FORESIGHT 02 - selected teaser

CLIMATE & ENERGY BUSINESS DENMARK

THIS IS NOT WASTE PAGE 16

TRANSITION

BUSINESS

CITIES

POLICY

To burn or not to burn

Digitalisation’s trillion dollar promise

Keeping it cool with seawater

History lessons in the cost of energy

PAGE 22

PAGE 28

PAGE 42

PAGE 62

MORE WITH LESS

A world without waste

FORESIGHT 02 AUTUMN / WINTER 2016

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CIRCULATION 24.500

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Forty years ago, a course in the history of economic thought was part and parcel of the graduate syllabus for most budding economists. Today, the subject is often not even available as an optional extra. This is perhaps an indication of the (over)confidence many economists have in the existing models of economic thought. Some, however, recognise that blind belief in the status quo is holding up a much needed rethink. There are signs of change on the way.

The use of the most essential of all economic indicators—Gross Domestic Product—is under severe attack from an increasing number of economists and organisations, such as the OECD, the World Bank and the UN. They point out that GDP ignores the costs of pollution and of natural resource degradation, among other factors central to well-being and progress.

Change is also coming to the guiding principles of investment. In September, BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, warned that failure to factor climate change into investment decisions would leave companies with no choice but to accept lower returns. The company, which manages more than $4.9 trillion in assets, now estimates firms’ exposure to climate change and calculates their emissions as a percentage of sales. Climate-aware portfolios, BlackRock argues, outperform the market in a time of tighter regulations, faster technological change and increasingly frequent disasters caused by extremes of weather.

The decision to include a company's exposure to carbon risk in its valuation echoes a warning made by the Bank of England in 2014 when it looked at the risk of a "carbon bubble" for fossil fuel companies. The bank reasoned that to keep global temperatures from rising more than two degrees above pre-industrial levels (they are half way there now) somewhere between two-thirds and four-fifths of the world’s proven reserves of oil, gas and coal would have stay in the ground as unburnable assets.

While the linear growth model of the 19th and 20th centuries— powered by fossil fuels—brought with it enormous value to the whole of society, it is not up to the challenges of the 21st century.

The linear value chain of "take, make, use, and dispose" will neither accommodate rising demand from a middle class heading for three billion consumers nor the need to keep pollution at reasonable levels. A new model is needed. Slowly but surely a growing body of decision makers is recognising the intrinsic good sense of the circular economy—reduce, reuse and recycle. Companies alert to the inevitable regulatory changes coming their way will stay ahead of them by mitigating supply risks, potentially saving a lot of money.

ENVIRONMENTALLY AWARE MAGAZINE PRODUCTION Using paper from sustainably managed forests. Postal deliveries of single copies in a 100% biodegradable plastic wrapper.

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Peter Bjerregaard

541-004 PRINTED MATTER

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

FORESIGHT

Content

KNOWLEDGE

TRANSITION

BUSINESS

CITIES

POLICY

IN BRIEF

WASTE INTO WEALTH

THE TRILLION DOLLAR PROMISE OF DIGITALISATION

KEEPING IT COOL

IS IT REALLY CARBON NEUTRAL?

The circular house, King Coal weakening, Delivering on Paris, Black and green utilities, G20 changing course, Greener energy investment Page 6

THE INVISIBLE MADE VISIBLE

Seeing is believing: step change in 3D wind imaging advances the science of wind turbine engineering Page 8

In the circular economy, the Danish town of Kalundborg is the archetype example of industrial symbiosis Page 16

TO BURN OR NOT TO BURN

Incineration of waste to recover energy must create environmental value to be a better choice than landfill Page 22

WELCOME TO RESOURCE CITY

A long disused industrial site is reborn as a highly advanced waste sorting and recycling centre Page 24

A lot of unexploited value lies in the new ability to collect highly detailed data on electricity use Page 28

SMARTPHONE MARKETED AS AGENT OF CHANGE

First there was district heating, now there is district cooling and in Copenhagen it comes from seawater Page 42

EVERY DROP COUNTS

An ethical mobile phone is not a mass produced disposable product of questionable origin

Tough legislation in Denmark has prompted development of highly advanced technology to detect leaks from the water mains

Page 34

Page 46

BIG BUSINESS DRIVES ENERGY MARKET EXPANSION

RAIN, RAIN COME AGAIN

The world’s major corporations are wielding their enormous power to increase supplies of renewable energy Page 38

A new suburb will recycle its own rainwater to use for washing clothes and flushing toilets Page 47

IPCC author questions burning of biomass Page 58

A MORE NUANCED APPROACH TO CARBON ACCOUNTING

Better methodologies for allocating responsibility for carbon emissions would spark greater effort from underperformers Page 60

HISTORY LESSONS IN THE COST OF ENERGY

Plotting past trends in the cost of electricity clearly shows the way forward Page 62

FORCE OF MAN

Geologists claim man is taking over as a force of nature in new epoch Page 65

FORESIGHT

3

Knowledge

WIND MEASUREMENT ADVANCES

TEXT Berit Viuf, Lyn Harrison / PHOTO Lars Just

THE INVISIBLE MADE VISIBLE

8

FORESIGHT

H

arvesting the wind’s energy sounds like a straightforward task. Hoist a rotor into the air and its blades rotate, turning the attached generator, which produces electricity; the windier the selected location, the more electricity generated.

Wind, however, is not just wind. It is a powerful swirling force that bounces off objects in its path, accelerates through valleys, decelerates across plateaus, varies in intensity over the ups and downs of undulating landscapes and reacts both imperceptibly and violently to changes in temperature and pressure.

Collecting wind measurements that provide meaningful data for analyses is a largely unsolved challenge in the wind power industry. But a discovery by researchers at the wind division of Denmark’s technical university (DTU) is being heralded as a breakthrough that promises to advance wind turbine design, wind turbine micro-siting and wind farm optimisation.

The more the wind’s turbulent patterns are understood, the better a wind turbine can be designed to withstand the huge and varying loads it is subject to while keeping material use to a minimum to save on construction costs. As important for achieving the overall aim of high productivity­—at least cost—is to know where to precisely place each wind turbine in relation to the effect its surroundings have on the wind, including the effect of other turbines. In addition, if wind patterns across a wind farm can be mapped in fine detail, each and every turbine’s geometry can be adjusted to maximise the operational efficiency of the entire plant over its full working life.

FUNDAMENTAL ADVANCE What has been missing from the science of wind assessment is a way to precisely create three dimensional images in real time of spatial wind flows as they approach and pass through a turbine rotor, both close up and at a distance. The solution to this problem devised by the DTU team is a fundamental advance in the use of laser imaging for wind detection and ranging, commonly known as LIDAR. “It’s a huge leap on the way to full understanding of what the wind does at the heights of today’s modern wind turbines. Other places in the world are working on this type of technology, but DTU is the first to have made a serious breakthrough,” says Henrik Stiesdal, a highly respected wind engineering pioneer and former CTO at Siemens Wind Power.

LIDAR provides information on wind speed and direction by capturing and measuring the light reflected from particles of dust as they whirl through the air to create 3D wind maps. Portable LIDAR units have been increasingly used in the wind industry

Inspired by IKEA: Torben Krogh Mikkelsen FORESIGHT

9

Knowledge

LIGHT DAWNS The challenge faced by wind flow modellers in their use of laser imaging, detecting and ranging (LIDAR) was to find a way of capturing the entire spectrum of the wind field around a fixed point to create a perfect 3D image of all the flow patterns surrounding a turbine rotor in real time. To measure such a broad wind spectrum simultaneously required that LIDAR scanners, which visualise dust particles whirling through the air, control a laser beam through two prisms and not just one, as has been standard practice.

Two prisms on the same axis, however, would cause the focused light cones to distort. A solution to the problem dawned on Torben Krogh Mikkelsen, wind sensing professor at Denmark’s

10

Technical University (DTU), during a shopping trip to a home furnishings store. In an idle moment his eyes hit upon a lamp on which each prism could be mounted to turn around its own axis, avoiding the problem of distortion.

“During a run-of-the-mill visit to IKEA with my wife to buy window blinds I saw this small wall light for a child’s bedroom. It was made in such a way that suddenly I could see how to place the prisms so the focused light cones could pass through both prisms at the same time, with the same point of entry and exit,” says Mikkelsen. His sketch of the concept inspired the development of DTU’s field-leading WindScanner solution (main story), now headed for commercialisation.

FORESIGHT

over the past 15 years as an alternative to the installation of meteorological masts equipped with spinning anemometers. Once wind turbines grew so tall that wind measurements at heights of more than 100 metres became a regular demand, deployment of equally tall met masts became ever more impractical. LIDAR units came into their own.

For all the advantages of LIDAR, however, the apparatus has only been able to measure speed and direction from one place at a time using a single scanner. The wind could be measured in front of a wind turbine or behind it, but not both and not from all directions. DTU’s solution, dubbed WindScanner, advances the technology by using up to three scanners.

THE BIG DIFFERENCE “Our challenge was to find a way of coordinating and controlling several laser beams to move synchronously while pointing in the same direction at the same place. That enables us to measure the whole wind field, which is what is different about our technology,” says DTU's Torben Krogh Mikkelsen. When data from three scanners is combined, wind speed, wind direction and turbulence can be measured to create a perfect 3D image of the otherwise invisible wind.

The DTU team has now developed a range of WindScanner models, from a 3D short range device with a reach of over 150 metres that takes several hundred scans a second to a long range WindScanner that takes fewer scans, but can measure the wind at

Knowledge

Tema

Out on a limb At the forefront of wind technology development is the discovery by Denmarkʼs technical university of how to visualise the entire wind spectrum as it passes through a rotor. DTU researchers can now give Vestas a far better understanding of how its experimental multirotor machine reacts to self-generated turbulence— and whether the turbulence is a help or a hindrance to overall performance. ˮA huge leap,ˮ says wind engineering pioneer Henrik Stiesdal (right), about the latest advance in wind measurement science.

distances of up to ten kilometres. Work is ongoing to stretch that reach to up to 30 kilometres, particularly useful for the offshore wind industry.

INSTEAD OF A WIND TUNNEL The WindScanner is being put through its paces in a research programme comparing several LIDAR technologies for offshore use being run by the UK’s Carbon Trust, a public-private body set up to drive advances in energy and climate technology. The apparatus is also part of an EU research initiative supported by the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures.

In Denmark, a WindScanner is doing duty at the DTU Risø Campus wind turbine test site, replicating the kind of detailed information on the wind’s interaction with its test subject that would previously only have been possible to achieve in a wind tunnel using a scale model. Full scale measurements in real life conditions also add a new dimension to research

work. Among the turbines being tested at Risø is an experimental multi-rotor concept from Denmark’s Vestas, which suspends four refurbished 225 kW nacelles on arms jutting from a single tower. It is similar in concept to other such experiments, including the Dutch Quadro design from 1988 that was operated in the Netherlands for well over a decade. Thanks to the WindScanner, the complex wind streams created by the four rotors of the Vestas machine can now be visualised, potentially allowing the concept to be developed to the point of commercial viability.

For the WindScanner to reach maturity and commercial viability, it has to be both cheaper and more robust to withstand everyday treatment by engineers.

“That’s not a step that DTU can take on its own. It’s up to the wind industry to help out by pressuring suppliers of the apparatus into seeing the commercial perspectives in industrialising it for use by wind turbine manufacturers and wind farm developers,” says Stiesdal. • FORESIGHT

11

Big Picture Dawn was breaking as the enormous cloud rolled in over Copenhagen, lit from above by the cold light of a dying moon and from below by the sun’s first golden rays. Minutes later the scene was transformed into a dull grey day in the city as the first heavy raindrops fell.

The frequency of cloudbursts in Denmark has grown steadily since records began in 1874.

A bad one in 2011 landed insurance companies with a $650 million bill for property damage. Copenhagen's Cloudburst Management Plan includes 300 climate adaption projects over the next 20 years.

PHOTO Lars Just

THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure and never more so than in industrial processing. Reuse of waste products in a closed-loop industrial eco-system brings many benefits to participating companies. But it takes a large measure of shared trust to achieve such close symbiosis, as the town of Kalundborg demonstrates

When Jørgen Christensen regularly met with fellow Rotarians back in the 1970s he was not to know that their casual conversations about managing the resources of their respective copanies would lay the groundwork for a town project that today draws attention from around the world.

Back then Christensen was plant manager at Novo Nordisk, the world’s biggest producer of insulin. Other members of the Rotary Club, in the town of Kalundborg an hour’s drive west of Copenhagen, had similar management positions. Some were CEOs at the biggest industrial companies in town. It was natural to not only discuss their work triumphs, but also their work concerns. One had too much surplus steam, another needed better alternatives for cleaning its waste water. The companies were all located within a 1.5 kilometre radius and before long ideas emerged 16

on how they could work together on resource sharing and by-product exchange.

The local oil refinery, now Statoil, originally agreed to provide excess butane gas to neighbouring Gyproc, a gypsum wallboard manufacturer. Later, steam from the city’s power station was led to Novo Nordisk, which used it to clean tanks, while yeast slurry from the production of insulin could be used as fertiliser by local farmers. And so it began.

Without recognising it until many years later, the Rotary Club members were laying the foundation blocks for an industrial future consisting of more than 50 bilateral, commercial agreements between a number of major industries, with the municipality’s utility services integrated into what has become known as the Kalundborg Symbiosis.

“It started long before it got a name. Basically, we FORESIGHT

Transparently obvious Light dawned for business leaders in Kalundborg when it became clear that waste products from one industrial process could be put to good use by another company just up the road. Industrial symbiosis in a waste sharing network was born

TEXT Sofie Buch Hoyer / PHOTO Mikkel Russel Jensen

WASTE INTO WEALTH

Transition

FORESIGHT

17

The sharing network

LAKE TISSØ

Kalundborg's industrial life in symbiosis

KALUNDBORG UTILITY

KARA/ NOVEREN

NOVO NORDISK & NOVOZYMES LAND OWNER ASSOCIATION

DONG

GYPROC

STATOIL

NOVO NORDISK

NOVOZYMES

MATERIALS 17. Waste 18. Gypsum 19. Fly ash 20. Sulphur 21. Slurry 22. Bioethanol 23. Sand 24. Sludge 25. C5/C6 Sugars 26. Lignin 27. NovoGro 30 28. Ethanol waste 29. Biomass

WATER 6. Waste water 7. Cleaned waste water 8. Surface water 9. Technical water 10. Used cooling water 11. Deionised water 12. Sea water 13. Drain water 14. Tender water 15. Process water 16. Cleaned surface water

INBICON

ENERGY 1. Steam 2. District heating 3. Power to grid 4. Warm condensate 5. District heating

just set up a number of rational collaborations that all players could benefit from,” says Christensen. The Rotarians knew each other well and their thoughts ran along similar lines, he recalls. “In a lot of places, you see that companies are terribly afraid of talking to each other about business ideas. But we weren’t.

There was a mutual trust between us, which made it easy to establish partnerships.”

The network that links the companies today is perhaps the longest standing industrial collaboration of its kind anywhere.

FULL CIRCLE Turning waste into wealth not only preoccupies industry, but also entire countries. The quest to improve resource productivity, reduce exposure to price volatility and dispense with wasteful practices has given rise to the whole concept of the circular economy and the part to be played by industrial symbiosis. Both the European Union and China have adopted the circular economy as a policy objective.

By designing goods and products as integral parts 18

of large industrial ecosystems, they can be turned into resources for reuse at the end of their useful lives, mimicking the circular flow of biological materials in nature. In the circular economy, resources are reused, recycled and recreated in new life cycles instead of following today’s common linear value chain of make, use, and dispose. In theory the new approach could add billions of dollars to the economy (see box page 19).

JUST UNDER THE RADAR Trade and exchange is as ancient as the sharing of hunt kills by early societies, says Marian Chertow, who heads the industrial environmental management programme at Yale University. A variety of “symbiosis projects” like that in Kalundborg are quietly evolving under the radar, she says. In Kalundborg, water, heat and energy flow along pipeline networks directly connecting the cooperating companies in a closed loop industrial system that saves money for all involved.

“You can’t really see industrial symbiosis. It happens because of private interests among companies.

FORESIGHT

NOVOZYMES WASTEWATER & BIOGAS

One of a kind ˮKalundborg Symbiosis is an archetype by which others are judged.

It’s really taken us some time to figure out the mechanisms of Kalundborg and fit that into the broader puzzle of what industrial symbiosis is all about,ˮ says Yale’s Marian Chertow

Transition

FORESIGHT

The circular opportunity Economic scenarios 2030

Primary resource costs Other cash-out costs Externalities EU-27, €1000 billion 7.2

-1.8 -25%

1.1 0.2

6.3

1.0

2.0 0.1

5.4

1.9 1.5

3.4 3.0

2.7

CURRENT DEVELOPMENT SCENARIO

REBOUND EFFECT

1.2

ADDITIONAL IMPROVEMENTS

2030

REBOUND EFFECT

1.4

2030

1.8

IMPROVEMENTS

INCITING CHANGE Evidence suggests that industrial symbioses can improve the competitive ability of the participants and bring societal benefits, by frequently internalising pollution costs and building resilience in the local economy.

Novo Nordisk has never calculated the total financial benefits of its participation in industrial symbiosis, but the benefits of diverting streams of unwanted by-products and waste energy to nearby enterprises are clear, says the company’s Michael Hallgren.

“As an example, the normal and expensive way of getting rid of our nutritious yeast slurry from insulin production is to send it to a treatment plant. Instead, we pass it to biogas plants that use the yeast slurry to produce energy,” he explains. Novo Nordisk is just one of the companies reaping the rewards of a long and dedicated engagement in Kalundborg’s industrial symbiosis. To establish new industrial symbioses that save money and energy, companies may have to change perspective when facing challenges. “You have to be able to see beyond your own nose in order to achieve a shared return on investment. Otherwise, a symbiosis won’t be successful,” Hallgren stresses.

Persuading companies to do things differently is what makes it hard to access the trillion-dollar opportunity the circular economy represents, points out Paul Ekins, who heads the sustainable resources institute at University College London. “The whole

purpose of industrial symbiosis is to facilitate that different way of looking at materials, to bring companies in touch with each other who may not normally be in touch and enable them to realise that they have resources, which they are regarding as waste but are of value to other companies,” says Ekins.

The really big wins are in manufacturing sectors because they use most materials. Whether looking at energy, water, chemicals, pulping paper or steel, the whole range of materials are opportunities to use resources more effectively and efficiently, Ekins adds.

“We can certainly speed up the material sharing networks, either by putting them in geographical proximity with each other, or by having facilitated networks and databases, which is the way it is grow-

TODAY

Source: www.symbiosecenter.dk / McKinsey & Company

KALUNDBORG MUNICIPALITY ALGAE PLANT

One company needs energy, another company has extra steam. So they make a one-to-one deal. That’s not a newspaper headline,” says Chertow. She adds there are many such cooperative initiatives that could be considered industrial symbiosis. They often start as joint ventures and gradually develop into industrial ecosystems.

“So when is industrial symbiosis going to scale?

My least favourite phrase. The point is that it doesn’t just go to one big scale—it pops up everywhere. We just haven’t had the eyes to see it until now,” she says.

The dynamics of industrial symbiosis can differ significantly, a point made in a newly published study

by Chertow and colleagues. In China, 106 huge industrial estates are organised to cooperate on resource management with the backing of government financing and authority involvement to guide companies on what to do.

Industrial symbiosis often starts among companies in already related sectors, whether or not they are linked by material flows. Those that are most successful are driven by a mix of benefits, including financial return, access to new sources of revenue and cost reduction, says Chertow. “It’s not easy, however, because more often than not a lot of infrastructure has to interact. It’s a big and societal issue.”

CIRCULAR SCENARIO

19

WATER MANAGEMENT

I

n his 1776 treatise on the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith ponders on the value of goods and the price of goods. One textbook paraphrases his thinking as follows: Why is it that “water, which has so much value in use, has no value in exchange, while diamonds, which have practically no value in use, are exchanged at high prices?”

Water may not sell for the price of diamonds, but delivering it to customers does not come cheap. Even so, large volumes are wasted by being sent through leaky pipes. In many large cities the water mains were laid decades ago and corrosion is now rampant.

In Denmark’s second largest city, Aarhus, water losses of 6% are registered by local utility Aarhus Water. By comparison, water losses in developing countries often run at 35%. Water pipe leakage costs utilities worldwide around $14 billion a year of which $9 billion is lost in the US alone.

A variety of methods are used to discover water losses, ranging from listening manually to the water pipes to advanced monitoring systems, which can detect any noise and send data back to the service unit, through to intelligent water meters, which can help gather detailed flow data and information on potential leaks.

Rasmus Bærentzen at Aarhus Water believes a key strength of Danish water management lies in the variety of leak detection measures applied and the strenuous monitoring of the water mains.

“We work hard to develop better methods for locating leaks. A new method of ours, which is currently being patented, has the potential to reduce the time spent on locating leaks by 80%. That’s very effi42

cient and provides opportunities in other countries, too, where water losses can be as high as 30-70%,” says Bærentzen.

Most water utilities in Denmark are working to reduce water losses from leaks, driven by tough legislation: under Danish law, water losses must not exceed 10% before a penalty is applied. For a utility the size of Aarhus Water, which produces 15 million cubic metres of drinking water a year and 87% of all drinking water for the municipality's 320,000 citizens, that would be expensive. “The tough legislation provides us with a clear incentive to be innovative,” says Bærentzen.

One approach that sets Aarhus Water apart from other utilities is its decision to create distinct District Metering Areas (DMA) for monitoring water flow in its mains, which includes 1500 kilometres of pipes for drinking water. Detailed data are collected from constant monitoring of delivery and consumption in each area.

“In principle we operate a virtual well and through a so-called intelligent water meter measure the water flow through it. The data are sent back to a main computer where balances are calculated. That way we can at all times see how much water is being distributed in each DMA and how water is consumed,” says Bærentzen.

If the data crunching reveals large fluctuations in water consumption or huge water losses in one DMA, that could indicate a leak. Work to locate it can begin.

Often this is done by closing a valve: if there is a leak, the sound of water continuing to flush through the system is clearly audible. • FORESIGHT

Computerised water meters can be remotely read and provide more detailed data than mechanical meters, which require time consuming manual read-offs and carry the risk of error. Fine data on leaks, blasts, and flow provide the water utility with the information it needs to understand consumer habits and consumption patterns. So-called intelligent water meters can be installed both in homes and on the water mains.

TEXT Karin Jensen / PHOTO Ib Sørensen / VISUALIZATION Loop Architects

EVERY DROP COUNTS

Cities

SMART CITIES

RAIN, RAIN COME AGAIN

W

ith urban populations rapidly increasing, the number of drought-prone areas is expected to increase. Finding solutions to the problem of supplying sufficient water is a growing challenge. Denmark is blessed with relatively high precipitation and rainwater can mitigate water shortages.

A new satellite town on the outskirts of Aarhus, Nye, under development for a population of 20,000 north of the city, is taking a new approach to water collection and supply.

“At Nye, we collect rainwater onsite and treat it so it is safe to use for toilet flushing and laundry,” says Aarhus Water’s Mariann Bruun.

Rainwater is unsuitable for drinking but can be used for other household tasks, which account for 40% of water consumption in a home, says Bruun.

“We expect to reuse some twenty cubic metres of rainwater per person per year,” she says.

Using rainwater reduces consumption of groundwater, but it comes at a price: a double-pipeline is needed to keep rainwater separated from clean drinking water. When building a whole new suburb, however, costs can be kept down.

“It’s much cheaper when doing it from the start and this is what makes Nye special. Nye is the first of its kind in Denmark and probably in the world too,” says Bruun.

The technology used is old, but the application is new and the concept can potentially be exported to countries with a shortage of clean water, or to conserve groundwater.

“This is not just relevant in Third World countries, but also in southern Europe and the US. What I really like about the Nye-project is that it makes sense to people. Why use clean drinking water to flush the toilet or wash clothes when we have all that rainwater in the backyard?” asks Bruun. •

Saving groundwater On the northern outskirts of Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city, a new satellite town is soon to be built. Its rainwater will be collected in underground reservoirs, partially purefied and then piped to dwellings for household use, although not for human consumption. Drinking water will continue to come from a separate mains supply. The aim is not to save money but to save use of diminishing groundwater reserves.

FORESIGHT

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