Renewable Energy-Even in America

2My major comment area of choice in the New York Times is Renewable Energy but unfortunately I rarely am given an opportunity to comment since the Times does not offer readers much information about renewable energy technologies.

So today, November 29, 2017, I begin a post titled Even In America to report that I have discovered that Even in America there is a company that provides advanced technology like the technology I often report on from my Swedish perspective.

Waste to Energy Technology

Waste to energy technology is used to heat most Swedish cities through the "fjärrvärme" system or distance-heating system, referred to in the US as district heating.. My Swedish city, Linköping, was the pioneer in providing such a system with a start back in the 1950s. We have here in Linköping at the Gärstad Plant what I have referred to often and recently as the world's most advanced system. You can see the Gärstad plant by clicking on my May 2017 post in the list at left.

But a few days ago thanks to quartz.com I discovered that a facility is being built in Denmark that may be even more advanced than Gärstad. Here is a picture of the CopenHill plant built by the Danish Company Babcock and Wilcox.

Discovery of that plant led to another discovery, that Danish Babcock and Wilcox is constructing a similar plant in West Palm Beach, Florida. Will be adding photos ASAP - this note 12/28/17.

                                                   Even In America

CopenHill waste to energy plant in Denmark - to be completed in 2018.
The roof is a ski and snow-board slope - Will there be snow?

And here below is the "Even In America" plant
 in West Palm Beach Florida

This waste-to-energy plant was designed and built by Danish
Babcock & Wilcox and was completed in 2015. It has never been
mentioned in the New York Times with one exception - in 2017
the Times had an article about garbage - a very negative article - and
there without any information was mention of this plant.

Burlington Discover Jazz Festival 2017 - Part I

Eventually, probably back in Sweden, I will create a montage of my experiences at the Burlington Discover Jazz Festival. But here today I will try to insert one video, not of musicians but of my dance partners whose line of descent like mine goes way back in Sweden.

I came down Church Street to the place that has non-stop live music outside in a tent. The music was playing and there were two women dancing right in back of the band and singer. Turned out they were mother and daughter. So I joined in right away all of us mostly in sync. There was no one I could enlist to film all of us so here is a clip of my two partners, just imagine me thewhat they are doing.

Then we talked and guess what they are mother and daughter - names in a book I do not have here - and grandfather Samuelson came from Sweden perhaps when my grandparents were coming over also. He would up in Jamestown, NY, where my great uncle Roy Lundgren wound up. They had visited the torp in Sweden where a returning Swedish soldier back from the wars when Sweden was Bernadotte country was given land. I visit a similar place at my Tree In The Pond in Linköping where returning soldiers were given land and maybe a cow or other animal.

I hope they find my blog and correct the details. Now to the Charleston Dancers and then a lesson they gave to a school class. That was a first take above, now let's have our first class.

OK they got their first moves, here is their first take as dancers

Tales of Two Cities - Linköping and Burlington

I was visiting Muddy Waters Coffee House in Burlington and write now from Speeder and Earl's Coffee neither your ordinary Starbucks place of residence. And listening to those around me led me to enter in my book above a new approach to looking at my two countries via the two cities I often use, Linköping SE and Burlington VT USA, in NYT comments.

Instead of pointing to one as offering something better, I let them tell their stories, so here I start.

I am a frequent resident of Coffee Shops where I often write. So here is what I wrote at Muddy's just to get started. The map is of my surroundings and of the people around me. These are just first notes on what I could hear and see. Just now I cannot get the text to land to the right and I have to leave. I simply note that in my 21 years in Sweden I have never been in a Coffee House where ev/eryone around me is engaged in so many different things as these people were. And I will also note that within minutes I had found an individual working on one of my passions, renewable energy, and specifically something mastered in my home city in Sweden, the systematic conversion of food and human wastes to biogas that runs the cities buses and many other vehicles. That's all for now. Just me

Heating a Swedish City

The New York Times recently gave us readers a new columnist Bret Stephens who led off with three columns about energy that suggested that his first assignment was to tell us readers, some of whom know a bit about renewable energy, that the US had best stick with fossil fuel since renewable really is not up to the job.

What he revealed is that he does not know much about renewable energy. He asked us to pose questions, some of which he would answer. My question was simple. Bret why do you and the New York Times seem to believe that there are only two forms of renewable energy technology at present, solar and wind? No answer.

Exhibit A in my list was a statement that Swedish cities are heated by using a readily available fuel, solid-waste from which as much as possible plastic has been removed and in my city from which food waste is separated for conversion to biogas.

Times comments have no place for pictures so I went out to the Gärstad plant in Linköping, probably the most advanced such plant in the world, and took a picture. Here it is.

Two glass houses located at the Linköping North Exit to E4, car in photo headed west.
Gärstad plant, Tekniska verken, Linköping, Sweden

Imagine, no coal must be mined, no bedrock fracked to produce natural gas, no transport of coal, natural gas, or oil from far off places. Simply collect waste in the city, add forest-product waste at some of the incinerators and heat this city of 150,000 people.

What this means for me, an American as well as Swedish citizen, is that here in Sweden I am freed from the periodic failure of my American hot water heaters, always electric, and from the oil burners that were terrible. Also freed from the odor of oil, the danger of gas, and the giant oil tank in the cellar. 

Instead a small white box in the basement where the incoming hot water gives its heat to two systems, one the system feeding hot water to the radiators that heat the house, the other the system that sends hot water to bathrooms and kitchen. Completely silent, maintenance free, best I have ever experienced.

Empathy at The New York Times

I'm crossing Sweden as usual in the Bus4You doubledecker and discover that the New York Times has yet another column on empathy, this time by Thomas Friedman. I filed a comment that contains a line referring to  an assertion by psychology professor and author Paul Bloom (see Room for Debate 12/29 and review of Bloom's new book on empathy.

The assertion by Bloom: We can only/find it easiest to empathise with people who look like us. He says that is what the research shows.

Not at all true for me, how about you?