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ENERGY

Vattenfall to build €1-billion wind farm in Germany

Swedish energy group Vattenfall said on Tuesday it would invest about €1 billion along with Germany's Stadtwerke München (SWM) in a 80-turbine offshore wind farm in the North Sea.

Published: 21 October 2010 16:08 CEST
Vattenfall to build €1-billion wind farm in Germany
Photo: DPA

Vattenfall said building of the site, some 70 kilometres (43 miles) off the German island of Sylt, near Denmark, would start in 2012 and be completed in 2014.

The farm is set to have a capacity of 288 megawatts, enough to supply power to 500,000 households, making it one of the main offshore projects in the world.

The “Dan Tysk” joint venture will be held at 51 percent by state-owned Vattenfall, and at 49 percent by SWM.

In September, the Swedish company inaugurated what is currently the world’s largest offshore wind farm off the English coast.

Vattenfall, which has been widely criticised in Sweden for running heavily polluting coal plants, especially in Poland, said last month it would implement a new strategy aiming to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

The company is Europe’s fifth largest electricity producer its largest supplier of urban heating.

AFP/ka

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ENVIRONMENT

Sweden’s SSAB to build €4.5bn green steel plant in Luleå 

The Swedish steel giant SSAB has announced plans to build a new steel plant in Luleå for 52 billion kronor (€4.5 billion), with the new plant expected to produce 2.5 million tons of steel a year from 2028.

Published: 2 April 2024 13:44 CEST
Sweden's SSAB to build €4.5bn green steel plant in Luleå 

“The transformation of Luleå is a major step on our journey to fossil-free steel production,” the company’s chief executive, Martin Lindqvist, said in a press release. “We will remove seven percent of Sweden’s carbon dioxide emissions, strengthen our competitiveness and secure jobs with the most cost-effective and sustainable sheet metal production in Europe.”

The new mini-mill, which is expected to start production at the end of 2028 and to hit full capacity in 2029, will include two electric arc furnaces, advanced secondary metallurgy, a direct strip rolling mill to produce SSABs specialty products, and a cold rolling complex to develop premium products for the transport industry.

It will be fed partly from hydrogen reduced iron ore produced at the HYBRIT joint venture in Gälliväre and partly with scrap steel. The company hopes to receive its environemntal permits by the end of 2024.

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The announcement comes just one week after SSAB revealed that it was seeking $500m in funding from the US government to develop a second HYBRIT manufacturing facility, using green hydrogen instead of fossil fuels to produce direct reduced iron and steel.

The company said it also hoped to expand capacity at SSAB’s steel mill in Montpelier, Iowa. 

The two new investment announcements strengthen the company’s claim to be the global pioneer in fossil-free steel.

It produced the world’s first sponge iron made with hydrogen instead of coke at its Hybrit pilot plant in Luleå in 2021. Gälliväre was chosen that same year as the site for the world’s first industrial scale plant using the technology. 

In 2023, SSAB announced it would transform its steel mill in Oxelösund to fossil-free production.

The company’s Raahe mill in Finland, which currently has new most advanced equipment, will be the last of the company’s big plants to shift away from blast furnaces. 

The steel industry currently produces 7 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, and shifting to hydrogen reduced steel and closing blast furnaces will reduce Sweden’s carbon emissions by 10 per cent and Finland’s by 7 per cent.

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