New record year for Swedish wind power - Germany invests billions

Over the next two years, new wind power will be built for over SEK 80 billion in Sweden, and one of the biggest new projects is the well-known Hästkullen outside Viksjö, which is being built by the German energy giant RWE and Credit Suisse.

- There is a great desire to invest in renewable energy globally and right now Sweden offers good conditions for this type of investment, says Roland Flaig, CEO of RWE Renewables Sweden AB.

The wind farm in Viksjö will be one of Europe's largest when it is scheduled to be completed in 2021. With the new super tower of 200 meters, the wind turbines will produce electricity corresponding to the county's entire household needs, but it is hardly in Västernorrland that the electricity from Viksjö will be consumed.

German energy companies are increasingly dominating the Swedish wind power expansion. In 2015, the municipal energy company Stadtwerke Münchener inaugurated a wind farm in Sidensjö that will provide 160,000 households in the Munich area with fossil-free household electricity and since then the German interest has only increased.

While wind power expansion in Germany has largely stalled due to local resistance groups, the gaze has been directed towards Sweden. Sweden is not only sparsely populated, here are large forest owners such as SCA and Holmen who have seen an opportunity to tailor completed projects and to lease land for the wind power boom, and it has attracted money from abroad. Swedish sparsely populated areas, few protests and tailor-made large-scale projects have led to a low production cost. In short, it is cheap to build new wind power in Sweden right now.

This has led to SEK 80 billion being invested in new wind power in Sweden during the period 2019 to 2021 and while Sweden, according to the county administrative networks for wind farms, accounts for only three billion, the rest is abroad. Germany dominates with 21 billion, followed by France, the UK, Switzerland and China.

- It amazes me that it was no longer noticed that Sweden is an attractive market, and since there are so many abroad who discovered this, you might have hoped that more people in Sweden discovered it too, says Fredrik Dahlström Dolff, expert at the Wind Farm Network which is financed by the Swedish Energy Agency.

Sweden has thus become an Eldorado for foreign investors. The wind farm in Viksjö, which is being built on SCA land, was originally built by E.ON and Credit Suisse, but last year E.ON's part was taken over by the German energy company RWE in a large business that included the entire E.ON's portfolio of renewable energy production.

RWE, Germany's largest producer of electricity, is based in Essen. The company has sales of SEK 130 billion