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RANKINGS

Reinfeldt reclaims top spot in Sweden power rankings

Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt can once again lay claim to the title of Sweden’s most power person, having nudged his own finance minister Anders Borg from the top spot in a new ranking released on Thursday.

Reinfeldt reclaims top spot in Sweden power rankings

Last year, Borg catapulted past his boss to take the number one spot in Fokus magazine’s annual ranking of Sweden’s most powerful people, with Reinfeldt coming in second.

But now the Swedish prime minister – and current de facto leader of the European Union – has reclaimed the top spot, pushing Borg back into second place.

Fokus ranks Sweden’s power brokers on a number of criteria, including media penetration, formal power, informal power, and extraordinary power.

There are 28 women among this year’s list of Sweden’s 100 most powerful. In the wake of the growing ties between Sweden’s centre-left political opposition, Social Democratic leader Mona Sahlin moved from sixth place to third place in this year’s rankings, while Green Party co-leader Maria Wetterstrand jumped to sixth place, up from 17th place last year.

And as the royal wedding of Crown Princess Victoria draws closer, the heir to the Swedish throne saw her ranking shoot up from 60th to 23rd place.

On the other hand, Victoria’s father, King Carl XVI Gustaf, settled for 70th place, which was still a marked improvement from last year when he failed to make the list altogether.

According to the Fokus ranking, the most power figure in Swedish business is Marcus Wallenberg of the famed industrial family, whose position as chairman of the board of SEB bank puts him in seventh place overall.

Figures from government and politics dominate the remainder of the top ten, with education minister and Liberal Party (Folkpartiet) leader Jan Björklund taking the fourth spot and energy minister and Centre Party leader Maud Olofsson coming in 9th place, while Moderate party secretary Per Schlingman sits in the fifth spot.

Eighth place in the ranking goes to the head of the Swedish Federation of Trade Unions (LO), Wanja Lundby-Wedin, while tenth place is held by businessman Gustaf Douglas, who also sits on the Moderate Party’s governing board.

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WIND

Denmark approves plans to build North Sea ‘energy island’

Denmark has moved forward with plans for an artificial island in the North Sea that could generate wind power for at least three million households, a government spokesman said on Friday.

Denmark approves plans to build North Sea 'energy island'
File photo: Henning Bagger/Ritzau Scanpix

Work is due to begin by 2026, he added. 

The Danish parliament adopted in June a political environmental framework aimed at reducing the country's CO2 emissions by 70 percent by 2030, which included plans for the world's first “energy hubs” on the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea and in the North Sea.

On Thursday, parliament went further by approving a plan to place the North Sea hub on an artificial island, with a wind power farm that will initially supply three gigawatts (GW) of electricity.

That could later be scaled up to 10 GW — enough for 10 million households — according to the Danish Ministry of Climate, Energy and Utilities.

The island is to be majority owned by the Danish government in partnership with private companies.

Its final size is yet to be decided but it is expected to cover between 120,000 to 460,000 square meters (about 1.3 to 5 million square feet), ministry spokesperson Emil Lee Madsen told AFP.

The total number of wind turbines has not been finalised either, but estimates range between 200 and 600 units at “a previously unseen scale,” with the tip of the blades reaching as high as 260 meters (850 feet) above the sea.

The project's next steps include environmental impact assessments and talks with potential investors, so construction is still some years off.

“At this point it seems like initial construction will actually begin around 2026, and hopefully it will be finished sometime between 2030 and 2033,” Lee Madsen said, noting that some delays were probable so closer to 2033 was more realistic.

At full capacity, the island would provide more wind power than Denmark needs for its population of 5.8 million.

Other countries could then plug into the hub to “increase the efficiency of the electricity production from the wind farms by distributing it across the European power grid,” the ministry said.

READ ALSO: Denmark proposes giant 1.3GW wind to jet fuel plant

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