Article originally in the Financial Times. Other articles .
Richard Milne is the head of the Financial Times branch for the Nordic countries and the Baltic.
Videos with cats on Tiktok or armory companies. The interests of oil companies opposite the interests of the reindeer breeders. Data centers or businesses that create jobs. Or rivalry among green steel manufacturers.
The list of unexpected disputes across Europe, which is the result of electricity rivalry, is growing rapidly and causes wrinkles not only to governments but also to companies that are trying to secure the necessary amount of energy.
European energy regulations are confusing. Downtime in Spain, Portugal and London’s Heathrow Airport revealed the poor resistance of an important sector, which in addition hinder decisions such as the cessation of electricity production from the core in Germany.
Europe has an increasing problem with where it will distribute the already produced electricity. The multiplication disputes in northern Europe point out the need to deal with the question of what is the best use of the available energy.
When they meet bullets, turbines and reindeer
Nordic countries are probably not the best place for such a discussion, as many of these states are pure electricity exporters, producing a large amount of green energy. Some of these disputes only underline as unprepared is Europe to the era in which more and more electricity will consume.
Let’s take an example of a Norwegian charge manufacturer NAMMO. The company still does not have enough energy to expand its factory, but the data center of Tiktok is in the advisor before it, as in Norway the principle, who comes first, the first grip.
The sharp disputes between Norway and Sweden regarding the location of the wind turbines in areas where the native Saams graze reindeer even led to allegations of green colonialism. The situation in Norway is also complicated by a huge amount of electricity, which is used to drive oil and gas wells to reduce the volume of emissions they produce.
Oil boreholes in Norway are currently mostly powered by natural gas turbines. If they were powered by green electricity, the extraction emissions would be lower, but the natural gas would still burn, just elsewhere in the world.
Nonsensical carbon accounting
The Norwegian Parliament recently approved the electrification of the natural gas processing plant on the island of Melkøya, which is owned by the state enterprise Equinor. The estimated cost of this project is 13 billion Norwegian crowns (1.12 billion euros).
Critics say that the project consumes all available electricity in northern Norway, if not more, which will require the construction of other wind farms. “It’s incredibly expensive, and it’s actually just environmental accounting,” the unnamed manager sighed.
After bankruptcy of the Northvolt battery manufacturer, in Sweden, there is concern about whether it is meaningful to allow the batteries and the manufacturer of green steel to use excess electricity. The progress of the sister company Stegra, originally called H2 Green Steel, is slowed by competition in the form of a subsidized project that seeks to replace coal with green hydrogen.
This project can also consume up to a third of the current electricity production in Sweden. “I think it should be discussed at national level,” says one prominent Swedish manager, “about what we want to use green energy for: they are data centers, green steel or something completely different? We should make these decisions thoughtfully, not according to who comes.”
So much work, so few people
Even more distant areas than Greenland and Iceland face serious dilemmas. Aluminums in Iceland have been using available green energy for decades, but it is also increasingly discussing whether this is the right way to use. Greenland is in the initial phase of this debate. However, entrepreneurs on a large island with 57,000 inhabitants believe that the export of electricity from hydroelectric power plants will one day be an as an important industry as tourism or frequently inflected reserves of minerals.
The chief of the Greenland Business Association Christan Keldsen says that unemployment is so low that he is not sure if they want to attract sectors that make up many jobs or data centers that do not need so much workforce. “We have space, we have energy, but we don’t have people,” he adds, adding that businesses that create many jobs can be perceived as controversial, as they require increased immigration in a low population country.
All these local dilemmas on the use of electricity have in common that competent must thoroughly consider which industrial industries want to prioritize and why, and at the same time they have to try to avoid expensive projects that will not help in reducing emissions or economic development. This is a serious discussion that the whole of Europe has to undergo.
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