Swedish Armed Forces chiefs have said they were concerned about plans for huge wind farms off the country’s coast.
According to the military, several of the projects are to be located in parts of the Baltic Sea where the power plants can interfere with Sweden’s defence capability.
Lieutenant General Carl-Johan Edström, Chief of the Defence Staff, said he believed that the towers and rotating blades of wind turbines could create disturbances that could adversely impact important surveillance systems.
“The biggest problem with wind turbines is that they affect our sensors in a very negative way,” Edström told Swedish newspaper SVT Nyheter on November 1.
“It’s a very serious problem. It will reduce our ability to meet … threats and warn the population.”
An inquiry by the Swedish Armed Forces found that a park with wind turbines could delay detection by one minute, for instance, if a cruise missile was to be fired at Sweden.
Similarly, underwater sensors are affected, reducing the likelihood of detecting enemy submarines.
“It is not something we can accept given today’s threat landscape and the responsibility we have towards Sweden as a nation,” Edström said.
A report by the Ministry of Defence, seen by SVT, showed that there were “no conditions to establish wind power” in large parts of the Baltic Sea, meaning they were unsuitable for such facilities.
The assessment was based on data from the Swedish Armed Forces and applied to the entire area between Åland in the northern Baltic Sea and Öresund in the southwestern Baltic.
“When it comes to the Baltic Sea region in particular, we see great difficulties in having a coexistence between large wind farms and a retained military capability to defend Sweden,” the Chief of the Defence Staff said.
Sweden has committed itself to building several large wind farms. The change to wind power generation is part of the country’s climate transition, moving away from fossil fuels and cutting carbon emissions.
“We are also dependent on a sustainable energy supply for our operations. We want to get involved earlier in the process to be able to define where it is possible to build,” Edström said.
Ultimately, the Swedish Government will make the final decision on where to build such farms.
Defence Minister Pål Jonson told SVT Nyheter: “We will need to make an overall assessment of this. Of course, we weigh in what the Armed Forces say but I do not want to pre-empt the assessment that we will have to make. We will have to come back to that.”
