Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Power The Military

Sweden Scraps Plans For 13 Offshore Windfarms Over Russia Security Fears (theguardian.com) 49

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

Comments Filter:
  • Yet another price (Score:5, 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 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 Rei ( 128717 )

        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.

        • You can see this process at work right now in Moldova or Georgia. And of course, the Crimean operation was such a success, with such a feeble response from the west, that Putin just decided to take the whole country.

      • 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

    • 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".
    • 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.

  • What is the point of joining a giant military alliance but to make yourself more confident in your own defense?
    • 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 lef

  • 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.

  • 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 MrKaos ( 858439 )

    Sure makes Peace difficult.

  • Those no good commie bastards ;)
  • Problem is (Score:3, 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".

Keep your boss's boss off your boss's back.

Working...