power was generated to support the polish market when half of Sweden's nuclear reactors had to be taken out of production due to some malfunction during a bad cold front in December.
Having said that, electricity is still scarce during winter which means that a lot of it is used for heating. That must end and ideally in a way that let us use the energy excess during summer for heating during winter.
The figure 80% needs to be nuanced a bit. The reason for such a drastic decrease is that there is a lot of forest land in Sweden. In 1990, the emissions were 71,6 Mt CO2eq, while the absorption was 51,39 Mt CO2eq. In 2023, the emissions were 44,22 Mt CO2eq and the absorption 41,22 Mt CO2eq. The net emissions did indeed decrease >80%, but that was because forests made them low in the first place. If we look the emissions only, they only decreased 40%, which is still a good achievement, especially since the population has grown, but far from 80%. Source, Swedish Environmental Protection Agency
So to a large extent the amazing figure is due to geographic luck. It's not very easy for other countries to copy this solution unless they also are lucky enough to have lots of forests.
It might also be worth noting that if you look at Sweden's consumption based-emissions instead, they are about twice as high as the emissions withing Swedish borders. Ourworldindata publishes consumption-based emissions for all countries, and by that measure Swedish emissions are low by European standards, but many countries have lower emissions and Sweden is by no means an outlier. (Note, numbers don't agree with those from Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, probably due to different methodology.)
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