page_title: Vattenfall
section_title: Criticism
hierarchical_section_title: Vattenfall / Criticism
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Baggerbesetzung Welzow Süd, unter dem Bagger
context_page_description: Vattenfall is a Swedish multinational power company owned by the Government of Sweden. Beyond Sweden, the company generates power in Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.
  The company's name is Swedish for "waterfall", and is an abbreviation of its original name, Royal Waterfall Board.
context_section_description: Vattenfall's past expansion strategy has involved the acquisition of multiple brown coal (lignite)-fired power plants, which has been highly controversial in Sweden and Germany due to the fact that brown coal is among the most carbon intensive forms of electricity generation. In addition, brown coal is strip mined in a process that sometimes forces communities to relocate as mining fields expand. Vattenfall sold its brown coal assets in September 2016 to Czech investor EPH .
  In May 2009, campaign group Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) launched the Climate Greenwash Awards, declaring Vattenfall the inaugural winner for portraying itself as a climate champion while lobbying to continue business as usual. Vattenfall owns (or has owned) four of the "dirty thirty" most polluting power stations in Europe, a list compiled by WWF and other organizations.
  A fire in the transformer of the nuclear power plant Krümmel (partly owned with E.ON) in 2007 forced a closure of the power plant for over two years, while a short circuit in July 2009 in another transformer led to another closure. Due to these incidents the Prime Minister of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, Peter Harry Carstensen announced that this will be letzter Versuch (their last try) before complete closure of the facility.
  Vattenfall has been accused of skirting the line of illegality in its effort to maintain ownership of electrical power grids. Most recently, Vattenfall's efforts to maintain ownership of Hamburg's power grid by lobbying the ruling SPD have drawn criticism.
  In Germany, the Berlin Energy Table (Berliner Energietisch) alliance united a number of NGOs and local groups initiating a Referendum on the recommunalization of energy supply in Berlin. The referendum took place on November 3, 2013, yet slightly missed the quorum. However, the Senate of Berlin promised to match the citizens' initiative's key claim, regardless of the referendum's outcome: to transfer all end-user operations, which were owned by Vattenfall at the time, to a public utility company. The company was founded in 2014 as "Berliner Stadtwerke."
caption: 3,500–4,000 environmental activists blocking a coal mine and the Schwarze Pumpe power station to limit climate change (Ende Gelände 2016)
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