Power system planning often faces the challenge of how to incorporate aspects that go beyond direct techno-economic factors, which are mostly integrated into standard modelling methodologies. For several geographies such as Poland, Sweden, and Spain, the techno-economic conditions for expanding onshore wind are very favourable—potentially leading to expansion results that span infeasible extremes due to other limiting factors. Most commonly, these additional aspects include social acceptance perspectives (e.g., local opposition), as well as land-use conflicts, for instance due to military interests. Further detailed technical aspects, such as available transmission capacity, may also apply depending on the model’s spatial granularity.
As a mean to incorporate the softer limitations in the onshore wind expansion it is common to create scenarios which exogenously impose different maximum expansion level limits. Just as for our previous power system studies focusing on Finland, Poland and Germany we have also done this in our recently published work for Svenskt Näringsliv evaluating Swedish power systems robust for 300 TWh [1].
Alike previous studies for Sweden, the updated modelling results highlight the cost effectiveness of expanding onshore wind in Sweden. This is demonstrated with onshore wind expansion hitting the employed maximum expansion limits in 21 out of 22 scenarios! Its expansion is a key driver to a low system cost and competitive electricity priced system.
This further underscores the importance of setting up a realistic set of scenarios for the expansion. The attached figure presents resulting annual generation of onshore wind across Sweden and compares to recent reports of Swedish TSO, Svenska Kraftnät [2] and Swedish Energy Agency, Energimyndigheten [3]. As you can see from the figure, the scenarios of the three different studies pretty well covers the same space of expansion for onshore wind. This indicates a rather good agreement between parties on the potential on the expansion. However, the range of possible expansion level between different scenarios is very large almost to the same level as the demand growth scenarios.
Power system studies consistently underscore the critical role of onshore wind in enabling a competitive and climate-neutral Swedish economy over the long term. To unlock this potential, it’s essential to deepen our understanding—not just of social acceptance, but also of key techno-economic factors such as:
– What level of flexibility in demand and assets will be required to manage a large-scale expansion of wind?
– How will hydropower dispatch need to adapt to balance increased wind generation in a more volatile market?
– What capacity expansions will be needed to transport growing volumes of renewable electricity across the system?
