Second Opinion Parallella Nät Skatt (2026)

Title: “Parallella nät för att undvika skatt” Publisher note: Second Opinion Nyheter AB, run on commission for Energiföretagen Sverige Interview: with Per Everhill (ansvarig Public Affairs, Tekniska verken) Language: Swedish

Critical-perspective interview arguing that Swedish/European energy-community uptake is substantially driven by energy-tax and VAT avoidance rather than genuine grid-optimization value, illustrated with a concrete German negative-price example. Note on source status: Second Opinion ceased publishing 1 July 2026; see Energy Communities for the topic this connects to.

Key claims

The price mechanism driving the trend: rapid solar buildout (primarily on the Continent, increasingly in Sweden) has made zero or negative day-ahead prices routine during strong spring sun, while prices remain much higher outside those hours. Concrete example given: Sunday 26 April, 14:00–14:15, German day-ahead price was −480 EUR/MWh (Nord Pool) — i.e. roughly 5 SEK/kWh cost to feed electricity into the German grid, before taxes/fees/subsidy effects. This German surplus exports into neighbouring markets including Sweden, compressing prices there too (less dramatically), reinforced by Sweden’s own growing solar fleet.

Everhill’s core claim: despite (or because of) this price collapse, solar installations keep growing, and a meaningful share of the energy-community trend is explained by tax/fee avoidance rather than grid benefit — self-consuming solar surplus avoids energiskatt and moms, which selling it into a near-zero/negative spot market effectively forfeits anyway. “Kan du i stället använda elen själv slipper du både energiskatt och moms. Det är där drivkraften ligger.”

“Parallella nät” — physical energy communities: a growing trend of bostadsrättsföreningar/fastighetsägare building their own internal electricity networks (e.g., a cable strung across a courtyard to a neighbouring building) specifically to move self-produced solar power between properties without it passing through — and being taxed via — the public grid. Everhill’s critique: this duplicates infrastructure that already exists, provides no net societal benefit, and creates stranded-investment risk if tax rules change later.

Virtual energy sharing — a separate, newer mechanism: also discussed is virtuell energidelning (virtual energy sharing), where electricity is “moved” between locations over the existing grid without new physical cabling (Everhill’s example: owning a wind-power share in Uddevalla, consuming the credit in an apartment in Linköping).

Everhill’s rebuttal to the “reduces grid load” argument: proponents argue local solar production reduces grid strain — Everhill disputes this as the operative constraint. The grid must still be dimensioned for the February peak, when solar contributes nothing and heating demand is at its highest; participants in an EC still want their full grid connection available for winter evening consumption. In Sweden, winter peak demand runs several thousand MW higher than spring/summer. Battery storage can reduce the effektbehov somewhat, per Everhill, but that value doesn’t require an energy-community structure — it can be captured by direct battery investment alone.

Overall framing: “Det är ett system som i stor utsträckning byggs för att undvika skatt, inte för att optimera elsystemet som helhet” — a system built substantially to avoid tax, not to optimize the electricity system as a whole.

Relationship to existing wiki topics