Sweden on track to produce all its energy from renewable resources by 2040

Anne Nilsson, Director General of the Swedish Energy Markets Inspectorate claimed that Sweden was on track to produce all its energy from renewable resources by 2040.

At present, production from renewable sources such as wind and hydro accounted for 57 percent of Sweden's production of 159 terawatt-hours (TWh). Much of the rest comes from nuclear power stations. In 2013 alone, renewable energy investment in Sweden was estimated at more than US $1 billion.

More than 35 percent of Swedish power production comes from ten nuclear reactors in three power stations. Although the government cut taxes on nuclear power generators, it is not expected to build any new reactors. Four of the ten reactors are being phased out. Sweden has no plans to provide further subsidies for nuclear power. Nilsson said:"Nuclear is quite an expensive energy source due to safety regulations and funding for long-term nuclear waste management among other things. Renewables, meaning large-scale wind in Sweden, on the other hand, are cheaper and cheaper to commission and to run. This together with low wholesale prices will make it less likely that new nuclear power plants will replace the remaining ones when they are phased out due to old age."

Nilsson noted that Sweden was not densely populated and had many good locations for large scale production of power by wind. In 2010 wind power accounted for only 2.4 percent of power production in Sweden but by 2012 it was five percent. Now it has doubled again to 10 percent. By 2030 Sweden hopes to produce 18 TWh of electricity from renewable sources. Due to environmental concerns there are no plans at present for new hydro power plants. Solar power up to now has been minimal but has been growing quickly recently with 2014 production doubling to about 79 MW. There is also one station that produces electricity from wave power.

One way in which Sweden has supported renewable energy production is by a "green energy certificate" to retail power suppliers. The plan currently is to support 25 TWh of electricity generation through renewables by 2020. Sweden was working to a target of a 50 percent share in production by renewables by 202 but had already surpassed that target by 2014. In a report published in 2011 by the World Energy Council, entitled "Policies for the Future" the best performers were Switzerland, Sweden and France.

Sweden is also cutting down on its use of fossil fuels. It aims for a fossil fuel free vehicle fleet by 2030. In 2013 the bus fleets in more than a dozen cities ran on biomethane, 60 percent of which is produced in local plants. Gothenberg Energy has a 20 MW facility that gasifies forest residues ultimately producing biomethane.

Swedish convenience store replaces cashiers by smartphones

IT specialist, Robert Ilijason, had a late-night journey of over 20 minutes to find a supermarket that was open after he had to find a store to buy baby food to feed his hungry toddler, after he broke his last jar of the food.

Ilijason lives in the small Swedish town of Viken.The experience gave him the idea of opening a 24-hour convenience store with no cashiers but only a smartphone:

Customers simply use their cellphones to unlock the door with a swipe of the finger and scan their purchases. All they need to do is to register for the service and download an app. They get charged for their purchases in a monthly invoice.

The shop only stocks basics such as milk, sugar, canned food, diapers and other products you would expect to find in a convenience store. Presumably, this includes baby food. However, alcohol cannot be sold in convenience stores in Sweden. It does not have tobacco or medical drugs either. Ilijason is surprised that no one appears to have thought of such an enterprise before. He hopes to start the same type of store in other small towns and villages in Sweden. He believes that small convenience stores can return to the countryside if they do not have the expense of hiring cashiers.

Ilijason has to receive deliveries and stock products on the shelves but that is all. The customers with their cellphones do the rest. The shop has several surveillance cameras to discourage theft in the 480 square foot store. If the front door stays open for longer than eight seconds or if someone tries to pry it open he receives a text message. Ilijason lives nearby. So far since opening in January he has had no attempted thefts.

Viken is a town of just over 4,000 people. One problem the store has is that older people do not understand the technology. Tuve Nilsson, 75, welcomed the new store, noting that there were many more shops in the town when he moved there back in 1976 and said it could be could be a convenience for elderly people living alone: "But if they can manage this (technology), I don't know. Sometimes I don't understand it."

Ilijason is considering other ways of opening the door such as a credit card reader that some banks use. Some supermarkets already have scanning machines that you can use instead of a cashier. Ilijason may hire someone to work in the store a few hours each day to help people who don't understand or are not comfortable with modern technology. Raymond Arvidsson, a friend of Ilijason loved the speed of shopping. He said he was able to do his shopping within a minute with no queues.

Robots are taking over many jobs, so it is hardly surprising that now smartphones are also joining the competition to displace humans. It all depends on the economics of the situation however. When Atlantic writer Adam Davidson visited Standard Motor Products' fuel-injector assembly line in South Carolina, he wondered why a worker, Maddie, was welding the caps onto the injectors. Maddie's supervisor, Tony, had a direct answer:"Maddie is cheaper than a machine." Maddie makes less in two years than a $100,000 machine would cost.

Sweden has quickly adapted to making mobile payments. WyWallet, one Swedish payment service, had 1.2 million users in 2014 and about 20 percent of the population that uses smartphones.

Pirate Bay torrent site raided by police and taken off line

Pirate Bay was allegedly the most popular place to download copyrighted material but it was taken off line last week after a police raid.

Hollywood has long been attempting to crack down on Pirate Bay and similar sites. The industry claims that in 2006 alone, piracy cost it $6.1 billion US. Hollywood decided to go after the biggest site Pirate Bay. However, shutting the site down required pressure from the US government: Given Sweden's lax laws regarding copyrighted materials, Hollywood had to enlist the United States government for help cracking down on the site. The US threatened that unless something was done to take the site offline, it'd impose trade sanctions against Sweden by way of The World Trade Organization. That led to Swedish police raiding the outfit in 2006, confiscating enough servers and computer equipment to fill three trucks and making two arrests. Three days later, the site was back up and running and more popular than ever thanks to a swell of mainstream media coverage.

 Eventually in a 2009 trial the co-founders, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm, were fined $3.6 million and jail time for infringing copyright. At the time of the trial Pirate Bay had about 22 million users. Pirate Bay has changed its domain name since that time and it is not clear how many users it had when it was closed down. The site was sold in 2006. Fredrik Neij was recently arrested in Thailand. He had fled Sweden while out on bail. The new owners took many precautions should a raid occur, making it uncertain how long the site will be off line. A Pirate Bay representative said: "If the police decide to raid us again there are no servers to take, just a transit router. If they follow the trail to the next country and find the load balancer, there is just a disk-less server there. In case they find out where the cloud provider is, all they can get are encrypted disk-images. They have to be quick about it too, if the servers have been out of communication with the load balancer for 8 hours they automatically shut down. When the servers are booted up, access is only granted to those who have the encryption password," . Mirror sites have already sprung up.

 The police raid that closed down Pirate Bay was on December 9th. The number of torrent downloads of movies, TV shows, music, video games and software dropped from 101.5 million internet addresses on Monday 8 to 99.0 million and then 95 and 95.6 million the next two days. A list of the top pirated movies and TV shows can be found here.

  One of the co-founders of the site Peter Sunde actually applauded the closing of the site claiming that Pirate Bay had lost its soul and was polluted with ads for pornography and viagra: “It feels good that it might have closed down forever, just a real shame the way it did that." Sunde was also outraged at the 10th anniversary celebration which charged admission. The new operators were money-grubbers as far as Sunde is concerned. He said of the celebration: "The party had a set lineup with artists, scenes and so on, instead of just asking the people coming to bring the content. Everything went against the ideals that I worked for during my time as part of TPB".

 Bit torrent traffic declined 20 per cent over six months last year. From 2012 to 2013 unique visitors to Pirate Bay had dropped from 5 million to 900,000 at the end of the year.This may be partly the result of much material being made available more quickly on a legal basis. However, there are still numerous torrent sites one of the larger being Kickass Torrents which is still up and running. As with Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrents has changed it domain name to avoid authorities. It is now kickass.so. The ".so" domain is in Somalia.

Loot lost by Swedes recovered at bottom of Vistula River in Poland

Loot lost by 17 century Swedish invaders of Poland has been revealed at the bottom of the Vistula river by record low water levels. Elaborate marble stonework lies in the mud of the river bed.

A huge cargo of large blocks of the marble stonework apparently sank to the bottom of the Vistula river almost four centuries ago. The blocks were likely being transported back to Sweden by Swedish invaders. Record drought and low water levels have revealed the blocks. They are are covered in a yellow foul-smelling mud.

Researchers had known about the artefacts but retrieving them had been difficult as they were several feet under water. However, the task is still difficult because the water level is so low large floating cranes cannot get near enough to lift up the blocks and regular equipment sinks into the mud. Even so researchers are thankful the drought revealed the blocks.

Hubert Kowalski of the University of Warsaw Museum said:

"The drought helped us a lot because what had been lying underneath is now at the surface,"

Previous to the revelation of the blocks, knowledge about what had happened when the Swedes invaded was quite sketchy but now there is clear material evidence of the invasion.

Historians think that the Swedes were trying to move the loot to Gdansk where the Vistula flows into the Baltic Sea and then ship the blocks to Sweden. As yet, it is not known exactly why the barges sank. Kowalski said that so far they have located 10 tonnes of stonework but they think there is much more. The barges had a capacity of about 50 to 60 tonnes each.

The Museum authorities intend to take the masonry to Warsaw's Royal Castle one of the sites believed to have been looted by the Swedes. However until the river level is a bit higher again progress will be quite slow.

The lowest water levels since records have been kept about 200 year ago have also revealed World War II explosives and pieces from Jewish gravestones. If water levels do not rise soon, power stations in the city that use the river water for cooling may be forced to close.

Paul Krugman on what ails Europe

An op-ed in the New York Times by the well-known liberal U.S. economist Paul Krugman is titled "What Ails Europe?" Krugman writes from Lisbon in Portugal.

In Portugal Krugman notes that unemployment stands at 13 per cent. While this is bad enough the situation is worse in Greece, Ireland and perhaps in Spain as well. Even the whole of Europe may be sliding back into a recession.

Krugman maintains that several of the stories explaining Europe's situation are simply not true. Both what he calls the Republican narrative and the German narrative are false.

According to the Republican narrative pushed by the likes of Mitt Romney Europe has spent too much on the poor and that too much welfare state spending has ruined the economy and plunged states into debt.

Krugman mentions that Sweden which still has an extensive welfare state is nevertheless doing well economically. NOTE; The welfare state in Sweden has been cut back however. Those countries in the most trouble Greece Ireland Portugal Spain are not in the top five of 15 European euro zone nations. Only Italy is in the top five and still has less of a welfare state than Germany which is one of the strongest economies. These facts surely show that the welfare state spending per se was not the trouble.

The German story is all about the fiscal irresponsibility of nations having debt problems. The story fits Greece to an extent but not the other countries having problems. Italy's deficits happened long ago and Spain and Ireland actually had surpluses. Countries such as the U.S. and Japan can run huge deficits without apparently facing any huge crisis. NOTE: Some analysts might claim that those countries just have not faced up to their crisis as yet!

In spite of their debts the U.S. and Japan as well are able to borrow at very low-interest rates. Krugman sees Europe's main problem as having a common currency without the institutions that are required for the common currency to work properly.

The common Euro led investors to invest huge amounts of capital into countries around the edges of Europe a flow that was unsustainable. These large flows caused both costs and prices to rise making some countries uncompetitive. This in turned resulted in large trade deficits.

The countries involved cannot devalue their currencies and restore competitiveness because they are tied to the Euro. The nations only have painful choices whether they stay with the Euro or leave the zone.

Krugman thinks that Germany could help by reversing its imposition of austerity policies but will not do so. Probably it is not politically doable in any event. What is important for Krugman is that people should realise that the conventional wisdom about the too expensive welfare state and fiscal irresponsibility lead to failed policies that often make the situation worse. For more see the article. Even though these policies make the situation worse over the short term they do weaken labor and do cut spending on social programs. This leaves more of the economic pie for the one per cent. The theory is that once labor costs are low enough and the countries implement more policies favorable to financial capital that investment will flow back into those countries

Philippines seeks help of UK and Sweden in peace talks with MILF

Gloria needs all the help she can get. Unless things start to cool down a bit on the ground any peace talks may be a bit premature. No doubt the MILF will not agree to start laying down their arms until they have an agreement they can live with and that may be some time if it is even possible at the present juncture.


Gloria seeks help of UK,Sweden in peace talks
BY JOCELYN MONTEMAYOR
PRESIDENT Arroyo is seeking the help of Sweden and the United Kingdom in the peace talks with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
Brunei is also offering scholarships for MILF members and their families to enable them to "learn to moderate Islam," Arroyo said in an informal interaction with media Monday night at the Well Being Spa at the Clark Freeport Zone.
Arroyo cited the experiences of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in talks with Northern Ireland.
"Actually Blair is willing to come to help us because he (played) a very strong part in the negotiations of Northern Ireland, although Sweden is helping us on the DDR side," she said.
She said Sweden in 2005 came up with the Stockholm Initiative on Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) which aims to "contribute to a secure and stable environment in which an overall peace process and transition can be sustained."
The President said an invitation to Blair, whom she met during her visit to London in December 2007, has yet to be sent.
Peace talks with the MILF were disrupted this month by major attacks launched by rebel commanders in several parts of Mindanao, including Lanao del Norte and North Cotabato.
A memorandum of agreement on ancestral domain with the MILF, seen as a major breakthrough in the talks, was to be signed August 5 but the Supreme Court issued a temporary restraining order based on petitions questioning the constitutionality of the MOA.
Arroyo said the MILF attacks, which included atrocities against civilians, led to a change in the basic premise of the peace efforts. She said the government is now focusing the talks "from armed groups to the community" through public consultations.
Arroyo clarified she is not setting the disarming of MILF members as a precondition to the peace talks. But, she said, she wants the government and MILF panels to start tackling the DDR, particularly the disarmament aspect, when negotiations resume.
"It’s not a precondition, but part of the outcome of the talks. Part of the comprehensive agreement," she said.
Senate President Manuel Villar urged government to advance the internal revenue allotment funds of towns badly affected by hostilities in Mindanao.
"Towns, cities and provinces hit by MILF attacks are being saddled by unforeseen expenses caused by unforeseen events," he said.
Villar said towns need money to "care for the wounded, aid the displaced, bury the dead, rebuild homes, heal psychological wounds, construct damaged public infrastructure and other things needed to make things normal again."
For starters, he said the national government can release part of the P2-billion calamity fund to areas hit "by this man-made calamity."
This can be complemented by funds to be taken from the P800 million contingent fund, which is under the discretion of the President to release, he said. – With Dennis Gadil

Iraqi refugees flee to Sweden and other industrialised countries.

So the US with a huge area and population admits less Iraqis in a year than Syria with a much smaller area does in one day. So people are fleeing liberated and democratic Iraq for the totalitarian dictatorship Syria next door. Of course the democratic liberator the US admits only a handful of Iraqi refugees.


(CNN) -- The number of Iraqi refugees trying to flee to industrialized nations has increased substantially in 2007 -- and nearly half are trying to go to Sweden, the U.N. refugee agency reported Friday.




Sweden received 9,300 asylum claims from Iraqi refugees, out of a total of 19,800 claims made to 36 countries during the first six months of this year, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said.

The agency said "the large Iraqi community in that country and its strong social network might account for the high number of Iraqi asylum seekers there."

The total number of applications is 45 percent higher than in the last six months of 2006, when 13,600 applications were made. The figures are also more than double those for the first six months of 2006, the agency said.

The figures are based on data provided by 36 industrialized countries to the UNHCR.

The United States expects to have admitted only 1,600 to 1,700 Iraqi refugees in the financial year that ends September 30, U.S. officials said Friday. That's fewer than earlier estimates of 2,000 or more for the year.

Officials from the departments of State and Homeland Security predict that the number of Iraqi refugees admitted to the U.S. soon will rise to 1,000 a month.

About 2.2 million Iraqis live outside their country, mostly in Syria and Jordan, the United Nations said. Another million have been uprooted from their homes but are still in Iraq, officials say. Assistance groups such as Refugees International consider the the situation the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world.

About 2,000 Iraqis arrive in Syria each day, U.N. staff said, according to UNHCR.

Earlier this month, Syria put visa restrictions on Iraqis wishing to enter the country, but temporarily lifted them with the start of Ramadan.

"It is encouraging to note that Iraqis fleeing violence and insecurity are still allowed entry in Syria, which is now hosting nearly 1.5 million Iraqi refugees, a very heavy burden on a country that has shown immense hospitality over the past years," the agency said.

Greece also had a high number of applications from Iraqi asylum seekers, about 3,500, compared with 1,400 in all of last year.

Spain and Germany recorded 1,500 and 820 applications, respectively, during the first half of 2007.

If current trends are maintained, the number of Iraqi asylum seekers could reach the levels seen between 2000 and 2002, when an average of 40,000 to 50,000 Iraqis each year sought refuge in industrialized countries, the agency said. E-mail to a friend