Green transition at this year’s Project Days
This year, for the umpteenth time, the Project Manager will participate in the Project Days organised by Project Professionals. As is tradition, they will be held in the congress wing of the Helsinki Exhibition Centre on 10-11 October. Projektipomo’s employer Proha will also be present as a sponsor of the event.
The theme of this year’s event is “Under the cloud of responsibility”. The theme leaves plenty of room for imaginative contributions of all kinds. The project manager’s task was to think about what kind of speeches and speakers we could propose for the event, in line with the theme. Proha’s client base has expanded from clients implementing renewable energy projects, so it was a simple matter of finding speakers who could share their own professional views on the development of wind and solar energy in Finland.
This year’s speakers will be Ville Vairinen, CTO of Solarigo Systems, a solar power company, who will speak on “Responsible domestic energy, opportunities and challenges”, and Lauri Alanen, Project Director of Vapo Terra, a wind and solar power developer. Lauri’s topic will be ” Wind and solar power development as part of Neova’s responsible business”. In addition, Miko Olkkonen, Country Manager for Finland of Dovre Group, will take the stage on “Sustainability in industrial investment projects in the future – where we started, where we are and where we are going”. The topics are nicely interwoven around the theme of Project Days and cover one afternoon stream.
As the Project Manager is an engineer and a number cruncher who is interested in statistics, the previous topics provided the impetus to examine what has happened in Finnish electricity production in recent years, for example with regard to wind power, and how carbon dioxide emissions from electricity production have changed partly as a result. In the following section, the Finnish Wind Energy Association’s material and the publications of the Finnish Energy Industry Association have been used as sources.
Let’s start with CO2 emissions and energy production in 2022. Electricity production without cogeneration with district heating was 69 TWh and total production with it was 82 TWh (in 2021 the corresponding figures are 67 TWh and 87 TWh). Wind accounted for 16.7% of electricity production and solar for 0.6%. In comparison, the previous year, wind accounted for 11.7% and solar for 0.4%, a sharp increase for both.
It is encouraging to read that the share of CO2-free electricity is already 89% of total electricity production in Finland (86% in 2021). This figure also includes biomass, hydro and nuclear power. The share of fully renewable energy was 54%. This is already well over half of total production.
The growth of carbon dioxide-free energy production is directly correlated with the decreasing amount of carbon dioxide emissions per unit of energy produced. In Finland, the amount of carbon dioxide in energy production has fallen by 77% per kWh produced over 12 years. This change can be considered significant.
The Finnish Wind Energy Association maintains a register of wind turbines built, under construction and planned in Finland. The following figure shows how wind power has been built in Finland.
In addition to the completed wind farms, there are currently 33 wind farms under construction, which will be completed between 2023-25. These will have a combined capacity of 3232 MW. 6 wind farms with a total capacity of 439 MW have already been completed this year. At the end of 2025, we will therefore have 9348 MW of wind power generation, an increase of more than 64% in three years.
The next challenge for the Finnish energy sector is not energy production, but energy storage to compensate for the large seasonal variation in solar and wind power generation in the future.
Before learning about new energy saving and storage techniques, the Project Manager will head to the Project Days.
See you there!