MD Henning Theorell: Wind power self-interest and rural residential development – a conflict of objectives
MD Henning Theorell is a licensed physician and specialist in internal medicine and allergy disease. Since his retirement in 2009, he has followed with concern the expansion of wind power in Sweden and its health consequences. An industry where areas are now being sought for increasingly larger wind power exploitations with more powerful turbines in order to satisfy an increased need for electricity through transition from oil, gas and coal to the mix of solar, wind and hydropower.
The political decision is to speed up the expansion of wind power. In order to do so, they have issued electricity certificates to reduce the cost for the investor. The aim of countering continued temperature increases above 1.5 degrees and to expand electricity production for fossil-free steel, electric cars and hydrogen production. Now they also want to speed up decisions on wind farm projects by making the veto process as short as possible. This is due to the fact that they have noticed that the municipal resistance to establishments has increased to an extent that 78 project applications have been rejected by the municipal boards in 2021.
Explanations for this hardening procedure and its health consequences are illustrated here in MD Henning Theorell’s article ”Wind power self-interest and rural residential development – a conflict of objectives”.
MD Theorell says that wind power has become a national interest that takes precedence over other national interests and where biological diversity and the health of the sparsely populated population can take a back seat. As an example, an observandum on Gotland is given, where deaths from vascular dementia increase significantly from 2009-2018, at the same time as the installed wind power output in megawatts increases sharply.
Download the article here > Wind power self-interest and rural residential development – a conflict of objectives
