Fjärrvärme-Distance heating Phase III

Phase I - Heating my home with distance heating - source Gärstad

Phase II - Examples of the distribution network (piping) that makes it possible for hot water (100 C) from Gärstad to reach my home and most homes and buildings in Linköping

Phase III - Introduction to Gärstad
     The green arrow shows the location of the photographs I took at noon today, 16 February 2013 at Gärstad. 58.43341, 15.65811 GPS coordinates
 To the north is farmland and a large lake Roxen. E4 (European Highway 4 crosses from west to east).
South of E4 you see the northeastern part of the city of Linköping (Lower left corner) and suburbs northeast of the city (Lower right corner).

When my distance heating was installed about 10 years ago only the red-brown building in the background was present. That is the original Gärstad municipal waste incinerator, described in my now out-of print text book Environmental Geology 2d edition. I hope to add material here from that book but not today.

Since Linköping has been growing fast, the original incinerator could not meet the needs of the system, so a new facility was built - the gray building at the right above and shown here from a different vantage point.

As you can see, the entire exterior is glass so if you visit you can see the entire interior of one of the most technologically advanced incinerators anywhere.

I close today by making a comment on thinking in my part of the USA, New England. There, in New England is an ngo, Clean Water, of which I am a member. Clean Water illustrates the American dilemma, if we may call it that. Clean Water is unalterably opposed to incineration, presumably because some time in the past it saw incinerators that were perhaps like the Baltimore incinerator I used to see when I was at Johns Hopkins.

Eventually I will try to get Clean Water to review my blog and, when I am in Westport, MA in June I will make a point of talking with a Clean Water representative to try to learn why the organization cannot move into the 21st century.

That's all for today but maybe some pictures at my Facebook (maybe even here) of the landscape I then went to in order to ski ,talk with my beloved oak trees, and study animal tracks on the frozen Götakanal.