The CleanTech Business Forum Key Topics

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Bio Energy (Bio Fuels, Biomass and Biogas)

In the San Diego region, there are nearly 30 biofuel companies, along with several world class research institutes and universities. San Diego is fast becoming a hub for biofuel discovery, production and commercialization. Finnish entities have staked out a considerable position in biofuel technologies as well and the country is a leader in biomass based energy production. Finland, as an active EU-member, has increased the utilization of renewable energy to a larger extent than the other EU member nations. The share of renewable energy in Finland will be increased from 28% to 38% by 2020 (EU average 20% by 2020). Simultaneously, traffic fuels will be substituted with bio-based fuels up to 20% by 2020 (EU average 10% by 2020). Other related technologies that will be adopted within the next 10 years are bio-coal and diesel from forest biomass (2^nd generation) and hopefully later also biofuels from algae (3^rd generation) sources.

Energy Efficiency / Intelligent Energy Management & Smart Grids

Advanced metering, demand response, energy storage and distribution grid management are all sectors that are in the center of the development of the smart grid ecosystem. Finland is one of the leaders in smart grid development and is currently installing 3 million smart meters. As a cold climate country, Finland has had to develop a wide range of solutions for energy efficiency in housing to avoid extra costs and to meet the European regulations. Effective heat recovery, multi-glass and selective glass windows, geothermal and bio energy utilization, and accurate and tight constructed houses are some of the new applications. Recently, very interesting passive and low energy construction solutions have been adopted.

Water Technology

Water is one of the most critical resources. In California, water availability is an everyday issue, which leads to enormous pressure to develop technologies to support sustainable water use in the area. Finland, on the contrary, boastsmore than 6,000 groundwater aquifers and nearly 120,000 lakes. To shelter the highly vulnerable water resources and systems, Finland has developed top-level technologies for reducing water use, recovering energy from waste water, closing industrial water cycles, and efficiently treating sewage sludge and waste water.

Waste Management and Utilization

Source separation and utilization of various recyclable materials is common in Finland. For several decades, paper, board, glass, and metal have been collected. One of the Finnish high-tech waste utilization technologies is separation of combustible waste and its incineration in a fluidized bed boilers and gasification plants. For the last 15 years, many regions have also adopted collection processes for the utilization of biodegradable wastes (i.e. kitchen waste). These utilization methods are composting, digestion, and distillation of bio-ethanol which is also produced from industrial wastes (i.e. brewery and bakeries). In some areas the recovery rate of municipal solid waste is as high as 90%.

Clean-ICT

The Finnish ICT industry is well-known in global markets. ICT-based new environmental service solutions for the Cleantech sector are now among the main R&D funding choices for the national innovation system.  New sensors, mobile data transfer solutions, as well as solutions for interoperability, collection and analysis of various data are all necessary for environmental reporting applications within the public and industrial fields. Several Finnish entities including private companies and research institutions work diligently within this field and seek also cooperation opportunities in California.