For Anna Borg, visiting Glasgow for Cop26 must feel like stepping on home turf. The chief executive of the Swedish state-owned energy giant Vattenfall, one of Britain’s biggest wind farm developers, has found plenty of support for erecting turbines in Scotland, where it has a number of wind farms.
South of the border, though, it is more of a struggle. Its Vanguard project off the Norfolk coast, which will provide enough electricity to power nearly 2 million homes, has been hit by lengthy delays. The project is nearly 30 miles from the coast — and yet locals are up in arms.
A retired RAF pilot argued that the Norfolk countryside was under threat from plans to construct a network of 40 miles of cables running through land close to his home. He raised £16,000 to challenge the government’s decision to grant development consent to Vattenfall’s project. The High Court this year ruled in his favour, forcing the company back to the drawing board.
“We started out in 2009 to develop these projects — and we’re still waiting for the final consent,” sighs Borg, 50, who warns that Britain is at risk of missing its target of cutting carbon emissions by 68 per cent by 2030 if these projects do not get the go-ahead.
Similar protests have occurred at Vattenfall’s rivals in Britain. Scottish Power’s plans to build two substations in Suffolk faced a backlash from locals including the comedian Griff Rhys Jones.
Treading carefully, Borg, who has been in charge of the power company for just over a year, says people have to make sacrifices to reach net zero. “We need to find some kind of social acceptance for the transformation needed. It’s not possible to make this kind of fundamental transformation without it being noticed. And I think that’s important to acknowledge,” she says of the resistance.
Borg, who has piercing blue eyes and is immaculately dressed, has been making these points to world leaders at Cop26. She believes an overhaul of the planning process must occur if we are to avoid the sort of delays seen in building new nuclear plants. “The trick is to make this happen in reality. And in order to do that, the consulting and the permitting processes need to be smoother and faster.
“It’s a major transition happening in a very short period. So you need a totally different approach to this . . . I think politics play an important role to clear the road of the obstacles.” She wants different steps of the permission process to be run at the same time to speed things up.
It is an argument Borg also made at a dinner last month at Downing Street, in what has been a whirlwind first year in charge. She attended a White House summit on climate change in April, has made the world’s first “green steel” (using hydrogen instead of coal), and brought forward Vattenfall’s deadline for getting to net-zero emissions from 2050 to 2040. The business recently aligned with the Paris climate agreement, meaning it is in line to meet its own goal to help limit global warming to no more than 1.5C.
Borg could easily be a politician herself, carefully navigating questions about the role of protest groups such as Extinction Rebellion — “They are keeping the urgency of the debate . . . but we also need to make this a reality” — while simultaneously backing and rejecting Boris Johnson’s push for developers to source staff and materials from Britain, not abroad: “We prefer to work with local suppliers . . . but there needs to be a mix.”
She was born in Stockholm and her father had a series of managerial roles, while her mother ran her own business. Borg went on to do a master’s degree in economics and political science before becoming a financial services consultant. At the age of 24, she joined Vattenfall, which had focused for decades on hydroelectric power in Sweden, before pushing into nuclear reactors in the 1970s and expanding into Europe.
She worked her way up the company until 2015, when she left to run the Nordic arm of Klarna, the buy-now-pay-later start-up that has become a fintech giant.
Jeanette Anttila, who worked with her at Klarna and is now at Swedish venture capital firm Summa Equity, says Borg adapted well to the vastly different tech start-up culture — even ditching her smart business attire for more casual T-shirt and jeans.
She says Borg had “a laser focus on targets” but was always approachable and friendly: “Some people are really full of themselves, but Anna never uses her power in that way.”
After two years in the job, she was convinced to return to Vattenfall, becoming finance chief in 2017 before taking the top job last year. She now oversees an energy behemoth with 20,000 staff and a turnover last year of £13.7 billion, with pre-tax profits topping £1 billion.
In recent years, Vattenfall has been winding down its coal-fired power stations across Europe, shutting several plants and phasing out the use of lignite coal in Germany — the least efficient type of coal. It has regularly hosted climate protesters at those sites.
Vattenfall owns seven nuclear reactors in Sweden and three in Germany. The German government decided to pull the plug on nuclear in response to the Fukushima disaster in 2011, triggering a huge legal battle with four big operators, including Vattenfall. The Swedish group even dragged the German government before the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes in Washington DC, seeking €4.3 billion in damages. This year, it received €1.4 billion (£1.2 billion) in compensation for lost profits on electricity that would have been generated. Those plants are being wound down.
Vattenfall’s attention now is on renewable energy, particularly wind power. Britain is a big focus, Borg says.
Climate sceptics regularly point to the low levels of power produced by wind when there is not much of it, but Borg hits back by claiming better storage solutions in the coming years will fix that: “If you say wind power is not working, what you probably mean is that there is no way to store the electricity produced when there is a lot of wind power.”
BP stunned the industry this year when it teamed up with Germany’s EnBW and splashed out £900 million for a slot in the Irish Sea to build a wind farm — before it even thinks about the cost of developing it. Many observers argued that BP, late to the wind power party, had overpaid in its desperation.
“I think we see a bit of a boom right now because everybody’s sort of running into this space and are also willing to pay high premiums for it,” Borg says. “But of course we will see some projects not being successful as well. You need to know what projects to focus on … and how to build a profitable wind farm which is cost efficient — because in the end, the customers always pay for the output. And we also don’t want this to be more costly for people than necessary.”
She adds: “If you don’t know enough about what you’re doing, or you pay too much for a project that you’re going to develop, you can easily get lost in the calculations in the sense that it will not be a profitable project in the end. And then we will see projects being closed down.”
Borg is up for the fight as the oil majors try to muscle in on her territory, with her eye on more wind farm sites in Britain for the right price — as long as the nimbys do not get in her way.
The life of Anna Borg
Vital statistics
Born: February 10, 1971 in Stockholm
Status: married with 20-year-old twins (a son and a daughter)
Home: Stockholm
School: Kungsgardsskolan high school in Norrkoping
University: Uppsala, Sweden — master’s degree in economics and political science
First job: consultant in financial services
Salary: £670,000 (2020)
Car: fully electric Audi e-tron
Book: Life 3.0: Being human in the age of artificial intelligence, by Max Tegmark
Film: Hidden Figures
Music: “Anything that will fill a dance floor or a guitar solo by Brian May [of Queen]”
Gadget: the coffee pot on her meeting table in the office. “It has saved many mornings and late afternoons.”
Drink: champagne on special occasions
Charity: Unicef
Last holiday: Nice, south of France
Working day
The chief executive of Vattenfall spends much of her time in meetings — both in person and over video links. Normally, she will make one or two presentations internally or externally, and — when the pandemic subsides — she will travel to different locations and visit the company’s sites.
Downtime
Borg is very sociable and likes to relax by spending time with friends and family. She also enjoys travelling, keeping fit and reading. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/vattenfall-anna-borg-green-energy-cop26-wind-farms-d9ztgpw0b?fbclid=IwAR1m9qLSltWnxWeR83zikqnAMlAEpFeHn0VubSfeQ1voq32sRIBJnDEVh00

SAS Volunteer

We publish content from 3rd party sources for educational purposes. We operate as a not-for-profit and do not make any revenue from the website. If you have content published on this site that you feel infringes your copyright please contact: webmaster@scotlandagainstspin.org to have the appropriate credit provided or the offending article removed.

0 Comments

Leave a Reply

Avatar placeholder

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *