District heating in Sweden has undergone changes in recent decades. Parallel with transition towards sustainability, a considerable ownership restructuring has occurred, due to liberalization of energy markets. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyze trends of mergers and acquisitions in the Swedish district heating market. A systematic review of ownership in 290 municipalities has been performed through annual reports, press releases, websites, municipal minutes, newspaper articles and personal contacts. The paper shows a transformation from municipal to diverse ownership, decreased municipal ownership and increased internationalization. The window of opportunity provided by liberalization was used especially by the "big three" (E.ON, Fortum and Vattenfall) in order to strengthen market position early in the wave of acquisitions. The time period 1996-2005 was especially hectic, showing strategies of cherry picking hot spots for acquisitions, with the "big three" being responsible for a large proportion of these. The period after 2006 showed trends of companies selling several district heating businesses at once, through large-scale disinvestment. The paper shows a transformation of the district heating regime, first as a reaction to changes on the electricity market and later in its own right, raising concerns regarding the weak position of customers.
Community energy (CE) and grassroots innovations have been widely studied in recent years, especially in the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands, but very little focus has been placed on Sweden. This paper describes and analyses the development and present state of several types of community energy initiatives in Sweden. The methodology uses interviews, document studies, analysis of previous studies, and website analysis. The results show that fewer initiatives have been taken in Sweden than in other countries, but that even with a rather ‘hostile’ institutional setting CE has emerged as a phenomenon. Wind cooperatives are the most common form of initiative, with solar photovoltaics cooperatives and eco-villages also prominent. The various types of initiatives differ considerably, from well-organized wind cooperatives that have grown into professional organizations to small-scale hydroelectric power plants owned by a rural community. The initiatives may have modest impact on the energy transition in quantitative terms, but they are crucial in knowledge sharing and as inspirations for future initiatives.
In this article, we suggest a methodology that combines Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and material flow analysis (MFA) into a secondary reserve-prospecting tool. The approach is two-phased and couples spatially informed size estimates of urban metal stocks (phase 1) to the equally spatially contingent efforts required to extract them (phase 2). Too often, even the most advanced MFA assessments stop at the first of these two phases, meaning that essential information needed to facilitate resource recovery, i.e. urban mining, is missing from their results. To take MFA one step further, our approach is characterized by a high resolution that connects the analysis of the stock to the social practices that arrange material flows in the city, thereby enabling an assessment of the economic conditions for secondary resource recovery. To exemplify, we provide a case study of the hibernation stock of copper found in disconnected power cables in Linköping, Sweden. Since 1970, 123 tonnes of copper or ≈1 kg per person have accumulated underneath the city, predominantly in old, central parts of the city and industrial areas. While shorter cables are more numerous than long ones, the longer ones contribute to a larger share of the stock weight. Resource recovery in specific projects reliant on digging comes at great costs, but integrating it as an added value to ordinary maintenance operations render eight locations and 2.2 tonnes of copper (2% of the stock) profitable to extract. Compared to the budget sizes of regular maintenance projects, a significant share of the stock comes with relatively small economic losses. Therefore, we suggest integrated resource recovery and regular maintenance as an interesting environmental measure for any infrastructure provider to engage with.
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