Sweden’s 2015 push

I have great memories of Sweden.  Well, I’ve only been there once, in 1997, but memories of the long summer nights, beautiful, friendly—and tall—locals, and trains that make Amtrak look like a donkey cart have stuck with me.  Now I have even more reasons for my fascination of Sweden.

  Sweden is achieving enormous progress towards energy efficiency and independence.  Yes, it’s close to Norway's oil fields and Russia's natural gas, but Sweden's government wants to be completely free of oil dependence by 2020--and this is especially impressive because there are no plans to build new nuclear facilities.  Rather than allow Norwegians to pay US$30 for a hamburger or be blackmailed by Putin’s regime (he’s still running the Russia show, I’m sorry), Sweden aims to be self sufficient and immune from oil price shocks.

Much of Sweden's heating needs are already met by geothermal technology and processes from waste heat.  Biofuels will be the base for most of its transportation needs.  Sweden has endless sources of black liquor, the waste that results from pulp and paper processing.  Meanwhile, Sweden's government is converting public buildings so that they can run on renewable energies, and homeowners can take advantage of tax credits that encourage them to install technologies such as solar panels.  In ensuring that the country can meet this 2020 benchmark, the government has a matrix of about 70 related indicators by which officials can measure the country's progress towards weaning itself from fossil fuels.

I recently got into an email discussion with Joachim Davidsson, who leads a green technology firm in Stockholm, and he educated me on what’s going on in that Nordic corner of the world.  What I found fascinating about Sweden's progress is its economic clustering approach.  Swedish firms are going beyond simple cooperation between business, government, academia, and community organizations:  companies share talent and resources, with the shared goal of becoming profitable. But besides profits, a healthy byproduct is emerging:  innovation and dare I say it:  a healthy and better society.  One city, Örnsköldsvik, has this scheme running at a very micro level:  companies in sectors from manufacturing to construction firms work with researchers, local government officials, and non profits in sharing technology and processes--with the result that the community has seen creating of new green products from textiles to solvents.

Let me translate this:  it goes everything I learned as a graduate student at a leading business school.  Americans may scoff at model as being too utopian and even demagogue it as "socialist," but in an industry that's still in its infancy--and with so many complexities--the Swedes' approach of sharing brainpower and talent is working.  There’s nothing politically correct or touchy-feely about this—they are doing this because it works for them!  Remember:  they were once a major world power, and economically—they still are.

One more nugget of info to chew on:  by any estimates, Sweden has between 2500 and 4000 clean technology companies—in a country that has less people than the LA metropolitan area!

So you can feel a little better next time you buy that furniture at the Burbank Ikea.  I suspect nothing has gone to waste . . .