The indigenous Sami people — numbering about 100,000 — have lived in northern Scandinavia for centuries, making their livelihoods from fishing, reindeer herding and fur trapping.

“When you talk about the Sami population, we have a dialogue, of course,” says SWEA boss Charlotte Unger. “Since they depend on nature with their reindeers, and of course a stable environment, trying to hinder climate change is of course very important also for the Sami people. I hope we could find solutions that are good for us, the Sami people, and regarding climate change.”

But according to the president of the Sami Council, Åsa Larsson-Blind, mega-scale wind farms represent an industrial threat to a fragile, ancient way of life.

“The wind industry often says it wants to have a dialogue,” Larsson-Blind tells Recharge. “But I believe it thinks it is easier to accommodate than it actually is. I think it has a naïve view that it is just putting up some windmills, not taking away [reindeer] pastures.

“Do children really have to grow up without their language, their culture, in the name of fighting climate change?”

The scale of the wind projects planned in the Nordics could be “the last straw”, says Anna Skarin, a researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, who has investigated the impact of the industry on reindeer grazing lands.

Skarin — who says her work on the issue is non-partisan and funded by the Swedish Energy Agency — has found reindeer avoidance of turbines even on small projects of eight or 10 machines, with an impact observed up to 5km away. The reindeer have a visual aversion to the turbines and, it is believed — Skarin is about to start work to establish this for sure — also dislike their noise. On top of that comes disruption from the associated construction work and infrastructure needed to support the projects.

At the level of build-out planned, Skarin reckons the ability to implement mitigation measures could be stretched to breaking point. “There are thousands of turbines in the planning system,” Skarin tells Recharge. “I think if everything is built, it will really be a big impact on the ecosystem. We’ve already seen it beginning.”

Sweden may be Europe’s hottest onshore wind market, but for how long?