The Quota Someone Else Is Buying

Klimatklivet started in 2015. By 30 June 2026 it had granted 33,311 applications, from biogas plants and energy conversion to charging points for electric vehicles, and every one of them was scored the same way: kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent avoided per krona invested. That single ratio is the market. It sets what a tonne of abatement is worth to the state, and it decides which engineering gets built and which engineering stays a slide. The number does not measure effort. It measures a ratio between a numerator most applicants cannot move and a denominator each of them chose. Everyone is pricing against it, whether they know it or not.

Cheap tonnes win. A heat pump replacing an oil boiler turns roughly SEK 300,000 into about 40 tonnes a year, which is 0.13 kilograms per krona. An industrial lighting retrofit turns SEK 200,000 into 30 tonnes, which is 0.15. The official emission factors set the numerator. Heating oil sits at 288 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per megawatt hour. Natural gas sits at 249. Coal at 385, peat at 425. Diesel MK1 at 324 per megawatt hour, or 3.22 per litre. Swedish grid electricity sits at 59, which is why displacing electricity hardly scores at all in 2026. The denominator is capital. Anything cheap and repeatable wins the ranking by arithmetic rather than merit.

Read the granted portfolio as a design output. Of the approvals, 28,145 are for non-public charging and 2,194 for public charging, and more than 262,700 charging points have been added with support. Everything else is small beside it. 1,907 grants for energy conversion, 250 for vehicles, 198 for transport, 169 for biogas production, 123 for energy efficiency, 93 for waste, 74 for infrastructure, 58 for information campaigns, 54 for gas emissions and 46 in the residual category. A scheme that pays on kilograms per krona buys charging points long before it buys a first-of-kind process plant. On its own terms it is right to.

The bar is not fixed. Reported breakpoints ran at 1.0 kilograms per krona in the first rounds, fell to 0.75 in 2016 and 2017, and sit somewhere between 0.5 and 0.75 in recent rounds, against a cumulative average of 1.07 across everything granted so far. That average is the tell. The accepted pool scores about twice the bar, which means the bar does very little work. It is a floor, not a ranking. Expected abatement across all granted projects is 3.3 million tonnes a year over an assumed 15-year operating life, with 60 to 98 per cent of it landing inside Sweden depending on category. A floor with a drift is a moving market. What cleared in 2015 is not what clears in 2026.

That single ratio is the market. It decides which engineering gets built and which engineering stays a slide.

Now price a capital-intensive plant. A unit costing SEK 10 million and abating 800 tonnes a year scores 0.08 kilograms per krona. That is one sixth of the lowest breakpoint and under a tenth of the cumulative average. Compare a solar array of 500 kilowatts: SEK 5 million for about 25 tonnes, or 0.005. It fails by a wider margin, because the denominator is capital and the displaced grid is already clean. The metric is not broken here. It does exactly what it was designed to do, which is to buy the most tonnes per krona. The plant is simply the wrong shape for it. The probability that a project is designed before the metric is read is not zero. In most rounds it is close to one.

The authority can fund below the breakpoint. The ordinance allows it for projects that carry technology diffusion, first-mover position, employment, health benefits or supply security. The precedent is not rare. Between 12 and 20 per cent of approvals in every round since 2015 sat below the breakpoint on exactly those grounds. That percentage is the most valuable number in the programme and the one applicants quote least. A project does not have to win the ratio. It has to be the kind of project the ratio cannot see. Two arguments are available. Either you clear the number, or you are the exemption. There is no third door.

Riksrevisionen published RiR 2019:1 on 17 January 2019. The finding was that the calculated emission reductions and the additional cost of the measures were not correctly computed, so the scheme could not be said to deliver cost-effective abatement. The recommendation was specific. For any new support scheme, start from the problem it is meant to fix and limit the scope to common measures in areas where other instruments are missing or weak. The scheme was not shut down. It was told that the next one should be narrower and easier to score. That is how a metric becomes a moat. Narrow the eligible set and the incumbents inside it stop competing with anything except each other.

Read the metric first. Compute your own ratio honestly, including the baseline you are allowed to claim, because the baseline is where the variance lives: the same project scores higher against heating oil than against natural gas. Then decide which side of the line you are on. If you clear the breakpoint, the application is arithmetic. If you do not, the application is evidence of diffusion: first of a kind, replicable, and tied to a priority the authority has already named. What kills these projects is not the ratio. It is an applicant who spent nine months on engineering and one afternoon on the scoring rules. Entrade built 200 wood-gasification machines across the UK and Europe. The machines worked. The measurement did not. The quota is not a moral argument. It is a market, and someone else is already buying.