Mundus International continues with our tracking of the Nordic green transition with an analysis of Nordic green business plans via their press releases and media coverage. It is the only analysis that we know of its type, tracking total activity, dissecting it via country and technology type. In addition, we look for changes in government policy and activity in the financial markets, collating the key drivers of economic transformation.

Highlights

Our Nordic Green Indices – which tracks the Nordic green transition – for May 2022 confirmed what may already have been obvious, but needed to be said – the Nordics green future rests on the success or failure of wind power.

During the month Denmark joined with Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium to announce that it was targeting a 10x increase in the amount of wind power to be produced from the North Sea, increasing capacity by 150GW by 2050. Separately, Norway also released its strategy for offshore wind power, which is to build 30GW of capacity. Business is already picking up the new sense of urgency from Nordic governments, with a number of large projects now being pushed. 

New wind power is not just a source of electric power. It is essential for the production of hydrogen, which in turn is necessary for making green steel. Denmark’s Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners said that it wanted to build “Hydrogen Island” on the Danish portion of Dogger Bank, supplying 7% of Europe’s green hydrogen by 2030, manufactured from what it says is one of the world’s lowest cost sources of renewable power.

Although financing was down there were still some very notable deals done. Polarium, a Swedish battery manufacturer, announced that it had secured SEK 955 million from AMF, valuing the company at more than USD 1 billion. Yara announced that it intended to spin out its Yara Clean Ammonia business on the stock market, and the Swedish chemical company, Perstorp was sold to Malaysia’s Petronas for SEK 24 billion. 

It was also an above average month for battery projects. The Polarium financing and ABB and Siemens backing of Morrow Batteries, a cobalt-free Norwegian battery start-up, were amongst the most interesting news.

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