How often does someone bring you a new energy invention?

It could be a month without someone coming in and then suddenly two in a week — it’s probably in the range of 10 a year.

Do you find it’s a productive thing for Vattenfall to spend time and manpower on listening to anyone who comes in with an idea?

In a way I’m quite grateful for people that come to us with inventions. It can be somewhat like looking for a needle in a haystack. But, I mean, if people come to us with ideas, and if we assess them, we might find something good in it. You can never exclude that.

What kind of ideas do people bring to you?

A wide variety of things. Mostly I’d say it’s various kinds of energy-generation technologies. Quite often small-scale technologies, but also sometimes some spectacular, large-scale ones.

What’s an example of a “spectacular” one?

Well, probably the best example is one that we assessed about a year ago. An invention that would extract energy from cosmic rays and convert it into electricity. Basically the same idea as a modern solar cell but with other kinds of cosmic particles—muons in this case. The idea was to concentrate them via a magnetic funnel.

That feels like pseudoscience — how do you prove that something like that won’t work?

Yeah. I mean, first of all, the burden of proof is always on the inventor. But, from our perspective, we’ll try to assess not only does it work technically, but does it make sense. And in this case we could easily show what the potential would be, and that it wouldn’t change the world. If you could harness all the muons globally, it would correspond to roughly three nuclear power plants or so. But in parallel, we also assessed the technical feasibility of the magnetic funnel itself, and proved that it wouldn’t work.

Presumably most of the ideas people bring you are going to be like this — not mathematically sound. Maybe people genuinely believe they’re viable but don’t understand the science. Are there hoaxers who believe in perpetual motion, who bring you ridiculous things?

Perpetual motion machines—that happens. We look over those as well. I would never start by assuming it’s a hoax. My estimation is that people don’t come to us unless they’re convinced that it works. That’s certainly the starting point. It’s quite hard to tell, but often it’s quite simple to discard it after an analysis.

When was the last time an invention was brought in that you found useful and worth investing in, or at least assessing further?

It’s not that straightforward — typically, you can find elements in [an invention] that could be of interest. Something [that] comes directly packaged to us, ready to invest in, that is quite seldom. One example is: Several years ago we had a biomass-refining technology that we found could be of interest with some minor modifications. We didn’t invest in the company so much as set up a joint development project with them, to see if we can modify the technology to fit the value chain that we believe in.

At that time, it fit well with our direction in the company, and it made sense to take a closer look.

How did you come to work for Vattenfall?

I’m an engineer by background. I came to Vattenfall in 2001 to work in the R&D department, and I’ve been with the company since then. I’m responsible for part of the R&D portfolio — the future of the energy system. We’re mostly working from the inside … but assessing technologies from external parties is a part of that job.

So what kind of things do you develop from the inside?

Well, a lot of things are around stability of the energy system. Integrating renewable sources such as wind and solar—that’s the main topic right now. It’s about having a system that works with technologies other than we have today. You can’t control wind and solar. It needs to be integrated in a sound way for the system to accept a large portion of renewables, and that’s a technical challenge.

What’s an example of that integration in action?

We look a lot at the integration of the electricity system with the heating system. For example, if you have an area with a lot of wind, and you get a temporary surplus of electricity, and at the same time you have a district heating system, you could store some of the excess electricity as heat. You convert it from power to heat, via electrical heaters.

The technology as such is already available, but it hasn’t been used in that way. In the late 90s, about 20 percent of district heating was supplied by electricity, but that was more a baseload, as we say. In this case, it’s the same technology, but a different application, operated more to balance the wind power rather than drag electricity out of the grid.

It sounds like you’re more interested in incremental improvements rather than revolutionary new technology.

It is more towards having existing technology used in new ways, rather than groundbreaking new innovations. Wind power has been around for many years, but it’s not until you change the proportions of things in the system that you see need for new things to develop. And then you can have tools such as power-to-heat that certainly can play a role. It’s about how things fit together in the system.

Do you see the long-term future of Vattenfall as a nuclear and renewable energy company?

Well, I would prefer not to comment on the changes to the portfolio. But, I mean, for sure we in R&D look at the great potential in renewables. My department is mostly looking at Sweden right now, and there we believe we can make a 100-percent renewable energy system.

When it comes to solar, we have about the same amount of incoming radiation as much of Germany, so it has potential. But [let’s not] forget that we have about double the energy consumption in Sweden per person due to a lot of heavy industry. So, it wouldn’t have the same relative contribution here as (for example) in Germany. But we’re a big country with a lot of resources in biomass and wind, and that could constitute a bigger part today.

We’ve looked a lot at wind and it has a lot of potential. There’s a lot of discussion of technologies, but I’d like to emphasize that when you transition an energy system, you have to look at use and the needs. Technology in itself is quite useless. It needs to fit in a system, solve a system’s problems, and have a proper value chain. That’s what’s driving us.