Your choices:
1 Water; 2 Electricity
| What is your resource? | What do you want to deliver? | What is the service the customer wants? |
| Biomass (digestible sludge) | District cooling | Comfortable indoor climate |
| Biomass (fermentable sludge) | District heating | 2 Electricity |
| Biomass (solid) | Electricity | Process cooling (< 0 °C) |
| Geothermal | Fuel: Gaseous | Process heat/steam (50 - 150 °C) |
| Sunshine | Fuel: Liquid | Process heat (150 - 1000 °C) |
| 1 Water | Fuel: Solid | Process heat (> 1000 °C) |
| Wind | Local cooling (ind. house) | Transport |
| Residual oils/fats etc | Local heating (ind. house) |
In many cases in modern life, the unique properties of electricity, the king of all energy carriers, makes it preferred. Electricity is used for escalators, lifts, to run home- and office electronics, illumination, for food preservation and cooking and to obtain high pressures or extremely high temperatures in industrial processes.
Electricity is also used for a huge number of processes where its unique features are not fully utilised such as for indoor climate control, for intermediate temperature industrial processes and a number of other applications where it could be replaced by other energy carriers.
The supply of electricity to those processes and applications where it is necessary should be done using the highest possible efficiency – and hydropower production of electricity is the technology with the highest efficiency.
With well-maintained hydropower stations, the production cost for electricity is minimal. Thus, from a societal point of view hydropower production is the one showing the highest possible efficiency and it may be done in an environmentally friendly way. At the same time, hydropower production can be made very profitable.