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NORTHERN LIGHTS

Why 2024 is a great year for the Northern Lights in Sweden

Lapland tour operator Chad Blakley says the Northern Lights are stronger than they have been for a decade.

Published: 6 December 2023 09:24 CET
Updated: 18 January 2024 07:08 CET
Why 2024 is a great year for the Northern Lights in Sweden
The Northern Lights are visible in Sweden during the winter months. Photo: David Schreiner/Folio/imagebank.sweden.se

Chad Blakley, who runs the Northern Lights tour specialist Lights over Lapland, has long been gearing up for the solar maximum, the peak in the sun’s eleven-year cycle, and now, he says, it is starting to arrive. 

“What we have seen since it became astronomically dark in late September is that the reality matches the expectations. We are seeing more powerful auroras than we’ve ever seen,” he told The Local’s Sweden in Focus podcast in November. 

“One of the gentlemen who works for us, he’s been a guide for a decade, been out there for 10 years. He’s been there through the last solar minimum, right back up to this solar maximum. And he said multiple times this season, I’ve never seen anything like that.” 

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The Northern Lights phenomenon is generated when a stream of charged particles from the sun, called solar wind, collides with atoms of oxygen and nitrogen in the Earth’s atmosphere, creating dazzling displays of light green, red, orange or blue light. It fluctuates in strength depending on the level of solar activity. 

The Space Weather Prediction Center in the US in October reported that the peak in solar activity was arriving sooner and more powerfully than it had predicted in 2019 and was now likely to come between January and November 2024. 

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In Abisko, a hiking and winter sports resort popular as a viewing station for the Northern Lights, the displays are already unusually intense, Blakley said.

“We have a webcam that’s actually the oldest running Aurora Borealis webcam on planet Earth. And you can go right back and look through the catalogue and compare pictures from a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, all the way back. And what we’re seeing right now really and truly is the most powerful, the most repetitive and most intense Northern Lights.” 

Even in a year like this, he stressed, there was no absolute guarantee that guests would see the phenomenon at all, let alone a once-in-a-decade display. 

“But I can say that right now and the next season and potentially the season thereafter are quite literally the best times in any of our lifetimes to be able to go and see the Northern Lights.”

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Blakley, a former photographer from Louisiana, came to Abisko with his Swedish wife Linnea back in 2008 to work a tourist season and never left, setting up Lights over Lapland back in 2010. 

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NORTHVOLT

Northvolt warns work permit salary threshold could jeopardise Sweden’s green transition

Sweden’s minimum salary threshold for work permits has increased by almost 120 percent in less than a year, and there are plans to increase it again to the median salary next summer. Battery manufacturers Northvolt warns that this could stop the company from hiring and retaining key workers.

Published: 3 July 2024 12:32 CEST
Northvolt warns work permit salary threshold could jeopardise Sweden's green transition

“Northvolt’s extensive labour requirements in northern Sweden cannot currently be met by permanently established workers in Sweden or within the EU,” the company wrote in a response to the government’s proposal to raise the salary threshold to the median salary, currently 35,600 kronor.

“This applies in particular to machine operators and technicians, whose minimum wages under collective bargaining agreements are lower than the median wage, and therefore are particularly vulnerable in this context.”

The EU has highlighted qualified machine operators and technicians as professions which are particularly hard to source within the bloc, meaning companies often have no choice but to source these workers from non-EU countries.

Northvolt has the added complication of being located in northern Sweden, an area which in general often struggles to find key workers in a number of industries, and the company isn’t convinced that enough is being done to fix this.

“Northvolt does not believe that the government and the Public Employment Service’s measures to promote geographic mobility in the Swedish labour market is going to be able to cover the company’s need for labour,” it wrote, while adding that it believes the proposed hike to the work permit salary threshold could have “significant consequences” for its facility in Skellefteå.

“Aside from the direct effects on the company, Northvolt sees a risk that staffing in healthcare, services and infrastructure in northern Sweden could be negatively affected by the salary threshold, which would indirectly affect Northvolt’s expansion.”

In addition to this, the company deems the proposed exemptions to the salary threshold – these would be put forward by the Migration Agency and the Public Employment Service based on professions where there’s a labour shortage – to be insufficient and unpredictable.

Northvolt’s criticism highlighted the fact that the exemptions are based on a model which is currently under development and which may not be ready by the time the law is due to come into force, as well as the fact that professions with a labour shortage will be defined using a so-called SSYK code.

Some key roles for Northvolt to do with battery production do not have one of these codes, as they are relatively new roles.

“It remains to be seen how the proposed model would effectively be able to identify professions with a labour shortage when they don’t have an SSYK code,” the company wrote, adding that this all makes it harder for the company to plan, for example, will an employee who is granted a work permit once be eligible for renewal two years later?

“The employee in that situation would risk being deported from Sweden. If that were to happen, it would be deeply unfair for the employee who has contributed to supporting Swedish society in a role where there is a shortage, and a catastrophe for the employer who has invested years of education and talent in the employee.”

“This lack of predictability can be compared to earlier notorious so-called kompetensutvisningar (talent deportations), and will further complicate the recruitment or necessary talent,” it wrote.

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