Electricity company Sydkraft, which suffered the greatest damage, said it expected some customers to remain without electricity for several more weeks.

"Our company currently has 45,429 households still lacking power, and in the worst cases it will take weeks to bring them back online," Sydkraft spokesman Johan Aspegren told AFP.

Including the customers of other electricity companies, about 51,000 households in Sweden remained without power midday Saturday, Swedish news agency TT estimated.

"The woods just look terrible. We're going to have to completely rebuild new lines over thousands and thousands of kilometers," Aspegren said.

"We usually say that the disturbance is bad when 50 lines are damaged. Now, about 1,000 lines have been damaged. We have never seen anything like this in Sweden before."

Complicating the repair work is the fact that Sweden, which counted seven deaths from the hurricane-force winds last weekend, was hit by two smaller storms over the next few days.

The mighty gusts of wind also caused huge damage to southern forests. The Federation of Forest Owners, Skogsaegarna, estimates that 75 million cubic meters (2,6 billion cubic feet) of forest wood had been uprooted or damaged.

Sydkraft currently has about 2,000 people working on its power grid repairs, including technical staff called in from Norwegian, Danish, Finnish and German affiliates.

"We also expect some Polish workers to come soon," Aspegren said.