[Business] News Electricity Divide and Divisive Petroleum
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Preem drops expansion plan
n the September issue of Swedish Press (page 6) we reported on Swedish petroleum giant Preem’s intention to expand its refinery in Lysekil near Gothenburg. The expansion would have created many new jobs for the benefit of the Lysekil community. According to Prime Minister Löfven, it would also have discharged another 1 million tons of harmful CO2 into the atmosphere, making Preem the biggest emitter of the climate-destroying gas in Sweden. The expansion plan proved highly divisive, with the city authorities welcoming the prospective boost to the local economy while ecologists staged massive protests to foil the plan. The division ran so deep that it threatened to derail the present Social
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Housing market booming
s the coronavirus heads for a second peak around the world, one would have expected the property market to stall like so many other businesses. Paradoxically, the opposite
appears to be true in many countries, Sweden included. As working from home becomes commonplace in both the near term and long term, Swedes are rushing to buy more comfortable and spacious accommodation. Since there is now less of a need to live close to the place of work, buyers are motivated to move to more rural communities where house prices are more affordable and the quality of life is better than in the big cities. Equally surprising, foreigners are also rushing to invest in Swedish real estate. The reasons appear to be that a great deal of idle foreign investment capital is looking for a safe home in these turbulent times, and that the Swedish socio-economic environment is seen as meeting expected stability and profitability criteria.
Power Production in Sweden
Introduction
A Swedish North-south Divide
Democrat government, leading to the possibility of snap elections. To the government’s relief, Preem announced on 28 September that it was shelving the expansion plan. The company’s CEO denied that the protests had been a factor in the decision-making. Instead, he blamed the cancellation on COVID-19 and the attendant drop in worldwide fuel consumption which made the proposed expansion no longer commercially viable. Preem will now focus on developing fossil-free fuel alternatives at its existing Lysekil plant.
By Bengt Palmgren, Energy Entrepreneur Why Hydrogen
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Hydrogens Future Role The Right Response Appendix
recent conference arranged by the leading Swedish industrial magazine Dagens Industri highlighted the problem that, from time to time, southern Sweden suffers power shortages caused, among other things, by an early dismantling of functioning nuclear power. Most of the electricity production takes place in northern Sweden. Lack of power line capacity from northern to southern Sweden has accentuated the power shortage. The shortage has led to unplanned procurement of nuclear-generated electricity from the Ringhals nuclear power station and the need to use fossil-fuelled power plants to satisfy peak demand. The cost to taxpayers
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23 September 2020
Di Framtidens Elmarknad 2020
amounts to around 300 million SEK ($34m). The power line that runs from Central Sweden to Skåne, which Svenska Kraftnät procured for 7 billion SEK ($790m), has not yet been brought into operation due to technical problems. Unfortunately,
the electricity shortage threatens the business community in southern Sweden, and now several business leaders are sounding the alarm that investments are under threat. For example, Sweden’s leading bakery Pågens Bröd has scrapped its planned investments in Malmö.
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Swedish Press | November 2020 9
