My View: We can learn from Sweden

March 29, 2009 06:35 pm

— Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part My View by John Frey, a former dean at Minnesota State University. He recently traveled to Sweden to observe renewable energy systems and energy conservation systems.

Sweden is a world leader in moving toward energy independence and reducing Planet Earth’s carbon footprint. They are addressing it as a business issue. As Bengt-Erik Lofgren, president of the AFAB for-profit test center for renewable energy, emphasizes; “renewable energy and environmental issues are big business issues, it’s all about business.”
Evidence of renewable energy being a business issue is shown in the following statistics taken from a presentation given by Bengt-Erik Lofgren and a recognized voice in Sweden on this issue.
Between 1992 and 2007, Sweden has reduced its output of CO2 by 9 percent. During that same time, Sweden’s GNP increased 48 percent. The significant factor decreasing fossil CO2 output while increasing GNP was the 80 percent increase in biomass for energy. The shift toward biomass for energy has created more than 30,000 new jobs.
This correlates to 100 new full time jobs, mainly in the non-metro areas, for every 1.33 billion BTU’s of biomass produced, harvested, transported, and processed. In addition, Sweden created an additional 33 jobs in the installation and service industry to maintain the combustion boilers and stoves. There is a firm belief that the key to Sweden’s current and future growth and economic prosperity is connected to renewable fuels.
To put this into perspective, Sweden is approximately twice the size of Minnesota with a population of 9 million compared to Minnesota’s population of just over 5.2 million.
Sweden has taken a systems approach to renewable energy. They seem to have captured citizen support for using all sources of renewable and waste for energy. They believe that their future rests with the entrepreneurial spirit to capture energy resources from within Sweden for maximum energy independence. District heating is perhaps the most visible indication of this, a concept that bonds individuals and businesses of a community. It seemed that every city, regardless of size, had district heating where a central heating plant would produce the heat for schools, businesses, as well as residential living.
The benefits of district heating are well understood by the Swedish people because it stabilizes price, and eliminates furnace maintenance worry. And if there is a need for a district to change to a more economical fuel, there is only one furnace to replace rather than one in every home.
The district heating burners use garbage in the larger cities but in the smaller cities and communities, wood dust, chips, logs, or pellets were also used. The district heating systems are often augmented with solar panels, either thermal solar or photovoltaic, earth source geothermal heating, and hydroelectric if near moving streams and rivers. They also use wind for the production of electricity but the turbines are not in the large wind farms as we find in the U.S.
A Renova company site in Goteborg is one of the most efficient waste-to-energy plants in the world and it provides the Goteborg metropolitan area of approximately one-half million people a district heating for homes and commercial buildings as well as some electricity. Their technology produces no odors and the emissions from the plants meets European air emissions standards by a good margin and no heavy metals, dioxins, or sulfur dioxide gets through the system.
However, citizen participation is required. One example is that residence must package their waste in either green bags for burning or red bags if not to be burned. After neighborhood pickup, much like in Minnesota, trucks deliver to the waste energy plant, the bag color is detected by laser and allows only the green to move forward for burning.

John Frey is the former dean of the Minnesota State University College of Science Engineering and Technology. His recent visit to Sweden was sponsored by the BioBusiness Alliance of Minnesota. This organization has been supportive of the work MSU has been doing in the area of renewable energy and has been a co-partner in the development of the International Renewable Energy Technology Institute.