What’s completely crazy about that is that there’s people spending serious money trying to build carbon sequestration systems while other people are turning an inert and stable form of carbon back into carbon dioxide in the name of sustainability.
In the 1950's we thought that in the future we'd have nuclear cogeneration plants. There was one such plant (Ågesta) in commercial operation, but it closed in the mid 1970's.
edit: also, to your point about sequestration: it's in actual and literal fact the same people. The Stockholm municipal energy company burns a lot of waste (and also woodchips and other renewables) for district heating. That same company also recently closed a big carbon sequestration deal with Microsoft: https://carboncredits.com/microsoft-and-stockholm-exergi-str....
Of course, you need to run the numbers to make sure it actually makes sense. Both economically and from a resource point of view. Cables ain't free to build nor maintain.
But there's probably a trade to be made with the carbon capture people to sell them trash plastic to bury (or to have them pay you to bury your plastic. No need to actually ship the actual plastic around.)
With the energy loss over the distance needed (you basically need southern Italy/southern Spain for any reliable sun during the Swedish winter), that becomes too expensive to be practical.
Not to mention now you have a domino dependence, where a few bad days of weather in the Mediterranean can take out multiple countries at once, instead of Spain/Italy being able to rely on their northern neighbours in such a scenario.
Can't be worse than that cable from Australia to Singapore?
> Not to mention now you have a domino dependence, where a few bad days of weather in the Mediterranean can take out multiple countries at once, instead of Spain/Italy being able to rely on their northern neighbours in such a scenario.
That's what peaker plants are for. There's no reason to go for 100% purity. Getting to 99% renewables gets you 99% of the way.
Unless you can wish natural gas into existence, that means keeping a lot of infrastructure and storage just in case.
Also in 2023, district heating delivered a total of 53 TWh to customers. About two thirds of this came from waste and biofuels, specifically 47% renewable biofuels (mostly woodchips, bark and other forestry industry byproducts) and 20% waste. The remaining third came from an eclectic mix of inputs such as industrial waste heat (7,5%), heat pumps (5% net, that is after the electricity consumption has been subtracted), exhaust gas condensation (11%), biogas from landfills and compost (2%), fossil fuels (2,5%) and various other stuff. Turns out my info about peat was kinda out of date; it's been almost entirely phased out now.
Average CO2 emissions for the electricity generation was 41g CO2 equivalents per kWh, and for district heating about 55 g/kWh. Countries with less emissions than this do exist, for example Norway and Iceland are down around 30 g/kWh, but this is already better than almost every other country on the planet. US electricity generation for comparison averaged 369 g/kWh in 2023.
So: replacing all of the district heating with heat pumps would be an insanely huge project requiring a massive expansion of electricity generation, and it would have very low return on investment when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions. There is also the problem that heating energy demands are extremely uneven and unpredictable, both over the year and between years. You need a significant amount of extra capacity for very cold days, and even averaged over the year the difference between an average winter and a cold one can on the order of 20%. Just burning stuff works great as a solution for this, it's easy to have capacity on demand. Air-source heat pumps also become much less efficient on very cold days when you need them the most, which is why they're not that popular for heating here (people prefer ground source heat pumps, but those have limitations in densely populated areas because the ground doesn't contain infinite energy).
Also, a side note: the heat generation in district heating plants is extremely efficient compared to electricity generation using combustible fuels. The average efficiency of the heat generation in these plants in 2023 was 96%, and that's before exhaust gas condensation is taken into account.
In other words: there's a reason we are doing things this way.
As the parent comment is on Sweden... That's a major discussion in our current politics and energy development landscape.
Not south, though... but north. 60% of Sweden's energy production is from hydroelectric dams far in the north, but most populations are down south. So, expanding this connection is the most imminently useful infrastructure investment that could be made. But that wouldn't be enough if we also use that power for heating.
The problem is that Sweden's largest energy demand is heating cold, windless winters, while the rest of Europe is also cold. Burning stuff to be warm can only really be replaced by nuclear power, which Sweden has been politically opposed to. Burning trash instead of coal is a pretty decent upgrade from that perspective.