Driving forces

We are expanding and strengthening the national grid for several reasons:

• Many of our lines and stations are nearing the end of their technical lifetime and need to be renewed.
• We need to secure the electricity supply and enable the expansion of renewable electricity production.
• It is part of our mandate to prepare the national grid for a common European electricity market

Society needs a robust national grid for a secure electricity supply

Sweden depends on a safe and reliable electricity supply in order to function. With increased dependence on electricity, society is more sensitive to power outages. Faults on lines or stations in the national grid can, in the worst case, mean that large parts of Sweden lose access to power. That causes major consequences and costs to both private and public interests in society.

Therefore, it is important that we expand and renovate the grid so that it is robust and reliable. In a reliable national grid, electricity reaches its destination and any interruptions have very little effect and can be corrected quickly.

Sweden has one of the world's oldest national grids and many of our lines and stations are nearing the end of their technical lifetime. To continue to have an operationally reliable grid and to transfer the amount of electricity that society wants, we do not just build new lines and stations. We also renew the ones we already have. 

We need new national grid lines and stations to enable renewable electricity production

The Swedish and European energy and climate policy seeks to significantly increase renewable electricity production. Therefore, the government has given us the mandate to expand the national grid to receive electricity from such new wind power production and ensure that it can be of use in the European electricity market. We need to increase the transmission capacity in several parts of the country to ensure that the new electricity can be fed into the grid and reach out to the electricity market without major restrictions. In addition to new lines, we need new stations to receive large amounts of new electricity production in different places in the country.

The grid is a prerequisite for a common European electricity market

Another part of the Swedish and European energy policy is that the Nordic countries and the EU work together to enable free trade in electricity across borders within the Union. An important step in this effort is to build electricity connections that link the various countries' electrical systems. There is also a requirement that countries do not have so little capacity in any part of their grid so that the flow of electricity between the countries is limited. To allow free trade in electricity between the Nordic countries and the EU is thus also a reason why we build new lines in the Swedish grid and to other countries.

You can read more about our planned and ongoing development projects here.