In the next tab, I am reading (in Czech) an article titled "Shall we produce tanks out of wood?" which addresses the fact that pushing all steel production out of Europe through unrealistic pollution demands and other regulations cannot be squared with maintaining any ability to defend ourselves.
(Link for the interested people: https://www.seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/ekonomika-byznys-rozhovor...)
Sweden has been researching and deploying technologies for foundries to not rely on fossil fuels for steel production (since steel is a major export), regulations are doing what's intended to do: move steel production to non-fossil fuel dependent processes.
i.e.: the shitshow that is going on with ILVA, our past government of grifters tried to screw over AM, which was trying to go the green route but didn't want to get sued over and over for natural disaster (caused by the previous ownership. Government promised to get that into law but at some point they did a 180), and they pulled out, since then the goal for our current government of grifters has clearly been to close the plants and send workers home with redundancy funds paid by whoever was going to buy the plants (and the taxpayers). For the last couple of years the projected job loss was around 6000 units (coincidentally the exact amount of workers in the Taranto plant), for the last two months it was around 13000 units (so like 90% of the working force) and yesterday it was 20000?
We are talking here about REALLY huge amount of Entergy
LOL indeed: that cable carries 20x as much energy from Sweden to Poland than the reverse.
Yes. And?
All that matters here is the cost. Is the cost of the energy (+equipment wear etc.) needed per ton of coal-free steel higher or lower than the cost per ton of whatever the current best coal-based method is?
That's not constant by time or place, so I can easily believe that the Scandinavian Peninsula does this with a bunch of cheap hydro, that Iceland does it with a bunch of cheap geothermal, that Denmark and Germany lose whatever steel industry they might have, that the UK does with cheap wind, that Spain does it with cheap sun, that France does it with state-subsidised "cheap" nuclear.
> Its not green but typical greenwashing - you don't emit CO2, but you import energy made from coal etc.
Or nuclear, or renewables.
Here's Sweden's power mix over the last few decades. Note it's a net exporter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_production_in...
Secondly, Sweden is an exporter of electricity to the EU, the huge undersea transmission cables are for selling electricity to the detriment of ourselves as shown after the Russian war against Ukraine when we had to pay the massively higher spot prices for electricity set by the gas/coal plants in Poland, and Germany. You can check right now that Poland is importing ~2-3% of its electricity from South Sweden (SE-4) [2] using 98% of the available transmission, Poland is always saturating the undersea transmission from Sweden with imports.
[0] https://www.hybritdevelopment.se/en/
[1] https://group.vattenfall.com/press-and-media/newsroom/2025/a...
[2] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/PL/live/fifteen_min...
The market price for energy regularly reaches close to 0 in nordpool during periods of optimal weather conditions, but the market price for green hydrogen do not. It has been and continue to be quite more expensive than natural gas. Hydrogen is also a very tricky and expensive to work with, and the cost to modify or construct new foundries to use hydrogen is not simple nor a cheap upgrade. Regardless of what they do with regulations, the problem with green hydrogen are not one that politicians can solve without reaching for subsidies and pouring tax money into the black hole (which is what the Swedish government decided a few days ago).
I believe it ties quite well with the build out of renewables, the necessary plan for renewables is to overprovision since it can fluctuate, energy storage is one way to use the excess production, and another is to further develop hydrogen technology to be better suited for industrial processes requiring natural gas.
Without government investment there won't be any private enterprise developing it, it's quite known that capitalism doesn't help in taking massive risks with not-yet-proven technology, it can work for scaling, and getting into economies of scale but before that I don't think it's a black hole to bet on the future of it. At some point it will be needed to be done, rather develop the technology early, and export it rather than wait until China does it anyway (because the USA will definitely not be the first mover in this space).
Sending large amount of subsidizes to a single commercial entity is also very risky. The bankruptcy of Northvolt demonstrated this quite well, including how wages and costs can get inflated when a commercial venture relies a bit too much on subsidies in order to exist. The size of government funding need to be balanced with the need for government oversight in order to verify that citizens money get used correctly. Time will tell if Hybrit will share the same fate, and for now it doesn't look great.
There need to be honest and clear information when the government funds commercial ventures, especially when it involve untested research. The biggest problem with green hydrogen is that it was presented as an already solved problem that was already commercial viable. Every year for the last couple of decades it was just "a few years" before it would be cheaper than natural gas, even as natural gas prices went up in price. Some municipalities even went as far as building hydrogen infrastructure on this promise that everything from heating to transportation to electricity would be operated on green hydrogen. Now most of that is being removed as the maintenance and fuel costs has demonstrated to be way higher than expected. That was not a well use of citizens money.
Go ahead and do it. If you are right, you will make a lot of money.
I've heard many such theories from people who never smelled molten iron, but actual factory owners say that it is not viable without truly massive subventions and massive tariff protections, which aren't that far from trying to build a decarbonized autarky.
A big steel foundry in Třinec delayed their decarbonization project in May 2025, for two years, because it just isn't competitive against cheaper steel from Asia and the European authorities, while being very vocal about green tech, aren't giving out billions left and right to compensate.
I'm sorry, but you don't ask the fox if the chicken coop should be protected.
Of course their capitalist interest would suffer if they had to make investments, but I don't really care if the monopoly man can have one fewer yacht.
I'm sure that would disrupt some business models. But we'd still being using steel (but perhaps not as much).
Of course importing cheap steel produced without the same regard for emissions would have to be forbidden.
That's very country dependent. In Germany, some "actual factory owners" founded kindergartens and maternal leave, before it was enforced by activists. They first understood that not everything is about money and they need to look their employees in the eyes when they sit next to them in the church on Sunday and also understood, that a happy, worry-less employee is an employee that can focus on the work and work harder. Lenin said about the Germans, that they are to lazy to do a revolution, but I think the actual issue is, that German countries mostly got rulers actually interested in the well-being of the population.
In Germany a lot of regulation used to be introduced by grassroots movements and was followed voluntarily and later the state adopted the winner of the regulation competition. See TÜV, FSGV (basically a random association deciding how to build roads that the state just adopts) etc. A large part of German economic and social failure is, that we don't have that culture of self-regulation and enforcement anymore.
It has nothing to do with decarbonization and everything with them having no idea how to compete. It's all the same across your northern border with coal - the coal miners want a graceful phase out because they understand that Australian pit-mined coal is cheaper despite being hauled across the world, but the owners want to keep the status quo and associated government subsidies.
So they lost all the ideas since the 1980s or so, when they were top of the heap?
Maybe, but increasing cost of inputs has more than nothing to do with economic balance of any business. Even regular households feel the increase in heating and electricity costs. A factory which needs orders of magnitude more energy will feel them even more.
Cheap energy is very important to any industry, no way around it. That is why China builds so many power stations.
The playing field simply isn't level, the ideas are there, the technologies are there but you can't compete if the competition is not bound in the same way.
> The playing field simply isn't level
It never was. European and Western countries had a significant head start. There should be a "right for CO2 emission" per capita offered for countries that didn't industrialize and are way behind. And exported CO2 shouldn't count.
How is life treating you? Are you doing well?
Those people who have large investments in traditional production facilities? Hmm, I wonder what they have to say about disruptive tech on the horizon..