Sweden To Build 2,000 Wind Turbines

Swedish Enterprise and Energy Minister Maud Olofsson recently announced the upcoming addition of 2,000 wind turbines to the country’s alternative energy stores, according to a recent Inhabitat article. The turbines would be brought online over the next 10 years and provide 10 terawatt hours of clean energy per year to the country’s grid.

The wind turbines will help the Scandinavian country reach its goal of having 50 percent of all electrical needs satisfied by renewable sources by 2020. Most of the energy produced in Sweden is already fairly green, coming predominantly from hydroelectric and nuclear sources.

“Sweden has extremely good prospects for rapidly increasing the production of renewable energy, especially from the burning of biofuels, cogeneration plants and windpower,” Olofsson wrote in a newspaper column.

The additional wind turbines would be matched by expansions in other renewable energy sources, like biofuel and solar power, increasing overall output from renewable sources to 25 terawatt hours

Sweden is already a major consumer of renewable energies, and it stands out for its consumption of sustainably-produced ethanol. In 2008, Swedish ethanol producer Sekab inked a deal with Brazilian ethanol producers to import 115 million liters of ethanol yearly, the first deal of its kind. The biofuels, produced according to certain social and environmental standards, are helping the country cut carbon dioxide emissions from farming, production, and transport by at least 85 percent compared to petroleum, according to a Reuters article about the deal. Altogether, Sweden imports about 800 million liters of ethanol yearly, about half of it from Brazil.

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Chris Timmerman
Contributing Writer
Green Education Services
www.greenedu.com