We (try to) use renewable electricity only

This is a quick note that for our premises we purchase electricity through a so-called renewable energy contract. One of the purposes of Majavan tila osk is to reduce the carbon intensity of our communities’ activities in order to ever so slightly reduce the devastating effects of the ongoing climate crisis.

Is this just greenwashing?

We use a so-called “100 % renewable” electricity contract from Helen, mostly because Helsinki’s own energy company is the most likely to have an impact (whether negative or positive) on the communities our cooperative serves.

We provide this information for transparency and not at all as an endorsement for Helen. Indeed we have little hope that choosing such a contract actually helps reduce emissions in Finland and there is a high chance that Helen’s offer is just greenwashing. As a company we do not even get an estimate of the energy sources in our bill, the way individual consumers do. Historically, such “certificates of origin” have been little more than paperwork exercises to attribute existing hydropower production from Norway to this or that customer in Finland. In the best case they may be backed by a long-term power purchase agreement which actually helps develop new renewable power production.

However, as discussed elsewhere, Helen recently commissioned a 148 MW wind power plant (The Karahka wind farm is now operational, December 2024). As of December 2024, Helen owned a whopping (read: pathetic) 5 % of the total wind power capacity in Finland, according to industry sources (Wind Power Year 2024: Finland’s Wind Power Capacity Grew by 20%, January 2025).

Energy financials and emissions

As previously discussed, from the very beginning our members have made changes to our premises in order to significantly reduce our electricity usage and save money.

Currently we spend about 600 €/year on electricity, so the additional cost from the so-called 100 % renewable option is negligible. Electricity costs in our premises are in principle reimbursed by their users: currently 70 % of the costs are reimbursed by the projects and individuals who rent space from us.

For comparison, our building spends about 30 k€/year on heating costs (from Helen’s district heating network). Our share of the building’s maintenance costs is about 13 %, so our yearly heating costs for the entire 2024 would have been about 3700 €. For any serious energy saving or carbon emission reduction initiative, heating is clearly the place to start: we are having discussions with our neigbours, but such things take time.

While Helsinki last spring has proclaimed that The age of coal in Helsinki’s energy production has ended, we are still far from a fully renewable or low-carbon district heating network.

There are better cooperative alternatives

We are open to discussions with anyone interested in developing better alternatives for climate-conscious individuals and businesses to procure actual, additional renewable electricity from the local grid.

In Europe there are several examples of rapidly expanding renewable energy cooperatives. Some of the biggest are Enercoop in France and ènostra in Italy; other examples include the pioneer Middelgrunden in Denmark (since the 1990s) and many others within REScoop.eu.

The idea is simple: people and businesses join forces as members of a cooperative where to trade renewable electricity with each other. Consumers can join the cooperative and purchase electricity as simply as they would from any electricity company, but as members they also increase the cooperative’s capital and capacity to invest in new initiatives and can sell electricity from their own poduction (usually solar panels). Business members can also sell electricity into the cooperative and whatever remains to be procured is purchased on the open market, ideally with arrangements which facilitate an actual increase in renewable energy production to match the increase in purchases from members.

Heating and geothermal in Helsinki and Haaga

As for heating there aren’t that many examples that we know about from district heating cities like Helsinki.

However, heat pumps with geothermal sources are growing rapidly in Helsinki (see also from the city: Maalämpö) and in many cases have been able to reduce the buildings’ heating bills. It’s generally very easy and cheap to drill the Helsinki bedrock to get wells capable of providing sufficient heat for a single building. Such projects are more likely to be successful and financially viable for slightly bigger buildings, so it may help if a cluster of nearby buildings joined forces to conduct such a project

Let us know if you know of buildings in Haaga interested in geothermal options (especially near us: Haagan tori, Kauppalantie, Rinne or Steniuksentie). We have a little and very partial map of the existing geothermal projects in Helsinki and we’d like help to make it more complete. One example we know about in Haaga is Angervotie 14.