Hacker News Reader

Comment by Y-bar | Hacker News Reader

Wind power is a purely commercial enterprise which only requires state support for permissions to build and permissions to connect to the grid. There is no issue about state support for manufacturing of equipment.

Living here where this happens. They are stopping it for two reasons:

First on a national level they want to concentrate on their renewed push towards building new nuclear power reactors, means wind has to take second fiddle: https://www.government.se/press-releases/2026/06/sweden-take...

Second, on a local level, the far-right party "SD" is voting agaisnt wind power in 96% of the cases.

As presented here, the national government is declining 84% of all requests of requests to build wind power, ad on the local level the right wing parties vetoed wind power at a rate of 64-92%: https://research.chalmers.se/publication/?created=true&id=09...

View on HN

That is not correct (https://finansnytt.se/vattenfall-pausar-havsbaserad-vindkraf...). They don't just need permission to connect. Wattenfall (the main producer of energy in Sweden) demanded to get subsidizes to construct the connection to the grid and transmitting the energy back from the wind farm to the main land and the grid. They canceled the project when the government denied those subsidies. They have all the required permissions, and still it was not economical to build.

In optimal weather, wind power already produce more or less all current demand in the grid if we include wind energy produced in nearby countries. The nordpool price (electricity market in the northern Europe) already goes below zero several times over the year. Shortages in production do not occur during periods of windy weather, which is especially true for the south part of Sweden where the energy price is highest and which is connected to the wind farms of Denmark and Germany. The reason that south of Sweden, Denmark and northern Germany has so expensive energy prices is that when the wind is not blowing there is nothing else to really support it beyond solar, and solar is neither reliable nor effective enough during the winter months where output of solar on average reaches around 10% of capacity in Sweden. The only other producer of energy in that region is thermal power plants that mostly burns fossil fuels, like natural gas (https://www.uniper.energy/sv/sverige/kraftverk-i-sverige/ore...) and oil (https://www.uniper.energy/sv/sverige/kraftverk-i-sverige/kar...). Those two are naturally the single largest sources of carbon emissions in those regions.

They may be talking about building nuclear power, but what local government in south of Sweden is actually building right now is more thermal power plants (https://hallbartbyggande.com/bygget-av-kraftringens-nya-kraf...). That one is supposed to be burning wood but time will tell what happens if they can't find wood to burn.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com