As solar prices fall and efficiency increases, countries like Finland are discovering the benefits of summertime solar.
Paul Hockenos reports for Inside Climate News
ULU, Finland — For years after northern Finland’s largest printing plant blanketed its facility’s eight roofs with solar panels, the curious beat a path to the extraordinary spectacle.
There were skeptics who doubted that solar power would pay off in this northern city, just 100 miles shy of the Arctic Circle, a geography known not for its sunny climes but rather its dark, snow-bound, sub-zero winters.
“They wanted to see what we’d done, how it worked, whether it worked,” said Juha Röning, chief technician at the Kaleva Media printing plant. In 2015, the 1,604 solar photovoltaic (PV) units made Kaleva Media’s rooftop the most powerful photovoltaic solar plant in Finland, and indeed in all of Scandinavia’s north country.
Today, Kaleva Media’s rooftop PV park is no longer a curiosity—it’s not even the largest solar producer in the city of Oulu, much less all of Finland. Across Europe’s far north, municipalities, businesses and households are increasingly taking advantage of solar power as solar cells’ efficiency increases and costs fall.
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While Germany was experiencing its mega solar boom in the 2000s, in Nordic countries like Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Denmark and Finland the sight of a suburban home with a PV panel was an oddity. Today, although still dwarfed by Germany’s solar force, tens of thousands of buildings, from Copenhagen to the Arctic Circle, brandish the cutting edge in solar tech.
“They wanted to see what we’d done, how it worked, whether it worked,” said Juha Röning, chief technician at the Kaleva Media printing plant. In 2015, the 1,604 solar photovoltaic (PV) units made Kaleva Media’s rooftop the most powerful photovoltaic solar plant in Finland, and indeed in all of Scandinavia’s north country.
Today, Kaleva Media’s rooftop PV park is no longer a curiosity—it’s not even the largest solar producer in the city of Oulu, much less all of Finland. Across Europe’s far north, municipalities, businesses and households are increasingly taking advantage of solar power as solar cells’ efficiency increases and costs fall.
While Germany was experiencing its mega solar boom in the 2000s, in Nordic countries like Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Denmark and Finland the sight of a suburban home with a PV panel was an oddity. Today, although still dwarfed by Germany’s solar force, tens of thousands of buildings, from Copenhagen to the Arctic Circle, brandish the cutting edge in solar tech.
“The technological developments in PV [cells] have driven the price way down,” said Henrik Borreby, the Nordic representative of BayWa r.e., a global renewable energy developer. “The general perception had been that the further north you go, the harder it was to make a business case, even impossible. That’s not so anymore,” he said, though he acknowledged that the further north one pushes—and the lower the domestic power price—the longer it takes to make the upfront investment in solar pay itself back.
Europe’s Nordic countries, roughly at the latitude of Alaska, are pushing the boundaries of solar power deployment.
They boast some of the world’s most progressive climate protection agendas, and much of the momentum behind the growth of renewables there stems from their national action plans, which are designed to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius. Norway is still a major oil producer, but Finland’s new progressive government—led by the world’s youngest prime minister, 34-year-old Sanna Marin—has set ambitious decarbonization targets that would render the country of 5.5 million carbon neutral by 2035.
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