The Senior Vice-President of Vattenfall Distribution explains why the energy sector needs more than just engineers to achieve net-zero goals.

It was writer and socialite Zelda Fitzgerald – wife of F. Scott – who said “she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring”. Songwriter Neil Tennant of pop group the Pet Shop Boys later loosely adapted the quote for the band’s hit Being Boring. No one could accuse Annika Viklund of being boring: she’s the progressive-thinking Senior Vice-President of Vattenfall Distribution in Sweden. Yet when we meet, it’s not electricity grids she wants to talk about, but the perception of the energy sector as ‘being boring’. “If there’s one thing that keeps me awake at night, it’s the scarcity of talent in the energy industry. Many of the older generation are now going into retirement at the same time that we have electrification and decarbonisation, and we need people who can build and plan and operate.”

This problem, she says, is compounded by the fact that “the energy industry is seen as the ‘old boring guys’”. She’s clear that to tackle this problem, a strategy is needed to target not college students, but children. “We need to be in pre-school or kindergarten, or elementary […]