If You’re Trying To Find a Winner in the Race To Renewables, Don’t Count Out Sweden
Here’s our Instagram post from the other day.
Caption: Sweden managed to reach its goal of a 50 per cent renewable energy share several years ahead of the Swedish government’s 2020 schedule, in 2012. The most recent figure of 52 per cent for renewable energy – including electricity, district heating and fuel – is the highest in the EU.
That’s wonderful, but I will not cheer Sweden until they achieve AT LEAST 90% CO2 free power which is highly unlikely. That is the minimum that the entire world will have to achieve. Goals of less than that are inadequate and should be recognized as such. So far NO country or region, however strongly committed, has demonstrated that it is possible to achieve 90% CO2 free power with solar and wind power. That is true for ALL countries which have committed themselves to solar and wind power.
Nations which have enough hydro power available can achieve close to 100% CO2 free power. However, few nations can have that much hydro power. If the available hydro power isn’t quite enough to achieve 100% CO2 free power, wind and solar may be able to make up the difference.
Mainland Norway is already is already at a little over 100% renewable electricity – the vast majority hydro with some wind. In addition, Norway is the main swing producer for Denmark and Sweden and to a lesser extent Germany and the Netherlands.
Demand is broadly stable in spite of a growing population and an enthusiastic uptake of electric vehicles.
Norway has just recently approved a further 1GW of wind power development which may well count towards its neighbour Sweden’s renewable energy target as the two nations share a renewable certificate market, and operate their de-carbonisation policies as if they were one country – so we can expect to see Norway’s electricity production rise taking its output of zero carbon electricity further and further above 100%.
Iceland also has an effectively 100% renewable electricity system, in this case geothermal baseload with hydro power as the swing producer and just a few wind turbines for variety. Iceland has attracted electricity intensive industries such as Aluminium smelting and data center operation due to its ability to offer long in some cases 20 year fixed price electricity contracts at substantially lower cost than almost anywhere else on the planet.
Iceland’s percentage of primary energy from renewables is higher than that of Norway as 90% of space heating and hot water is derived from geothermal sources.
Iceland has a huge amount of further un-tapped hydro and geothermal resource that it simply cannot use at home, and is thought to have sufficient potential to supply a third of UK electricity demand with zero carbon electricity should a suitable number of inter-connector cables be connected between the two countries.
Obviously some countries can attain 100% renewable energy if they have sufficient hydro power or almost sufficient hydro power. If a hydro systems fall slightly short of having enough water to achieve 100% renewable status, the difference can sometimes be made up with wind and or solar power which, when available, can reduce water usage by the hydro system so that the hydro system won’t run out of water. However, few countries have enough hydro power to make that possible.
Iceland is a special case because of the readily available geothermal power. It is possible that if they harvested most of the geothermal and hydro power they have available, they might be able to export the excess. I say “might” because I have not studied the transmission of power with underwater cables so I don’t know whether it would be practical to do so for that distance in that area. Also, withdrawing large amounts of heat from the earth to generate power can cool the source to the extent that it ceases to be useful. Whether that would be a problem I don’t know.
It is very easy to assume, without knowing, that something is practical. Some seemingly good ideas work out well but some do not.
In actual fact, hydro and other dispatchable resources are used to back up wind and solar, not the other way around.
Regardless, combining hydro with intermittent sources of power can work out very well. It may be that we will be seeing more of it in areas where it is practical.
Hydro is very good at load following because its output can quickly be changed.