MORNING WITH LIVE MEETING

Good morning to you all. Today we'll be talking about sustainable future. Our online meeting starts on Microsoft Teams at 9:00 WET / 10:00 CET / 11:00 EET. Check the time here.

The meeting will last about two hours. Starting at 10:00 CET, we will first present the work we have done since our virtual mobility in Portugal last month, and then, at about 11:15 CET, we'll begin an international debate on the future of motor cars.

The meeting can be accessed here:

After the presentations it's time to find out about the technologies that might make our plans for a sustainable future possible. In the Lappeenranta region, some of those technologies have been around for decades.

There are two reasons for that: Lake Saimaa and the ubiquitous forest.

Great quantities of water and wood have always been a lucrative combination for commercial wood processing: wood was needed for raw-material, water for transport and energy. Industrial wood processing arrived in Lappeenranta in the late 19th century, when the Norwegian Salvesen brothers set up their first saw mill in what is now the district of Lauritsala. In the early years of the 1900s, their saw mills were acquired by Kaukas Limited, a Mäntsälä-based bobbin manufacturer that had also arrived in Lappeenranta in search of high-quality birchwood.

Almost by accident, Kaukas initiated the idea of recycling by becoming a pulp mill. The company's visionary CEO, Gösta Björkenheim, suggested in the late 1800s that the waste timber from the bobbin factory could be processed into pulp. Nobody, we believe, called it sustainable at the time. Financially, however, it was brilliant: the years before World War I were a golden era for the Lappeenranta plant. The bobbin factory had regular deliveries to customers in Russia, Central Europe and Britain, and the pulp mill was Finland's largest producer of sulfite pulp. The Salvesen purchase in 1916 brought Kaukas four saw mills and 70,000 hectares of well-stocked forest.

With the exception of the years of World War II, not only Kaukas, but wood processing industry in general boomed in this country. In terms of output, the south-east part of Finland was one of the top three paper-producing regions in the world in the 1980s and 1990s.

The 1990s saw major mergers in the wood processing industry: one of them gave birth to the present UPM-Kymmene Corporation that today carries on the operations of Kaukas Limited. They no longer produce bobbins - the bobbin facility was closed down in 1972 - but they still manufacture pulp, paper and timber.

Since January 2015 they have also produced biofuels. Their biorefinery in Lappeenranta is the first commercial-scale facility in the world to produce renewable diesel and naphtha from crude tall oil in the old Björkenheim style: from the residue of their own pulp production. The annual capacity is 120 million litres, and this time it can truly be called sustainable: the very same biofuel can also be used as a basis for plastics and biocomposites to reduce the need of fossil-based raw materials. The site of the biorefinery is marked on the map:

For most of the 20th century, Lake Saimaa provided a convenient way to transport timber from logging sites to saw and pulp mills. These days most of the timber is transported by road and rail, but it is still possible to see the occasional tug boat and log boom traversing the open lake.

If the lake itself provided transport, its outflow channel, the 150-kilometre-long River Vuoksi, provided energy. With its average discharge of 540 cubic meters of water per second, there was so much energy to be harnessed that a small town on the banks of the Vuoksi chosen for the purpose quite literally became the powerhouse for all Finland for decades. That town was Imatra, some thirty kilometres east of Lappeenranta:

In 1900, the first hydroelectric power plant was built at the Linnankoski Rapids on the outskirts of Imatra. The plant extended 100 meters from the shore into the river, generating electricity with 34 turbines of which 18 were in use simultaneously. As it was intended to be in temporary use only, it was built almost completely of wood, and there was no dam or artificial reservoir apart from the partial obstruction the 100-metre long structure caused to the natural flow of the river. The construction of a permanent power station some four kilometers downstream from Linnankoski began in 1921. When the work on the new power plant together with its dam and reservoir was completed in 1929, the Linnankoski plant was dismantled above the turbine housing, which was left flooded in the river. The site of the Linnankoski plant is here:

The turbine chambers are now accessible to diving enthusiasts. If you have ever wondered what the submerged ruins of an old hydroelectric power plant might look like, today is your lucky day:

The permanent power station was built at the Imatrankoski Rapids, right in the middle of the town. It proved to be very permanent, indeed. It is still there; it has been generating electricity for 90 years, and there are no plans to shut it down. It was last refurbished in 2015, and its annual output of energy is approximately 1,000 gigawatt hours. The power station can be seen here. It is not marked on the map, but you can see it if you switch to the satellite image:

But there are also winds of change that are blowing. They, too, are blowing from Saimaa. In Muukko, between Imatra and Lappeenranta, there is one of the biggest onshore wind farms in Finland with estimated annual electricity production of over 40 gigawatt hours, covering the needs of over 3000 private houses with electric heating. The farm is equipped with seven Alstom ECO110 wind turbines, each 3.0 megawatt. The rotor diameter of the turbines is 110 meters and the hub height 90 meters. The farm is not marked on the map, but if you switch to the satellite image and zoom in, you can see the turbine towers:

AFTERNOON AND EVENING

And now, after all this, it's time for lunch. If you were here, you would now have vegetable lasagna and potato sausage soup on the school menu.

After the lunch, we would have taken you to Lake Saimaa for the last time.

With its 14,000 islands, Saimaa is a labyrinthine freshwater system whose waters slowly flow from north to south before rushing through its outflow channel, the River Vuoksi, to the southeast across the Russian border into Ladoga, Europe’s largest lake. The Saimaa drainage region covers most of the southern part of eastern Finland, an area about the size of Belgium, reaching Lake Oulujärvi in the north and the Russian border in the east. In places, the lake has more shoreline per unit of area than any other region in the world, the total length of it being nearly 15,000 km.

The Saimaa basin was formed by the continental ice sheet during the last Ice Age some 12,000 years ago. At that time, thick and heavy ice covered the entire area; when it melted, Saimaa gradually emerged through various stages - all of them thousands of years long - as a freshwater basin separate from the sea. Today, it lies about 76 metres above sea level.

In short, it is Finland’s largest lake, and the fourth largest natural freshwater area in Europe. In 2014, it even made the Wall Street Journal list of the five most beautiful lakes in the world.