Stockholm Fossil free 2040

Introduction:

As an exchange program we, second & third year bachelors, went a week to Sweden. We visited a lot of start-ups, district heating facility’s, energy plants, but also big companies like ABB & Atlas Copco. The one I found the most fascinating was the presentation given in the Stockholm city hall. Where they explained how they want to be fossil free in 2040. To achieve this goal they made three big category’s: Sustainable energy use, Transport & Recourse-efficient natural cycles.

Sustainable energy use

This part deals with the energy use of houses, industrial buildings, trade. This is divided in two parts, heating & cooling,  electricity & gas. This sector takes more than half of the energy consumption. Since 1990 the energy consumption of Stockholm is more or less the same. However the amount of buildings that need to be heated & cooled are almost doubled. They are building off the use of fossil fuels to almost zero because they are closing the old powerplants and are building new ones that use bio-fuels. Now there are also state of the art new energy & heat plants that run on waste but they don’t plan on burning to much waste because it is 30% plastics & those are also derivates of crude oil. Also buildings like hospitals have back up generators running on oil. They can’t be replaced easily because of Swedish law. The electricity in Sweden is so cheap that nuclear plants aren’t profitable. They are exchanged for windfarms. Also the swedes themselves are placing solar panels. As they state that the more expensive energy becomes, the cheaper the renewables. As in the future more demand is needed, prices go up. By 2040 they hope to need only 1-2% fossil fuels across all Nordic countries. Instead of eliminating gas uses they just replace the fossil gasses for biogases. They aim to meet demands by collecting 70% of the food waste. The planned factory should be up and running in 2020 and will reduce the C02 by around 20.000 tons each year.

Transport

As the live expectancy of a car is about 20 years they want every car sold form 2020 to be adaptable to green transport, this may include electric, hydrogen, hybrid powered vehicles. This also means that the city must improve their charging & docking stations to recharge the cars. Furthermore the city asks the state to write laws that reduce taxes on green cars for example.
They also want to reduce private cars on the road and create a good and improved public transportation network. If the private car number in the city would go down, the public transportation & the delivering of goods will go more efficient and the air quality would be better.

Recourse-efficient natural cycles

The idea is to reduce fossil fuel but also the derivates, like plastic bags. As it is currently being burned as a fuel it is still a fossil one. Burning it for heat and electricity is better than putting it in a landfill.
This is but a small summary of what we heard. For more information you can use the link below. Everything I used for this paper can be found here : http://international.stockholm.se/globalassets/rapporter/strategy-for-a-fossil-fuel-free-stockholm-by-2040.pdf