Page - (000022) - in Clean Water Using Solar and Wind - Outside the Power Grid

xxii Clean Water Using Solar and Wind: Outside the Power Grid Energy has always fascinated me and may explain why I wanted to study nuclear engineering in the 1960s, a time when peaceful nuclear energy was supposed to save the world. I was engaged in the planning of the first Swedish nuclear reactor. Soon I became involved in automatic control and got a faculty position at the Department of Automatic Control at Lund Institute of Technology (now the Engineering Faculty of Lund University), Sweden in 1967. As a control engineer I was challenged in 1973 to discover whether control could be of any value for wastewater treatment operations. This triggered my interest in water and over the years I have been increasingly involved in water system operational challenges. In the Department of Industrial Automation at Lund University we did research applying control and automation in water, power and electric energy systems. When I retired in 2006 and had more time for reflection, I started to see more clearly the many connections between water and energy and how closely they depend on each other. The buzzword water-energy nexus had been created. Dr Allan Hoffman, at that time Senior Analyst at the US Department of Energy, Washington D.C., was probably the first to use the term. He had opened my eyes to the water-energy challenges and we met in person for the first time in Washington D.C. in 2008. Since then we have had regular contact, and Allan has given me a lot of constructive feedback, new insights and encouragement. At the time when the first edition of my book Water and Energy was published in 2012 the challenges of the water-energy nexus had been widely recognised. I was quite pessimistic about the development of the climate negotiations, water quantity and quality consequences of fossil fuel exploration and processing, oil accidents and oil spills, and the lack of political will to make any positive changes towards a more sustainable future. However, seeing progress in the climate negotiations invigorated my spirits and provided inspiration for the second edition of the book (Olsson, 2015). The commitments by both the US and China to sign the Paris Agreement were a truly positive sign. In the last chapter of Olsson (2015) I tried to describe the new hope from renewable energy and the possibility that water and energy can  be decoupled for energy production. So, in 2017 I was encouraged by Mark Hammond, IWA Publishing, to widen the scope of the chapter and examine how renewable energy can provide water, not only in areas where electricity is already available but also in Downloaded from https://iwaponline.com/ebooks/book-pdf/520710/wio9781780409443.pdf by IWA Publishing user