In today?s society climate change has grown to one of the largest global issues. To reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, large changes of the energy system are required. An increasingly popular solution is investments in local production of renewable energy resources like wind, solar or geothermal power. The following report examines the possibility for implementing a solar power plant on the new hospital Nya Karolinska Solna. Two different technologies for extraction of solar energy has been studied, solar thermal collectors  to meet the need of heating and solar cells to satisfy the need for electricity linked to operating the hospital building.

Calculations of net present value are based on a discount rate, which requires knowledge about the company?s cost of debt. A common way to do this is by observing the company?s credit rating, when no credit rating is given it?s possible to use a synthetic rating model based on quantitative data to estimate a credit rating. Thus, the aim of this study is to increase the understanding of which quantitative data, in terms of key figures, that can be used to explain the given credit ratings for companies from the Nordic countries.In developing the model, key figures found significant in previous studies are being tested for whether or not they are applicable for companies from the Nordic countries.

This thesis concerns an energy audit of a food industry. The company's business consists of boiling and peeling shrimps, and producing mayonnaise-based salads. This type of work involves energy-intensive processes, such as steam generation, compression of air and refrigeration of large spaces. These needs are supplied with electricity. Furthermore, the industry is a major consumer of district heating, particularly for heating the supply air in the ventilation system.

Title: Strategies for competition ? a study of the Swedish contact lenses market.Authors: Pernilla AArskog and Annika Lange.Background: As a market gets more mature and the competition increases, it is more important for a company to apply the right strategic perspective. There are four fundamental strategic perspectives for a service-oriented business: a core product-, a price-, an image- and a service perspective. This study is a about service management and take its point from the theories from the Nordic School about strategies for competition, customer value, perceived customer quality and customer loyalty.Purpose: The main purpose with this study is to analyze and evaluate how the actors at the Swedish market of contact lenses should compete to gain further competitive advantages.Method: The study includes four qualitative interviews with two traditional opticians and two Internet based businesses, but also a survey with 106 contact lens users is included.Analysis: In the analyse part of this thesis it was concluded that the traditional opticians conception about their customer not agrees with what the customer evaluate as important. Many of the customers have thought about changing their optician, and besides that do not recommend their optician, and can there for not be categorize as loyal customers.

Companies and organizations recognize the importance of collaboration to develop responsibility and ability of change in the workplace. The concept of collaboration was a relatively new idea in business in the late 1980s. In a Nordic context, collaboration is a traditional approach that companies use successfully for competition, survival and development. Collaborative organizational efforts cover management of committed people who can help companies achieve flexibility, customer loyalty, innovation and economic success on a challenging and competitive market. Many theorists believe that collaboration is the key to integrating technology, financial competence and innovation.

The purpose of this thesis is to assist the Swedish energy company NIBE Energy Systems in their studies of adaptive regulation applicable to electrical water heaters. Due to coming energy classifications of these appliances in the European Union, NIBE Energy Systems needs to use adaptive regulation, called Smart Control, to keep their products in the best possible energy class and remain competitive to the market. By using this Smart Control regulation a 2-3 % improve-ment of efficiency can be credited the system. This is a small number, but heavily needed, since the energy classes are based on the idea that the European Union is provided with electricity from coal condensate power resulting in a 40 % maximum efficiency. Furthermore, doing noth-ing will result in some water heaters not being approved to use on the market from 2015 due to low efficiency.

Purpose: The purpose of the study is to in a comparative and causal way explore whether there is a relationship between risk and return and also how it is perceived on the Nordic financial markets.Theory: The theoretical frame of reference applied in the thesis is considered relevant inthe perspective of the study?s purpose and research questions. We have among other theories used The Capital Asset Pricing Model, The Efficient Market Hypothesis and various Behavioural finance theories.Method: The study has its starting point in a quantitative approach with a quantitative data analysis supported by secondary data extracted from Thomson Reuters.Empirics: The empirics contains regression analyses made from calculated secondary data of 240 randomly chosen companies from Nasdaq OMX Stockholm, NasdaqOMX Copenhagen, Nasdaq OMX Helsinki and Oslo Bors.Conclusion: The study conclusions show that there are both a negative and positive relationship between volatility and actual return on the investigated markets. Considering this prior statement we can conclude that the Capital Asset Pricing Model can?t correctly describe the actual relationship between the parameters investigated on the current sample.

The building sector accounted for around a fourth of the total energy usage in Sweden in year 2010 (Energimyndigheten, 2012). Therefore it has become very interesting to achieve a lower energy usage in residential buildings. One way to achieve that is to build so called passive houses. By being very well insulated and have low leakage through the walls, they can reduce the energy usage for heating with a substantial amount. The first passive house was built during the 90?s in Germany; and in Sweden the first passive house was built in Gothenburg 2001.

Initiativet till projektet kommer från Nordic gyms ägare Christer Eriksson. Inför det första mötet mellan Christer och Jimmy Kärkkäinen, December 2010, var det egentligen ett annat projekt som var planerat att utföras. Då Christer med stor inlevelse berättade om deras nya produkt för bålträning och dess potential, kände båda parter att detta är det vi skall arbeta vidare med. En lång och spännande resa tog sin början.Nordic gym är ett helsvenskt företag som huvudsakligen utvecklar styrketräningsmaskiner. Nyligen har Nordic gym tagit fram ett nytt träningsredskap (Nidroc) för bålträning.

The Smart Grid technology has during the last decade been established as a way to create a greater flexibility on the electricity grid that will be needed as the development moves towards an increased share of renewable primary energy sources in the electricity production. One part of the Smart Grid technology is the ability to shift loads in time, to adapt to either price or emissions, known as Demand Response. This project, which was conducted at KTH in collaboration with the consulting corporation Capgemini, examines the economic, environmental and social aspects of the Demand Response technology. In the project, three household products are used in a model that derives the potential savings in costs and emissions of CO2e. The results show that the actual savings measured in SEK are small, but that the savings measured in percent can be as high as 20 percent. Reduction of CO2e emissions is slightly lower.

During the last decade millions of people have migrated to Europe. Parallel to this development, we see that many countries are becoming more hostile towards immigration. The success of radical right-wing parties (RHP) has been accredited to natives within the receiving countries turning to RHP to reduce their perceived threat from immigrants. Paradoxically, the RHP-support has also increased significantly among the immigrant population given the common assumption that immigrants are in solidarity with regards to shared experiences of immigration. In this dissertation, I argue for the importance of considering the increased RHP-support amongst immigrants, something that has been neglected in contemporary research.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine the view of market-led culture, focusing on literature, within Swedish governmental cultural policy. The main issue is to discover changes in attitude towards cooperation between culture and business by comparing the attitudes and ideas expressed in the governmental policy documents from the 1970s with the governmental policy documents from the 1990s. To illuminate, and with an effort to explain, these attitudes and ideas expressed in the documents their political and social context has been studied as well. The theoretical starting point is two political ideologies, and Danish cultural policy researcher Dorte Skot-Hansens theories of cultural policy in the Nordic countries. The methodological starting point is two variants of analyses that are textual ones.

Visby is a city that at first glance is of medieval origins. The popular image of scientists today is that the city was formed in the Middle Ages. According to some of the researchers Visby was formed during the Viking Age, it is based on the basis that the area has been used for a long period. Urban development in the Nordic countries is complex and there are different opinions as to why the Nordic cities emerge. It is important to shed light on the underlying process on why cities are emerging to provide clarity as to why Visby city is emerging.

This study uses European researcher Tomas Valasek?s hypothesis about factors required for defence cooperation in order to achieve conditions which can be successfully applied to the Nordic defence cooperation NORDEFCO. The study uses only Norway and Sweden on the grounds that they are the original actors and the driving forces behind the defence cooperation. The factors studied are; the countries' strategic culture, solidarity and trust between countries, similarity in military forces, if similar conditions prevail in the defence industry and if the intentions of cooperation have been clarified.Mainly government documents in the form of propositions, orientations and defence documents are studied, together with previous research in this area and, especially, interviews with representatives of NORDEFCO at military level and policy level as well as outside perspectives from the military attachés in each country. With the intention of studying the extent to which the factors Valasek features may prove to be significant in assessing the conditions for enhanced cooperation in NORDEFCO, the study raises the question of how it is possible to find expressions for the factors.

Charterflygbolaget TUIfly Nordic har haft problem med att utnyttja intervallerna på ett antal planerade underhållsåtgärder för deras Boeing 737-flotta fullt ut på grund av begränsningar i trafikprogrammet samt övriga praktiska begränsningar. De har även under en längre tid misstänkt att många intervaller för återkommande underhåll borde kunna eskaleras något för att möjliggöra en omläggning av trafikprogrammet och därmed effektivisera användningen av underhållsintervallen. Genomförs underhåll på flygplanen oftare än de behöver blir detta också en onödig resursförbrukare och kostnad för bolaget.Detta examensarbete har haft till uppgift att genomföra en granskning av de anmärkningar TUIfly Nordic haft på sin 737-flotta och gallra ut de anmärkningar som haft eller kunde ha haft någon relevans för någon av de underhållsuppgifter vars intervall TUIfly Nordic vill eskalera. Med denna information som underlag har sedan en bedömning gjorts om huruvida varje identifierad underhållsåtgärd är lämplig att utföra en eskalering på eller inte. Detta examensarbete har visat att en majoritet av de underhållsuppgifter som valdes ut för ändamålet anses vara möjliga att utföra den önskade eskaleringen på.