#148 Lund: From District Heating to EnergyNet

In this episode recorded live at the ReThink Cities Summit 2025, Markus Paulsson, Energy Strategist at the City of Lund, Sweden, walks us through how Lund couples visible delivery with system change. District heating supplies around 90% of demand and went fossil-free two years early, helping halve emissions from 1990 to 2020.

We unpack EnergyNet, a bottom-up, digitally controlled, self-steering architecture that links building to building and pushes capability to the edge. We also explore CoAction Lund, an ecosystem model bringing property owners, employers, infrastructure operators and solution providers into shared action beyond the city’s formal mandate.

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Chapters

• (00:01:40) - Teaser question: If you had three magic wishes, that magic wand, how would you use them to sustainably advance Lund's energy transition?
• (00:03:05) - Guest background
• (00:05:53) - Lund's Decarbonization Journey
• (00:08:20) - The CoAction Lund Initiative
• (00:13:00) - Advice for Solution Providers
• (00:14:46) - EnergyNet Architecture
• (00:17:02) - Addressing Cybersecurity Risks
• (00:18:56) - Internalizing Climate Action
• (00:21:19) - The Digital Energy Revolution
• (00:23:10) - Segment: Trial and Error
• (00:26:09) - Ending question: “To you, what is a Smart City?”