Nils Brandt

• Associate Professor
• KTH Royal Institute of Technology

To realize the benefits of smart grids, residential demand response (DR) aims to increase demand flexibility by influence household electricity consumption. Although price-based DR programs have shown potential, there is a need to further investigate the effectiveness of DR in energy strategy and policy development. The evaluation of DR has focused...

Cites have been identified as one key arena to meet future sustainability challenges. However, if cites are to be part of the transition it must become possible to confirm results of ongoing actions. By the introduction information and communication technologies, it has become easier to collect performance parameters from the built environment, the...

Demand Response (DR) is expected to play a crucial role in balancing supply and demand in future smart grids with increased proportion of electricity from renewable sources. However, previous studies on price-based DR programs have shown that there is a substantial need to strengthen the incentive models in order to achieve sufficient end-user resp...

Urban sustainable development is today seen as one of the keys towards unlocking the quest for a sustainable world. One feature of urban sustainability is the increased interest in developing sustainable urban districts. For many of these developments, guiding sustainability documents are developed to frame future goals. However, few of these docum...

The development of smart grid projects, with demand side management as an integral part, has led to an increased interest of households’ willingness to react to different types of demand response programs. This paper presents a pilot study assessing the impact of real-time price visualization on residential electricity consumption, and its effects...

For half a century, system scientists have relied on urban metabolism (UM) as a pragmatic framework to support the needed transition toward sustainable urban development. It has been suggested that information and communication technology (ICT) and, more specifically, smart cities can be leveraged in this transition. Given the recent advances in sm...

Urban metabolism is a concept employed to understand the flow of energy and materials through urban areas. However, applying this approach at the city level has been limited by the lack of data at this scale. This paper reviews the current application of the urban metabolism concept and proposes the concept of a “smart urban metabolism” (SUM). Thro...

This report aims at analyzing the state of today's knowledge and tools that is relevant for moving European cities towards climate neutrality. The report has been created using both literature sources as well as analyses of case studies from European cites. The main issues dealt with are how the concept of climate neutrality applies to cities, what...

The City of Stockholm is making substantial efforts towards meeting its climate change commitments including a GHG emission target of 3 tonnes per capita by 2020 and making its new eco-district Stockholm Royal Seaport a candidate of Clinton Climate Initiative's Climate Positive Program. Towards achieving these policies, this study evaluated the ene...

This paper presents preliminary findings from a big data analysis and GIS to identify the efficiency of waste management and transportation in the City of Stockholm. The aim of this paper is to identify inefficiencies in waste collection routes in the city of Stockholm, and to suggest potential improvements. Based on a large data set consisting of...

The Chinese government has announced a national mitigation target towards sustainable development of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per unit GDP (CO2/GDP) by 40–45% by 2020 compared with the 2005 level. This paper analyses China's CO2 strategic mitigation target and suggests possible ways to reduce CO2/GDP. The mitigation target of reducin...

Hourly demand response tariffs with the intention of reducing or shifting loads during peak demand hours are being intensively discussed among policy-makers, researchers and executives of future electricity systems. Demand response rates have still low customer acceptance, apparently because the consumption habits requires stronger incentive to cha...

Interest to harvest wild cyanobacteria exists due to the environmental and socioeconomic risks during cyanobacteria blooms coupled with demands for nonterrestrial-based alternatives for biofuel sources. This research, therefore, sought to estimate the wild cyanobacteria harvesting potential using Nodularia spumigena, and using the Baltic Sea as the...

Climate targets for cities abound. However, what these targets really imply is dependent on a number of decisions regarding system boundaries and methods of calculation. In order to understand and compare cities' climate targets, there is a need for a generic and comprehensive framework of key methodological considerations. This paper identifies ei...

The purpose of this paper is to explore to what extent the integrated infrastructural system in Hammarby Sjöstad, Stockholm, also named the Hammarby Model, reduces the metabolic flows of the district, and to what extent the district is self-sufficient, in terms of generated energy. Furthermore, the paper aspires to help create a deeper understandin...

The rapid emergence of smart cities and their sensor networks is being accompanied by an increasing demand for systems to interpret and use the vast amounts of new data they make available. This paper describes the key system design decisions that needed to be taken when developing a calculation engine for a pilot project entitled Smart City Stockh...

The recycling behaviour of multicultural householders was investigated in the urban area of Järva, northwest Stockholm, Sweden, which is home to a significant proportion of immigrants from different parts of the world. Different ethnic minorities currently make up an important proportion of the urban population in Sweden, but little is known about...

The interest in harvesting biomass from the Baltic Sea has increased in recent years. However, there is a lack of available data on macroalgae biomass and of cost-effective methods for site-specific quantification of macroalgae. In this study, macroalgae biomass has been quantified in Trelleborg and thus the nutrient reduction that could be achieve...

As the impetus of life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle thinking (LCT) in waste management policy is increasing, decision makers may face conflicting advice on the potential environmental impacts of competing end-of-life treatment options. This paper discusses the problem posed by the Waste Framework Directive, 2008/98/EC, where LCT is require...

A meta-analysis was made of results from previous studies on different variables influencing and determining the recycling behaviour of householders. These studies were conducted by researchers working in various fields in a number of different countries and are published in diverse journals. We evaluated trends in research outputs in the period 19...

Industrial symbiosis (IS) developments have been differentiated as self-organized, facilitated, and planned. This article introduces a tool, Looplocal, which has been built with objectives to support the strategic facilitation of IS. Looplocal is a visualization tool built to assist in 1) Simplifying the identification of regions susceptible to new...

This paper examines the possible existence of an Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) relationship between China's carbon dioxide (CO<sub align="right"> 2 </sub>) emissions per capita (CO<sub align="right"> 2 </sub>/capita) and GDP per capita (GDP/capita) during the period 1980-2008. The timing of the turning point in China's CO<sub align="right"> 2 <...

By 2012, Hammarby Sjöstad, a former large industrial harbor area in southern Stockholm, Sweden, will be a fully developed residential district containing approximately 11,000 apartments and accommodating 35,000 people. The transformation of the area began in 1996, and the development soon became renowned for its ambitious environmental program, ins...

Today, many new urban areas, such as cities, towns, villages, or districts, are being built worldwide and their completion requires the development of a number of infrastructures. Traditionally, these infrastructures are planned in parallel. However, increased environmental awareness is pushing cities to improve their environmental performance. One...

The grave concern over climate change and new economic incentives such as the clean development mechanism (CDM) have given more weight to the potential of projects for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In the Adjara solid waste management project, even though the need for reductions in GHG emissions is acknowledged, it is not one of the key...

Purpose This paper aims to analyse Chinese policy instruments for climate change mitigation. Design/methodology/approach First, the paper reviews Chinese energy consumption per unit of GDP (EC/GDP) in order to determine the overall effects of the combined policy instruments. Second, the different policy instruments are compared in terms of their e...

Waste management in Europe has experienced significant changes since the 1970s. The majority of Member State waste management regimes have shifted from policies based on the control of waste disposal activities, to include goals for waste prevention and recovery. The rapid increase of plastic packaging recycling in Germany had a number of unintende...

This study evaluated the impact of socio-economic and lifestyle changes on nutrient loads and water quality in Haapsalu Bay, the Baltic Sea between 1995-1996 and 2003-2004. Monthly monitoring data of water quality in four rivers discharging to the bay and seawater at five sea stations were used. External input of TN to the bay remained almost uncha...

Given the aim of motivating householders to behave in a recycling-friendly manner, there is a need to understand consumers' recycling behaviour. This paper documents and analyses acceptability and awareness of a pre-recycling society, through a survey carried out in the region of Minsk, Belarus. The results show a large number of people have no str...

A coupled source-transport-storage model was developed to determine the origin and path of copper from materials/goods in use in the urban drainage area and the fate of copper in local recipient lakes. The model was applied and tested using five small lakes in Stockholm, Sweden. In the case of the polluted lakes Råcksta Träsk, Trekanten and Långsjö...

The environmental impact of internet is growing, reaching an estimated 1.4% of world greenhouse emissions. This impact is hidden for both users and web developers. Understanding and analyzing the environmental footprint of a website is not an easy task. The impacts are distributed through multiple hardware networks and a global user base, making th...

This paper focuses on the management of Climate Change Mitigation (CCM), seeking a working institution capable of addressing its cross-scale and multi-level challenges. Currently, two most studied forms of institution are co-management and transnational networks, of which a common point is that they both attempt to build up cooperative networks. Wh...

Despite management of point sources, heavy metals today remain at an elevated level in the urban environment, with diffuse sources dominating the emissions. In order to manage these pollutants, it is necessary to understand the coupling between the urban sources of heavy metals and their monitored, environmental levels, for example in aquatic sedim...

Eutrophication is a major threat to the Baltic Sea, causing algae blooms and hypoxic bottoms. Ecological engineering methods aiming at help mitigating the nutrient imbalance problems have already been initiated or are being planned in the coastal zones of the Baltic Sea. This includes harvesting of reed, macro algae and blue mussels as nutrient and...

ICT has reshaped our society, and with the current accelerating development of technology, and its wider distribution throughout the globe, they will continue doing so even more. These changes in society are important for sustainability. They affect the physical way the society and the environment interact, but they also affect the way people think...

Theories and practice of sustainable development have to be discussed and developed within a broad range of actors in different areas of society. The complex concept of sustainable development interacts with at least four separate systems that in one way or another affect each other: ecosystem function and change, economic performance and change, t...

This paper discusses the present character of environmental monitoring in Swedish municipalities. We have found that local environmental monitoring in Sweden is insufficient. There is very little connection between monitoring activities and local environmental goals, and environmental goals have been established without considering information from...

This paper presents some thoughts on the use of material flow accounting (MFA) as a tool for providing information to the environmental policy making and management in a city. Examples are given from the early approaches to MFA made by the Environment and Health Protection Administration in Stockholm. Further, some results and experiences from a cu...

We are nowadays increasingly presented with information about greenhouse gases in our everyday life. However there seems to be a gap between this increase in the exposure to carbon dioxide information and the understanding of how to interpret it, making behavioral change difficult. This article presents examples of how different applications have d...

The European Union (EU) has adopted a mutual water policy for its members and this has been ratified by Framework Directive 2000/60/EC -the Water Framework Directive (WFD) -,which establishes a common policy. Good water quality shall be obtained and preserved in the EU. Water is not any kind of good, it is a heritage that has to be protected and pr...