Being able to predict the future had been an invaluable competitive advantage for any corporation. Forecasting is a vital part of any business, hence a good forecast allows enterprises to invest in a beneficial way. However, there are several ways to prepare forecasts and the forecast methodology can vary. An industry that is dependent on forecasts is the energy industry. By predicting consumers' energy consumption, Swedish energy companies can hedge on the Nordic power market Nord Pool.

Uppsala County has ambitious environmental aims for the planned residential area inÖstra Sala backe. In this thesis different energy sources have been evaluated todetermine which system that would be most favorable given currently availableinformation about the project. Planned energy usage has been divided into tap waterheating, space heating and power. Three base case scenarios were made with districtheating, small scale bio fuel and heat pump. Solar power and solar heating were thensimulated and the production from the two could individually be deducted from theenergy need in the base cases, constituting 9 different scenarios.

Umeå Energi are working towards a goal, that in the year of 2018, they will be completely climate neutral. As a part of this, one target is to reduce their grid losses by 4 % of the 2012 level, which corresponds to an overall reduction of the grid losses of just over 1.7 GWh. In many residential areas, the distribution grid is designed and rated for electric heating as the heating in the houses. As many of the houses later has been converted to other types of heating, their electricity use has decreased and the total power output from many of the secondary substations has decreased significantly. Because of this, many of these stations today are well oversized, which in turn means that the energy losses in these stations are unnecessarily high.In this degree project, 25 secondary substations have been studied, all located in residential areas in and around central Umeå.

In today's society, the availability of energy plays an integral part in our everyday lives. Unfortunately, the price of energy in Sweden has increased in recent decades. A large part of our energy consumption goes to heating modules for houses, where heating methods that depend on energy sources such as electricity, district heating, fuel oil, gas and biofuels are the most common ones. During the winter period, the increase in energy costs becomes significantly evident, especially for small property owners. This increase in energy cost is most noticeable for home owners with electric heating.This thesis is written at the Halmstad University, in cooperation with a company, which makes parts of this thesis confidential.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how investments are justified in the Swedish data center industry, with a focus on cooling equipment. This is achieved through semi-structured interviews with 20 different interviewees. These interviewees represent different facets of the industry and facilitate an understanding of which factors, such as: investment costs, operating costs, reliability, environmental impact and the influence of external and internal actors, come into play and to which degree they impact the investment decision-making process. The results show that primarily low operating cost in the form of low energy consumption is the driving factor when it comes to the procurement of new equipment. A lower environmental impact is a positive side-effect of lower energy consumption.

Micro-power wind energy convertors have recently increased in popularity. The reasons for this are among other things the increasing cost of electric energy and enviromental concern.In this thesis the connection of these micro-power wind energy convertors to the utility network is discussed. Electric standards for the connection of small production units is presented. Finally some calculations and measurements of electric quality are also presented. The utility network used in the calculations is part of Halmstad Energi och Miljö network..

Most of the portable electronic devices use a battery as a primary power source. Nowadays, when the applications are becoming smaller and smaller and more power efficient, the designer needs to concentrate more on reducing power consumption, using secondary power sources and introducing power storage devices. Multiple power source availability and a power storage device on the board will make the applications much more useful and efficient in everyday use. This thesis proposes a power supply unit (PSU) for wireless sensor platforms which is capable of supplying a sensor node with energy from multiple sources, as well as status information from the PSU. Present power storage devices, like electric double-layer capacitors (EDLCs) and batteries, have become more and more common as their characteristics have developed.

This report was performed in order to evaluate a new technological measure and focuses generally on a heat pump system to a HWC-washing machine. The client is Asko Appliances AB, a company well known for its environmentally friendly products. The goal of this study was to improve the energy efficiency of a washing machine by combining a heat pump device to the heater of the wash water, in order to reduce the energy consumed for heating the water. Besides reducing the energy consumption in heating the water, the washing machine was required to meet low noise and short operating time specifications. For that purpose, nine trials in three test series have been carried out.

This report is the final step in the Bachelor of Science program in Building Construction Engineering, Department of Engineering Sciences, Uppsala University.The purpose of this study is to highlight the difficulties and possibilities that could involve the introduction of new energy efficient technologies and changing work around this technology. This study focuses on energy use at a construction site or other temporary workplace where so-called portacabins are in place to address the need for temporary facilities.The method for obtaining knowledge on the subject was mainly interviews with site managers working in Svevia AB's various activities. In conjunction with the interviews I visited construction sites and portacabins if it was possible.My most important suggestion to Svevia AB concerns a better organization in order to make poratacabins more efficient on energy and costs. The company should also evaluate and monitor the energy efficient portacabins that are in operation.Expected energy savings of new technology may not materialize if there are gaps in information, education, technical services and technical maintenance. It is very important to utilize the experiences of new technology.

The company Olofsfors AB manufactures drive belts for forest machinery, known as ECO-Tracks, and abrasion-resistant steel and cutting edges for graders, excavators and tractors, known as Bruxite and SharqEdges. Manufacturing these products requires the steel to be heated and molded, then submerged in water and hardened. The water used in the hardening of steel is pumped to the process from pits below the floor and then pumped back to the pit after it?s been used. Since the temperature of this water rises after being used to harden the steel the temperature of the pumping pit needs to be adjusted to maintain its setpoint of 21°C.

With increasing energy prices and increased focus on the environment we saw the need for companies to get control over their energy use and their emission of carbon dioxid. An analysis tool that integrates both these areas is, with our knowledge, not available on the market today. Therefore, our project became to develop such a tool.By doing this degree project we would like to clarify that energy consumption and environmental impact are integrated. The less energy consumed by today?s society the smaller the environmental impact will be.

This thesis provides a good introduction to the American environmental certification system LEED, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and trough compar-isons between Sweden and the United States an explanation to the systems design is given. The work is closely linked to a LEED Core & Shell project in Stockholm, Swe-den, where the goal is to reach the second highest rating in LEED - Gold.This thesis gives a broad description of the LEED system and a more profound study of the energy sector, Energy and Atmosphere. Here, for example, an analysis has been made of how the energy consumption of an imaginary building designed according to the requirements of the BBR (Swedish building code) performs in comparison to the Baseline building in LEED.The existing model of Borgarfjord 3, which served as a case study in this work, has al-so been modified to investigate the energy savings that could have been achieved by adding extra insulation to the building. A description of the problems, regarding how the Swedish district heating system (DES) is treated in LEED, is given as well as the suggested modifications. This is an issue that will be pursued during the process of shaping a new, international, version of LEED due to be launched 2012..

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how investments are justified in the Swedish data center industry, with a focus on cooling equipment. This is achieved through semi-structured interviews with 20 different interviewees. These interviewees represent different facets of the industry and facilitate an understanding of which factors, such as: investment costs, operating costs, reliability, environmental impact and the influence of external and internal actors, come into play and to which degree they impact the investment decision-making process. The results show that primarily low operating cost in the form of low energy consumption is the driving factor when it comes to the procurement of new equipment. A lower environmental impact is a positive side-effect of lower energy consumption.

Uppsalahem AB is a municipally owned real estate concern that owns and administrates housing for nearly 30 000 people. The company puts a lot of effort into reducing the energy use of their housing stock. This project is a master?s thesis in the energy systems programme at Uppsala University, carried out in collaboration with Uppsalahem. The aim of this thesis is to provide energy saving measures for fourteen student housing buildings in Uppsala, Sweden.

The thesis describes a completely new biofuel system to generate particle-free heat from combustion of ash-containing biofuel particles at high temperatures.The suggested system gives opportunities to introduce biofuels in new areas.Main components in the suggested system is a heat radiating combustion chamber intended for pulverized wood, combined with regenerators to extract heat from flue gases and simultaneously preheating the combustion air.The thesis contains a description of the suggested system, theoretical considerations, calculations regarding the combustion, and includes results from tests performed.The results from calculations and tests performed concludes that the system is workable and possible to apply..