Maria Jalvemo is busy these days. She works for Sweden’s state-owned electric distribution utility, Svenska Kraftnӓt. She’s in charge of overseeing projects in northern Sweden, home to a clean tech manufacturing boom.
“The queue is long to connect to the power grids,” Jalvemo said.
Sweden’s grid is powered almost entirely by hydroelectric, nuclear and wind power. This zero-carbon energy has put the country at the forefront of a green manufacturing boom.
Several big projects are in the works or are already on the way to make steel, chemicals, and batteries in the country’s North, all trying to take advantage of the region’s plentiful clean energy.
“We have a lot of hydropower in Sweden, which is a green and sustainable electricity source,” Jalvemo said.
One of the latest projects is Stegra’s nearly $7 billion ‘fossil-free’ steel mill, currently under construction in the town of Boden. The plant will use electricity to produce hydrogen out of water. It will then use hydrogen to refine the iron, which will be processed into steel. This will cut out coal from the production cycle and save millions of tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide and toxic air pollution from being released.
To accommodate the project, Svenska Kraftnӓt is building a $50 million substation in Boden capable of handling 2,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to power “a small town in Sweden,” Jalvemo said.
“Sweden is an industrial nation, and we want to keep being an industrial nation,” Jalvemo said. “The steel industry, they need to transform because otherwise steel production will happen somewhere else.”
One thing Jalvemo doesn’t have to worry much about is the question of whether climate action is necessary or even whether climate change is a problem at all.
“I think in Sweden, the general opinion is that we have a negative climate impact that is caused by humans. So I think that’s not very questioned in Sweden as a general sort of public opinion,” she said.
As in other Nordic Countries, Sweden’s government has made climate action a priority. It’s set a goal of carbon neutrality by 2045.
An energy transition with major questions
There still are public arguments about climate change and the energy transition.
The main debate is not whether to build more zero-carbon energy sources, but rather, which ones.
“In Sweden it’s very polarized between the pro-nuclear [side] … and wind power,” said Filip Johnsson, a professor of energy systems at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenberg.
Conservatives favor more nuclear; left-leaning politicians favor wind energy. This debate is important, Johnsson says, because Sweden will need to scale up its clean power supply to fuel its clean manufacturing ambitions.
“There are estimates that we would almost need to double our electricity generation,” he said.
This could lead to localized debates over renewable energy projects, like wind power, says Adam Peacock, a postdoctoral research fellow at the UK’s University of Exeter, who has studied renewable energy acceptance in Sweden.
“There are parcels of land that have been handed down across multiple generations, and there’s a personal and emotional attachment to them. When a power line is suddenly built, it could disrupt that…that could be a reason that people protest,” he said.
The energy transition in Sweden could also see financial setbacks. Battery maker Northvolt declared bankruptcy in November, after problems with production and job cuts at its facility in Skellefteå, in northern Sweden.
Failures like this could factor into public support for the transition, even among those who worry about climate change.
Alexander Karlsson, an intern at a law firm in Stockholm, said he’s in favor of doing something about climate change, within limits. “I wouldn’t want it to come out of the taxpayer’s pockets,” he said. “There has to be some sort of more sustainable solution financially.”
Support for climate action widespread
Even though there are questions over how Sweden will meet its clean energy goals, most in the country accept the basic premise that scientists have laid out for the past few decades: human-caused carbon pollution is making the planet warmer, and if we don’t stop, there will be “grave and mounting” impacts on human society and the environment, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Hanna Rönnquist, an advertising copywriter in Stockholm, says she has friends who take trains instead of flying because of climate concerns.
“I think we are far in Sweden on that thought. I think most of the people are really, really aware of it,” she said. “But I also think that you are aware of it, but it’s hard to know what should I do about it?”
People are exposed to information about climate change in schools and in workplaces, which often have sustainability departments, she said.
That’s not how everyone thinks, however.
Ari Eerola is a retired auto body technician who lives in Northern Sweden. He agrees that the climate may be changing but doubts it’s the result of human action.
“But people [haven’t done] this,” he said. “This [is] natural,” he said.
Eerola thinks global warming is a natural process – not human-induced, as scientists have found. His skepticism about global warming is not uncommon in Sweden, says Matto Mildenberger, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He says public opinion on climate is pretty similar to that of the U.S.
“We actually see fairly similar levels or proportions of the population that hold more climate-skeptical views” in the two countries, Mildenberger said.
What is different between the two countries is how climate is discussed among politicians and the media. In Sweden, anti-climate views are more marginalized than in the U.S.
Mildenberger says one reason why is that there are only two main parties in the U.S.; in Sweden, there are many.
That means the climate skeptics in Sweden end up in smaller political parties that “sometimes might be brought into coalition government but don’t have the ability to dominate the main center-right or right-wing party in the way that we see in the United States,” he said.
In the U.S., President-elect Donald Trump has called outgoing President Joe Biden’s climate policies a “green new scam” and has vowed to roll them back.
Another difference, according to Mildenberger, is that policymaking in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries is more consensus-driven. Interest groups like the fossil fuel industry have a seat at the table in policy decisions and don’t have to politicize issues like climate change as they do in the U.S., he said.
There is also support for the transition among some of Sweden’s trade unions. Tomas Karlsson is the local chairman of the IF Metall metalworkers union. It represents workers at some of the country’s largest steel mills who will help build and operate the green steel mills currently under construction. He is happy about the country’s move to clean up its steel industry.
“We cannot do the [same] production that we do today. We must change,” he said. Europe is tightening rules on carbon pollution that will make traditional fossil fuel-based processes in steelmaking more expensive.
Karlsson said it’s good that Sweden is at the forefront of a movement away from fossil fuels.
“I think we are a little bit in the front to take the next step. And I also think it’s important to show the world we can do it.”
This story was supported by the MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship.
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