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Power The Military

Sweden Scraps Plans For 13 Offshore Windfarms Over Russia Security Fears (theguardian.com) 123

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Sweden has vetoed plans for 13 offshore windfarms in the Baltic Sea, citing unacceptable security risks. The country's defence minister, Pal Jonson, said on Monday that the government had rejected plans for all but one of 14 windfarms planned along the east coast. The decision comes after the Swedish armed forces concluded last week that the projects would make it more difficult to defend Nato's newest member.

The proposed windfarms would have been located between Aland, the autonomous Finnish region between Sweden and Finland, and the Sound, the strait between southern Sweden and Denmark. The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad is only about 310 miles (500km) from Stockholm. Wind power could affect Sweden's defence capabilities across sensors and radars and make it harder to detect submarines and possible attacks from the air if war broke out, Jonson said. The only project to receive the green light to was Poseidon, which will include as many as 81 wind turbines to produce 5.5 terawatt hours a year off Stenungsund on Sweden's west coast.
"Both ballistic robots and also cruise robots are a big problem if you have offshore wind power," Jonson said. "If you have a strong signal detection capability and a radar system that is important, we use the Patriot system for example, there would be negative consequences if there were offshore wind power in the way of the sensors."

Sweden Scraps Plans For 13 Offshore Windfarms Over Russia Security Fears

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  • Yet another price (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @10:42PM (#64920273)

    When you have a belligerent around running its own economy into the ground and invading neighbours for a resource infusion... you have to waste money defending against that aggression.

    If everybody would just stay in their own damn yard, we'd have so much more productivity to make people's lives better instead of spending it on a giant game of Risk on behalf of a handful of rich assholes.

    • by znrt ( 2424692 )

      When you have a belligerent around running its own economy into the ground and invading neighbours for a resource infusion...

      you forgot about the decapitated babies in the oven?

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, yes, definitely. If assholes were not tolerated in positions of power (or worse, voted into them), the world would be a better place.

    • I've kind of given up on the human race. We've had about 10,000 years of civilization, and in that time, for every great work of art or building we've made, we've also spent far more resources on the means of subjugating and killing each other. We're easily duped into the most idiotic acts of vandalism and murder because for all the wonder that is our prefrontal cortex, most of our decision making is pretty much on the same level of that as your average chimpanzee.

    • Yup. This is why Putin must not be appeased and Ukraine must receive surged support to reach victory ASAP. Putin loses power if the Russian army loses. (It's also why Europe is effed if Putin's buddy wins.) Release the damn Kraken already (because Putin cannot use nukes for geopolitical and economic reasons)!
  • Blame it on Sweden (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RossCWilliams ( 5513152 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @11:01PM (#64920295)
    Lets be clear, this is a price that Sweden has decided to pay to feel more secure. You can argue about how real a threat there is to Sweden's security but it doesn't really matter. They have decided the threat is sufficient.
    • by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @11:04PM (#64920301)

      I don't think Putin's dumb enough or desperate enough to invade a NATO country, but you can be damn sure he'd sabotage a wind farm or use it to make sabre-rattling more credible. Especially if it made him look 'strong' domestically.

      • by Tailhook ( 98486 )

        Plinking at a wind farm at sea is exactly the kind of petty shit the Russians would enjoy. Sweden is being wise here.

      • by RossCWilliams ( 5513152 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2024 @12:09AM (#64920367)

        you can be damn sure he'd sabotage a wind farm

        That isn't their worry. Their worry is that the wind farm will interfere with their air defenses and detecting incoming threats.

        • by reanjr ( 588767 )

          He'll sabotage them by putting up pirate wind farms along the coast to mask his incoming invasion...

      • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2024 @05:06AM (#64920655) Homepage

        I doubt Putin would directly and overtly invade a NATO country. Instead, you'd have a bunch of "pro-Russian locals" in one particular region of the country who are "being oppressed" and "ask for help" from Russia, to which Russia "provides humanitarian aid", and all of the sudden the "separatists" have professional military training and armoured columns and air defense systems, which they "found in local arms depots", including systems that the host country never possessed.

      • If there is a war between NATO and Russia, then it is NATO that has started it and driven Russia to it. Russia isn't stupid enough to go to war by itself with NATO unless really provoked, Russia doesn't have the resources.
        And don't count on a war between NATO and Russia using conventional weapons. If a war is started, it'll be the end of most of the world as the only thing Russia can do is launch all their nuclear missiles as it knows it can't win any conventional war with NATO. And NATO knows this, and is

        • by gtall ( 79522 )

          Russia is not stupid enough, Putin is. And he's already started a war on the West, it just is not kinetic yet except in Ukraine.

          The basic problem is that Russia, after years and years of authoritarian rule, does not have the political structures to support any other form of government. Hence the latest authoritarian de jour defines himself as "protecting" Russia against the West. He cannot fix Russia because to do that he'd have to fire the kleptocrats and start forming responsible political institutions.

      • They already sabotaged e.g. the power cable between Finland and Estonia. Officially blamed on a Chinese ship which "accidentally" dropped its anchor and dragged across the power cable, severing it. They claim they didn't notice. Anybody familiar with the procedure for releasing a 6-tonne ship anchor will tell you that it's not something you do by accident.

        Strangely enough, a Russian oceanographic "science" ship was zig-zagging over the damaged area in the weeks before the cable was accidentally cut. An int

    • No, this is the "dog ate my homework" of excuses, "we weren't really that enthusiastic about offshore wind farms anyway [4coffshore.com] and this is the perfect excuse to avoid building any without saying we don't really want them".
      • by spitzak ( 4019 )

        Yea this really sounds like a bogus excuse. The real threat of Russia is them sabotaging the wind farm but for some reason that is not mentioned. Obstructing radar is something other things, such as *ships* do, and they move around and are thus harder to ignore. Also they contain a lot more metal.

    • Sounds more like an excuse to me

      The real threat is zero or near zero. Russia attacking a NATO member would trigger Article 5.

      This is a political convenience

      • The interferences of the turbines create radar blind spots over water, and vibrations and simply sound under water, which affects sonar.

        The sonar situation in the Baltic sea is: "complicated".

        Different layers of different temperatured water, and different salt levels, not only horizontally but also vertically at river mouths makes it easy for submarines to sneak around.

        Adding "extra background noise" makes it even more easy.

        • by spitzak ( 4019 )

          This seems bogus. *ships* produce far more noise, and are made of metal and interfere with radar far more. And they move around, too.

          I do believe turbines are a visible target Putin could sabotage without triggering NATO response, though I am stumped as to why this more plausible explanation was not used as an excuse to cancel them.

          • It is about radar versus planes. Not about ships.
            And the sound of a single ship, has nothing to do with an obscuring sound cloud of sound coming from thousands of sources.

            The plausible explanation is: they do not want to be blind - when the attack is coming. And they do not want to be blind when allies fight in the sea, and they can do nothing to help.

            It is physics, not politics.

            Has nothing to do with NATO.

      • There is nothing magic about "Article 5". There are plenty of reasons to think there could be a direct war between Russia and NATO that would make Sweden, as a NATO member, a target. In fact, it looks increasingly like a war between NATO and Russia is inevitable if NATO is unwilling to accept Ukraine's defeat.
  • What is the point of joining a giant military alliance but to make yourself more confident in your own defense?
    • by couchslug ( 175151 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @11:19PM (#64920323)

      That includes designing everything with military advantage in mind.

      You're clearly too young to have experienced the early Cold War so you can have no idea regarding the permanent Russian threat, but while this may be incredibly difficult to understand there is more to maintaining secular democracy than wishful thinking.

      Russia will never cease to be an enemy. It is not some modern nation temporarily afflicted with a bad administration, but I don't expect you to know that either since it's not an orthodox leftist belief.

  • Something ChatGPT just invented?

    • by Rei ( 128717 )

      Oh man, but "ballistic robots" sounds like a cool sci-fi weapon system ;) You launch them, they arrive in half an hour, ride a heat shield through reentry, fire retrorockets, march off wielding heavy weapons in a coordinated assault, and immediately seize the objective that they were launched to take.

    • What are ballistic robots?

      At a guess, smart bombs or shells. They are ballistic, and they are robots.

  • by couchslug ( 175151 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @11:38PM (#64920349)

    Ossis and other Kremlin shills ensured Germany would depend on Russian resource extraction so the usual pattern of former Commies monetizing their old connections would not just be confined to Russia.

    It's worth reminding Russian history in that region gives every reason to be militarily prepared which includes reducing economic therefore social vulns. The Russo-Finnish war is still in living memory and Sweden knows Russia can easily finish returning to its natural (s)talinism Putin regrets losing.

    • by r1348 ( 2567295 )

      If the Russo-Finnish war is still in memory, so should be WW2. Should we rearm against Germany, Italy and Japan?

    • Ossis and other Kremlin shills ensured Germany would depend on Russian resource extraction so the usual pattern of former Commies monetizing their old connections would not just be confined to Russia.

      It's worth reminding Russian history in that region gives every reason to be militarily prepared which includes reducing economic therefore social vulns. The Russo-Finnish war is still in living memory and Sweden knows Russia can easily finish returning to its natural (s)talinism Putin regrets losing.

      LOL. Read about how many wars there have been between Sweden and Russia.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      FYI, Russian children learn in school that Americans and Brits had troops on their soil fighting against the Bolsheviks in the revolution.
      If Russians had troops in the US fighting on the British side in the US revolution, you'd learn about it in history classes.

  • by MrKaos ( 858439 )

    Sure makes Peace difficult.

  • Those no good commie bastards ;)
  • Problem is (Score:5, Informative)

    by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2024 @03:51AM (#64920565)

    The issue is that radar reflections from windmills create a massive blind spot behind them in radar coverage. This is the reason why we in Finland block building of windmills across a lot of East and North. In spite of locals really wanting to get access to massive amount of government subsidies, and being some of the relatively poorest regions of the country.

    There have been several official reports issued on the subject, this being the latest iirc:

    https://julkaisut.valtioneuvos... [valtioneuvosto.fi]

    Issue with radars are only one page (172), but it's put last because the goal of the paper is to "advancing building of wind power", and that one just torpedoes the whole thing in large swathes of the nation by stating that "blind spot creation effects cannot be technologically mitigated".

    • by ledow ( 319597 )

      Sounds like a perfect research opportunity for an anti-radar weapon to deploy from some kind of drone that you could dangle all around your warships.

      • The problem is that the wind farms act as passive counter for radar, leaving blind spots that you have to constantly be watching out for.

        Drone deployed screens would be an active counter - while it can interfere with getting a good signal, you can tell that something is happening outside of normal operations. And honestly we already have anti-radar deployed material - it is commonly referred to as chaff (and for larger target you are generally better off using jamming methods for active countermeasures)

    • I'm sure there's a reason, but why can't they put radar on the far side of the wind towers? Certainly enough power for it.
      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        Same reason why you can't just have the latest flight Arleigh Burke on watch at every maritime chokepoint that exists to ensure total maritime shipping security. Finitude of resources.

    • by spitzak ( 4019 )

      Is there anything comparing this to other construction and ships, which they are allowing? This whole excuse sounds kind of bogus to me.

      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        What are you on about? Ships in a middle of a forest? "Other construction" that doesn't interfere with radar (of which there's very little if any, regions are remote, forested, and very sparsely inhabited.

        • by spitzak ( 4019 )

          "Sweeden Scraps Plans For 13 ***OFFSHORE*** Windfarms Over Russia Security Fears"

          • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

            My subtopic was about wind farms on land.

            Wind farms on sea will obviously have similar effect, compounded by the expected relative evenness of sea surface as compared to trees and hills on land.

  • funny how news report miss those details, almost as if they had an agenda
  • Oh look, a right wing government looking for excuses not to invest in renewables.

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