We were super lucky to be joined by Samar Ahmed, sustainable energy systems engineer and researcher (who also just won the Sparbanksstiftelsen for her thesis on climate neutral futures for Växjö - congrats Samar!)  As storage is one of the major issues that renewable energy futures face, since they are "unstable" / ephemeral, it was really interesting to hear about how industry and states are looking at this from a large scale as well as decentralised systems perspective. (constant demand - constant supply / felxible demand - flexible supply) We spent some time trying to imagine scenarios that can tick these boxes but aren't relying on SMART top-down systems. We all agreed that new ways of thinking are needed, and we should be doing more "slow engineering". This worked well with all the technical talk about ceramics we had going on, as Anna-Karin Arvidsson came to visit too, where among other things, she enlightened us about Ollas, a water storage and automated watering technique. 

As fate would have it, routine electrical maintenance was underway, so most of the lab was conducted by candlelight, and powered by pre-made tea, which also gave us some food for thought... Also, electricity prices are at record highs, cos it seems some nuclear plants got shut down without enough backup plans in place, or something.