Allthough it is nice to have a small personal corner on the internet such as this site, it is also nice to have an audience. And, to be honest – the audince reading this blog is usually marginal. Which of course is not very strange, considering that it mainly consists of short regurgitations of stuff I’ve done elsewhere. Despite being a poor strategy for generating masses of readers, I think my blogging practices are unlikely to change any time soon (perhaps in an unemployed post PhD vacuum, who knows). Therefore, it is good news that a group of PhD candidates at our department now have established a blog at the well-read Norwegian research portal forskning.no. The first entry was published today by Kristine Ask and deals with “fiction and mad scientists”. Stay tuned here for more posts on science, technology, theory and other exciting topics by colleauges of mine and myself! (Will probably generate more short regurgitations here by me as well, hooray!)

Last week I did a presentation entitled “Organic innovation – on innovation in the bioenergy industry and media coverage of bioenergy” which was hosted by the centre for renewable energy (CRE) at Gløshaugen campus (CRE, by the way, has a brand new – and very nice website – check it out and take note, dept. for interdiciplinary studies of culture). If anyone is interested, the talk is actually available as a video lecture here. The idea, I think, is to videotape all the lunch lectures from now on, something which should make this site quite interesting to follow in the weeks and months ahead – at least if you are interested in renewable energy developments.

A counple of weeks ago I attended a small conference dealing with small scale rural bioenergy development in Norway. One of the presenters (from mjøsen skog) showed the audience a graph I thought was quite nice:

Basically, this graph (which is difficult to read, sorry about that) shows the price development for three categories of forest biomass in Norway since 2002.  The red line indicates the price of what was previously considered “low value” biomass – biomass which the graph clearly shows, is not really “low value” any more, since it has caught up with the other categories. The presenter attributed this shift to the emergence of bioenergy as a viable market opportunity in Norway, and I have no reason to object to this analysis. This is one of the obvious points that bioenergy protagonists like to make – bioenergy can literally transform waste into a valuable resource, an argument I thought was nicely summarized with this graph

Following up on our article in ISPS, Marianne Ryghaug and I had an article on print in the norwegian newspaper Adresseavisen today, where we basically sumarize some of our findings in Norwegian. You can find it online here