Finland accounts for roughly one-thousandth of global emissions. A giant like China can emit in a single day what Finland emits in a year. From those numbers it could be easy to conclude, that what we do at home doesn’t matter.
That conclusion is wrong. Cutting domestic emissions is essential, and we are bound to them by our own Climate Act and by EU targets. But the numbers do point toward the right question: the problem is one of scale.
So where is scale solvable then? The answer is not found within Finland’s borders. And yet that is where the majority of our climate discussion stays.
If we are serious about accelerating the energy transition, we need to aim our efforts at the carbon handprint — a positive concept of how much a product, service, or solution helps reduce someone else’s carbon footprint. The conversation should shift towards creating positive impact by identifying new business opportunities, rather than focusing only on efficiency and on minimising our own carbon footprint.
Using the leverage effect, we can help countries far larger than us in terms of population and emissions, with their energy transitions. A one per cent improvement in Finland’s power system is a fine technical achievement. The same solution applied in India can mean millions of tonnes of avoided emissions. We can create an impact far larger than our own weight class.
…but how?
Let’s take a moment to think about the global picture. We’re in a real hurry. These days what matters is how quickly a solution can be deployed, and the real impact to the environment. So how do you cut emissions at scale within a couple of years?
Large infrastructure projects are necessary, but they take a decade to complete, not a year. The European Commission has estimated an investment need of €1.2 trillion to the electricity infrastructure by 2040. And even that doesn’t look like enough. We can see that this stuff is expensive and slow, and it still doesn’t seem to solve the large-scale integration of intermittent renewables (solar and wind) into transmission grids.
A far faster way to scale is to make existing infrastructure smarter. Software has a decisive advantage here, because it scales across borders enormously faster than hardware. Finland is never going to win a contest of physical manufacturing volume. What counts instead is the ability to build systems that learn and adapt, and Finland has a combination of energy and digital expertise that few countries can match.
Fingrid, Finland’s transmission system operator, balances supply and demand in real time by combining a smart grid, industrial demand response, and distributed software and hardware solutions. Germany has committed hundreds of billions of euros to energy infrastructure (for example grid expansion and hydrogen networks), but project schedules keep slipping and completion stretches into decades. Finnish flexibility solutions are running today. We have one of the most advanced reserve (ancillary) markets in the world.
And yet internationalisation is still treated as a linear sequence: first the home market, then the Nordics, and only then one has a look at global scale. That model sits awkwardly with how real impact actually happens in this sector. It happens when the global context is built into the design from the very start of the innovation process.
We can’t solve everything. We must concentrate on high-leverage use cases where we hold a genuine technological edge and where what we build can scale.
Born global shouldn’t be a growth strategy. It should be the initial assumption. Otherwise solutions end up structurally too small for the scale they were meant to address.
The model for action: how does Finland build a global carbon handprint?
My short answer: an ecosystem. Serious international expansion rarely rests on the capabilities of a single company. It rests on consolidated combinations of actors. New energy solutions emerge in partnerships and consortia, where you have ambitious technology startups, large corporates, local players and public financing mechanisms working together. Competitive advantage doesn’t come from technology alone, but from the ability to steer a complex network of partners toward a shared goal. Every market has its own structural barriers, and different partners solve different problems.
A born-global approach doesn’t mean uncontrolled or premature expansion. It means disciplined, deliberate market selection, with the solution aimed at one clearly defined use case. I’m not claiming this is easy. I am claiming it’s worth deciding explicitly and in advance, which market barriers you can live with and which you can’t.
The greatest need and the toughest barriers often show up in the same place, and that is not a coincidence. Markets stay dysfunctional partly because they are closed. The reasons may lie in regulation, in political decision-making, or in other societal power structures. A country may have a state-owned utility controlling both transmission and distribution, and a Finnish company may still conclude that its solutions fit that market. Wärtsilä and Fortum are examples. Or then a country may have no electricity reserve market at all. In that case the problem isn’t a missing technology, rather it’s that specific kinds of solutions fit the market better.
Large industrial players can support technical validation by providing access to data, real operating environments, and the first paid pilots. Market access, by contrast, rarely resolves itself without local partners: local knowledge and a warm introduction from someone trusted are often what it takes to even have a seat at the same table with the people needed.
Credibility also must be built at national level. Finland is among the first societies in the world moving toward carbon neutrality, with a target date of 2035. This is an ace up our sleeve worth using, and a strong reference. It is evidence of our technological capability.
For technology developers, everything above means taking the global context as the starting point for research and design. For the public sector it means actively removing the barriers to internationalisation.
Finland’s real climate impact will not be measured by how clean we make our own system. It will be measured by how much we accelerate everyone else’s transition.
Written by
Robin Haapavaara
+358 505944297
robin.haapavaara@gmail.com
