Driving forces and obstacles with regard to co-operation between municipal energy companies and process industries in Sweden [An article from: Energy Policy]

This digital document is a journal article from Energy Policy, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
District heating networks can technically enable energy-related co-operations between energy-intensive industries and municipal energy companies. The most common form of co-operation is to utilise industrial waste heat as the primary energy source in district heating networks. However, another type of co-operation is to jointly own a plant that produces both process steam for the industry and hot water for district heating. In this article, eight Swedish energy co-operations are studied and the main focus is on the process leading to co-operations of this kind. Different aspects of factors that facilitate or obstruct the start up and continuous daily operation of a co-operation are discussed. The main conclusion is that while the primary reasons for the foundation of such co-operations are favourable techno-economic factors, this is not enough for a co-operation to emerge. This study highlights the importance of people with a real ambition to co-operate in both parties in the co-operations.