EGEB: Sweden builds huge, sustainable wooden office building

In today’s Electrek Green Energy Brief (EGEB):

• Gothenburg debuts one of Europe’s largest office/warehouse facilities — and it’s made of wood.
• The IEA and IMF give governments a how-to guide on sustainable economic recovery.
• Green energy spending to exceed oil and gas for the first time in 2021, says Goldman Sachs.

The Electrek Green Energy Brief (EGEB): A daily technical, financial, and political review/analysis of important green energy news.

Eco-friendly wooden warehouse/office

A Nordic fashion agency has built one of Europe’s largest office and warehouse facilities entirely in wood.

Sjöklint Agenturer‘s new 1,750 square-meter (18,836 square-foot) facility is located in Gothenburg, Sweden. The contractors, Exli, and the client agreed to use Kebony, an environmentally certified printed pine, as exterior facades for the entire building.

Manufacturing Kebony uses an environmentally friendly process that modifies sustainably sourced softwoods by heating the wood with furfuryl alcohol, an agricultural byproduct. By polymerizing the wood’s cell wall, the softwoods permanently take on the attributes of tropical hardwood including durability, hardness, and dimensional stability.

Building and construction create 39% of all carbon emissions globally, so innovative new approaches in the construction industry are welcome.

A global plan for sustainable recovery

The International Energy Agency, in collaboration with the International Monetary Fund, today released the Sustainable Recovery Plan. The report “outlines energy-focused policies and investments to move the world toward a cleaner and more resilient future.”

The plan lays out a series of actions that governments can take over the next three years to help economies recover and boost employment in a sustainable manner.

The report says policy actions and targeted investments can boost global economic growth by an average of 1.1 percentage points a year; save or create around 9 million jobs a year; and reduce annual global energy-related emissions by a total of 4.5 billion tonnes by the end of the plan.

It also includes a plan for driving a 5% reduction in air pollution emissions, bringing access to clean cooking solutions to around 420 million people in low-income countries, and enabling nearly 270 million people to gain access to electricity.

It would require $1 trillion annually over the next three years, which represents about 0.7% of today’s global GDP and includes both public spending and private finance that would be mobilized by government policies.

Green energy investment will surpass fossil fuels in 2021

According to Goldman Sachs, green energy spending will surpass oil and gas in 2021 for the first time. Further, spending on renewables will account for 25% of all energy investments next year. For perspective, renewables made up 14% of energy investing in 2014.

Looking ahead, the banking giant sees total investment in green energy rising to $16 trillion over the next 10 years.

Goldman Sachs sees the coronavirus pandemic ultimately accelerating the nationwide pivot to renewables, despite current job losses in the sector.

The Goldman Sachs team wrote:

We believe this time will be different, especially for technologies that are now mature enough to be deployed at scale and can benefit from a falling cost of capital and an attractive regulatory framework, unlocking one of the largest infrastructure investment opportunities in history on our estimate.