What a change! temperatures: up to 6°C today and the previously slippery, icy paths become safe to walk on. Today the sky is clear and blue so I headed out for a walk through town and along the banks of the lake. Just to give you a better context for where we are, here is an embedded map that you can scroll, zoom etc, and on today’s walk I wandered through town and along the banks of Malaren to the east.
The shoreline here is dominated by apartment developments, much like docklands in Melbourne, though mostly only 5-6 storys tall. Vãsterås has become a commuter suburb, and this side of the lake area is close to the central station, and it is only 1 h each way to Stockholm.
There are also oodles of marinas. In summer there are always lots of boats out on the water. By this time of year the water is getting a little solid, so the marina berths are mostly empty and the boats are all wrapped up for winter. They seem to have the art of shrink-wrapping large yachts worked out.
The water’s edge is fringed by frozen and refrozen ice, and there are lots of interesting patterns to contemplate and photograph.
By the lake at the edge of town is a huge old building that I discovered was the old thermal power station. This was closed in 1982 and is now a historic monument that houses the “Kokpunkten, Västerås’ action water park”. It’s currently surrounded by cranes so I assume they are doing further renovations.
The current power station, across the bay, is a highly sophisticated thermal power station with capacity for 520 MW of electricity generated mostly from combustion of biomass (though it was originally commissioned in the 1960s to use oil). In Australia we throw away a huge amount of energy in our thermal power plants – cooling water and the like. Here the “waste” heat is piped through town. Under-road heating keeps the central streets free of ice, and households have heat exchangers in their basements to extract the energy for radiators and water heating. The whole town is, thus, efficiently heated. For reference, the plant generates 950 MW of heat that would otherwise be waste, almost twice its electriciity genration capacity. Further eco-credentials; they just opened a new unit that can generate heat and electricity from domestic waste as well as biofuels. This one unit alone can supply about half of the needs of the town for heat and electricity.
Offshore from Vãsterås are lots of small islands that look very scenic. the islands are generally low lying and tree covered. During the most recent ice-age (the Weichselian glaciation), about 70,000 to 10,000 years ago, this whole area was covered in an ice sheet up to 2 km thick. As the ice sheet moved, it ground the granite below relatively flat, so the whole area is undulating rather than mountainous.
Despite the oncoming winter, there are still plenty of waterfowl on the lake. I must find out how they survive when the whole lake freezes over.
That’s all for now. I’ve added more photos to the gallery at https://goo.gl/photos/yX21ne76vG6MUR6t7