Environmental impacts
Environmental impacts
Fortum’s purpose is to drive the change for a cleaner world. We want to enable the energy transition by providing customers and societies a reliable and affordable supply of low-carbon energy and sustainable solutions.
Environmental impacts in 2021
Energy
In the future, the energy system – and Fortum’s portfolio – will be based on renewable energy, increasingly clean gas (e.g., hydrogen) and nuclear power. By improving the energy efficiency of our power and heat production, we can also reduce flue-gas emissions to the environment relative to the produced energy and decrease production costs.
Fortum’s power generation is mainly based on natural gas-fired generation, and carbon dioxide-free hydro and nuclear power. Fortum targets to reduce the share of coal in power generation rapidly. A minor share of Fortum’s power generation is currently based on solar and wind, but Fortum targets significant growth in the area over the next five years.
Our target is to build 1.5–2 GW of new renewable energy capacity by 2025, primarily in Europe.
Fortum is also a large producer of district heat. The heat is mainly produced at natural gas-fired and energy-efficient combined heat and power (CHP) plants.
In 2021, the asset availability of Fortum’s gas-fired and coal-fired power plants was, on average, 80.8%.
Emissions
Energy production and other production operations generate emissions to the environment, such as to air and water. We aim to control emissions caused by our operations and to reduce their environmental impacts by using technological solutions and cleaning technology.
Greenhouse gases that accelerate global climate change are generated primarily from the use of fossil fuels and the combustion of fossil-based waste. Flue-gas emissions causing local environmental and health effects are generated from all combustion.
Water
We use water mainly as cooling water in our condensing power plants. Water is also a prerequisite for Fortum’s hydropower production. Our responsibility for water use is related not only to water volume and availability, but also to its quality and to the aquatic habitat. We are improving the efficiency of our own water use, and we also offer services to our customers for the treatment, analysis, purification, and utilisation of their waste and sludge waters, and other severely polluted waters.
