Christian Steinbeck is a business economist and former CFO who has investigated the economics of wind power by studying over 1,500 annual reports from 2017 to 2024. He concluded that the investment in wind power in Sweden is the greatest destruction of capital in modern times.
Steinbeck studied which companies own the wind turbines, but ”It’s not going well at all. It’s going terribly badly.”.
”The only ones making money out of it are those who build wind farms and then walk away. And there you'll find OX2, Eolus Vind, these project developers, but you'll also find SR Energy.
Steinbeck shows a diagram of the actual production of wind power in terawatt hours from 2015 to 2025. Production is rising, ”and that's what everyone is so proud of. We're getting more wind power in Sweden.”, but with the maximum capacity increasing, production cannot keep up.
”This is because we now have such a capacity for wind power that we have to shut it down when it's windy, otherwise the power grid will collapse, and yet more is to be built.” ... ”So we are building wind power that we cannot use, and that is perhaps the strangest thing in today's energy debate in Sweden.”
Steinbeck says that politicians want to build more wind turbines even though they are unprofitable, because a lot of the electricity that could have been produced is lost as the wind turbines are often stationary. Furthermore, wind power is financed to a very large extent by public money on which we never get a return.
During a bike tour in a pedal bar at Almedalen Week in Visby, Steinbeck shows a diagram of Sweden's electricity consumption and states that since the turn of the century, consumption has fallen by ten percent. The reduction is due to us adding insulation and expanding district heating, as well as the electricity tax being so high that many cannot afford to use electricity.
According to Statistics Sweden (SCB), six percent of Swedes can no longer afford to heat their homes as much during the winter months.
”There's so much talk about global warming, but we have global cooling in many Swedish homes. People are turning the heating down to, say, 17 degrees instead of twenty. This is a public health problem.”
Steinbeck therefore questions whether we should build even more wind turbines that we have to shut down when electricity demand is low, despite the wind blowing, because the electricity cannot be stored. This involves large amounts of electricity which are instead exported at very low prices.
Our politicians are proud of Swedish electricity exports, but this is therefore about an overproduction of electricity from wind turbines that cannot be stored, and then it is exported out of the country at bargain prices. Sweden does not make any money from this.
”If you're selling electricity for perhaps five pence per kilowatt-hour that cost perhaps eighty pence per kilowatt-hour to produce, then that's a very bad deal.
It's no wonder wind power companies are going bankrupt, argues Steinbeck.
”We sell a lot of wind power to people who get it randomly. I'd rather call it random power than wind power.”
Interview and photo: Thomas Åkerberg, Ambition Sverige | Torbjörn Sassersson