First day in Delhi

I´m safe and sound in India! We´re staying at Hotel Lalit, which is a beautiful, central hotel in the heart of the capitol city.

Today I have had a look at our presentation, before going sightseeing with a new friend. She was the most wonderful guide and traveling companion in Delhi´s busy streets!

We went to the old parts of the city, including the impressive Red Fort. India is so full of history, beauty and literary pulsing with life. And you never have to wait more than three minutes for the Metro :)

One of the things I noticed at once with Delhi, is all the greenness. There are trees and grass everywhere! I wouldn´t have expected this in such a large city (ten million inhabitants, double of Norway all together...), so it was a really pleasant surprise. I love it here!

Questions for the Conference

I´ve been discussing the conference in New Dehli with a good friend. He came up with some questions, so I would like to look for some answers during the days we have in Dehli:

1) Is the trend shifting more towards clean

energy generation (sustainable power plants) or efficient energy usage (efficient vehicles, low energy houses etc.)?

2) Are we predominantly thinking in terms of medium range (cleaner and more efficient use of fossil fuels) or long range (totally sustainable sources like sun, wind and water)?

3) Are most of the plans focussed on political reform (new legislation for promoting marketing, distribution and implementation of existing technology) or on technological reform (more aggressive R&D)?

4) How is the techno-economic feasibility of the front-running candidate technologies promising to keep satisfying the world’s insatiable thirst for energy?

I will do my best to get more knowledge during the conference, so hopefully I´ll be able to answer these questions. They´re simple, but currently the simple solutions are hard to find. Let´s hope we can bring them to the surface soon!

Skiing in October!

Snow arrived in Trondheim three days ago! I got a wonderful, almost mid- March feeling. I´ve been skiing three days in a row, and I don´t plan to stop until the snow melts.

It will be fantastic if we get a snowy winter! Not like the much talked- about season three winters ago, when the snow arrived on the 12th of February...

I took this photo on my way back from one of my skiing trips (skating, just in case someone wondered). It was just as beautiful as it seems!

Going to India!!

I can´t believe it! My friend Leon Prebeau Menezes from Canada and I got to the finals in Mind Odyssey! We´re going to the WPC- Petrotech Youth Forum conference in India next week.

The conference is about solving the energy crisis and securing energy in the future, emphasizing clean power and innovative ideas. The conference will be held in New Dehli from 1st of November.

We got to the finals for our paper about the intersecting geothermal energy and the oil industry. In short, it´s about the transformation of the oil industry; from drilling after fossil fuels to producing renewable energy.

Right now, I´m absolutely thrilled! I would love to go to India, learning more about the energy future and presenting our idea. A great opportunity!

I´ve got one concern though: I need a VISA! It´s got to be fast, so I really hope it works out. I´ll get up at 6:00 am tomorrow to call the embassy.

Solar Thermal Energy

Here is another way of exploiting solar energy. Using the heat from the photons to produce steam is even more effective than using photovoltaic cells. That´s why this technology is used for most solar power plants. For now it´s the best solution, but I´m positive we´ll find even better ways of extracting the energy from sun rays in the future!

How Solar Energy Panels Work

I´m deeply fascinated by solar energy. There are several ways of exploiting the energy from the sun, some more effective than others. It´s great to know how things work. I think this is a good (though quite simplified) explanation!

Thoughts about energy

In general: human attempts to tame the nature tend to give a backlash. We create more problems than we solve, hurting ecosystems (and thereby ourselves) rather than helping. The frightening thing is that we often don´t realize the damage until it´s too late, and so we have to put out the fire instead of treading carefully and avoiding it in the first place. Preventing problems is always better than mending.

No energy source is without complications, so it´s not easy finding the perfect solution. Maybe there is none; maybe we have to pick "the best of the worst options" That´s a little pessimistic, but it´s obvious we can´t keep going like the western countries have done since the industrialization.

It´s really hard, isn´t it? There´s no way we can find all the raw material needed for renewable energy constructions in a sustainable way. The technology used for covering all our energy consumption is complex, no matter what energy source is used. Also, they often demand rare and/ or valuable raw materials.

I guess the best option is to NOT waste energy in the first place. Increased efficiency, saving energy and recycling might be the best ways to reduce emissions. The less we use, the less energy we need, and a larger part can be covered by renewable energy.