Illustration: Daniel Bjerneholt - Haus Society AB

Spring Fires Day

We are the ones changing the society - How do we ensure that the future will be better than today?

Regardless of whether the new green industries materialize or not?

District heating is an enabler for a flexible future energy system! Do you know how your home is heated?

Read the story of Spring Fires Day and the child Max who is looking forward to celebrate the return of spring and the sun, the day when the solar cells are cleaned and lifted onto the roofs to suit the solar angle of the summer months

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Spring Fires Day

By Andrew Dana Hudson

The morning sun was bright, promising to be warm, and soon all through Skellefteå the rooftops would be alive with people working and talking, shouting to tilt this way or that way, sharing food and warm drink, and wondering if it would all be for the last time.

“Get up, Max.” Maja Perez shook her son. It was early, and Max—who hated change, especially to his schedule—knew it. He burrowed deeper into the covers, still thick despite the quick-changing season. “I need you today,” Maja said, then suppressed a sigh, left him, and went to fix breakfast.

Presently Max got up and went through his routine, then padded to the kitchen where his parents were whispering to each other.

“It was contentious, but in the end the budget went through without renewing the program,” his father Emil said. Emil had been at a kommun forum the previous night, Max remembered, and had gotten home late.

Maja shook her head. “Money talks, I guess.”

“I don’t know if that’s fair. Not everyone in the crowd was against the Pipe-and-Lines Project. Most, sure. But a few got up and shared their reasons for supporting the new transition.”

“Hmph. Plants by HydroLine or the southern utilities, probably.”

Emil shrugged. “Maybe. Still, they’ve got points. They say what we do here just isn’t efficient enough to be worth the extractive footprint of replacement.”

“Hmph,” Maja said again. “If we’d worried about extractive footprints in the last transition, we’d all be a lot worse off.”

“Yeah, but the younger generation is really sensitive about these material circularity issues. They don’t get why we throw some things away, they don’t accept that we need new material. They think it's all more climate sin.” Emil rubbed at tired eyes. “I mean, Max came home from school last week crying because they’d talked about this in his class and he’d remembered that my father had worked for Nordic Ore.”

“I didn’t cry,” Max said, unable to maintain his silent stillness by the door. His parents started and then looked at him, then each other. His mother finished arranging the cheese and bread Max always had for breakfast and brought his plate to the table.

“No, you didn’t,” Emil said, very carefully. “I misspoke. I’m sorry.”

Max sat down, not contented but not knowing what else to say about that.

“Happy Spring Fires Day, buddy,” his father said, brighter. “Are you excited to help your cousins set up Aunt Karin’s roof?”

Max nodded and ate. His parents left him to it. When he was done he scraped his crusts into the compost and put his plate into the dishwasher. He found his parents in the mud room, continuing their conversation.

“And it’s a boutique system. Hard to modernize,” Emil was saying.

“That doesn’t mean we give up on it,” Maja said. “It’s part of the city, part of why we like it here. I mean, today of all days, we should remember that. I can’t believe the council did that last night.”

“Probably thought if it was fresh for people, they’d be even less happy about it going away eventually. And budget season scheduling is always a nightmare. Not a great look, but when is politics ever?”

Max wanted to hear more, to understand, but he didn’t like people standing in the mud room, so he spoke up. “All done. Boots time.”

“Boots time,” Maja agreed. She didn’t look happy. “Max, I know it’s a different morning, but we’ve talked about listening in on conversations you weren’t invited to join.”

“Sorry,” Max said, though he wasn’t. He grabbed his boots and began to labor over the laces.

“Stay safe today,” Maja said, turning back to Emil. “Try to not get yourself tossed off the roof over politics.”

“If anyone even shows up,” Emil said.

“Oh, I think they’ll show up,” Maja replied, as she ushered Max out the door. “I think everyone will have a lot to talk about.”

#

Spring Fires Day had once been a day of traditional bonfires to celebrate the turning of the seasons. Those fires had been bad for emissions and bad for air quality, however, and nowadays people had learned to view dumping soot into the air as an unhygienic foolishness of generations past, like eating moldy food or allowing open sewage on the streets.

So instead they took the opportunity of the holiday to get together with neighbors and haul light-but-awkward photovoltaic panels up to the rooftops of houses and apartment buildings. All through the winter those panels were set vertical and attached to the south-facing sides of most buildings, where they would be free of snow-cover and could pick up a trickle of photons cast by the low sun, some even bouncing off the ground’s white powder and ice. Then, come spring, the snow would melt and the sun would lift higher in the sky. Spring Fires Day was the city’s cue to scrape off the last of its dripping ice and move its solar up to the rooftops, where they would provide a steadily increasing share of the city’s electricity.

Max and Maja took the bus together down toward the city center. Skellefteå was shaped like a snow star—instead of just expanding in a big centralized lump, mid-century development had focused on growing some of the smaller surrounding communities and stitching them into the centrum with transit and services, leaving green and wild space in between each ‘point.’ Aunt Karin lived in a point on the other side of the star.

The bus was less crowded than it would be on a normal day, Max observed, but more crowded than it was on most holidays. Everyone was like them, on their way to join a volunteer work crew. Max liked that people got organized this way on Spring Fires Day. Not everyone needed to do their own home’s panels, like Emil and their neighbors would, because many people lived in apartments. Not everyone could do their own panels, because they were old or infirm or renters. And anyway most of the panels belonged to the city. So many people went across the city to where they were most needed, or to help out relatives, or just to spend the day hanging out with friends.

Max understood all this and liked the order of it, but disliked the disorder of all these people on the bus going where they didn’t belong. Thus he spent the bus ride in a state of mild agitation, staring out the windows, counting the corners where snow had been pushed into big piles, waiting to be hauled to the warehouses where it would be stored through the summer. Covered in wood chips, it could last for months, and provide a useful supplement to Skellefteå’s district heating-cooling system.

Soon they arrived at the centrum and got off to change busses. A few big timber buildings loomed over them, their south-facing sides shiny-black with photovoltaics. The bus stop was packed, many bodies on their way to Spring Fires Day gatherings, milling around without the surety of purpose of commuters, a few smelling of alcohol or cannabis, having gotten started early on the festivities. The mood was mostly jovial, but cut through with an edge of discontent.

“Wanted to sleep in, but I heard this was the last time we’d get to do this,” a tall man said a bit too loudly. “A damn shame if you ask me.”

“It’s not the last time,” his companion replied. “The panels might not be getting replaced, but most have still got some years on them. If you don’t bang them up too badly today.”

“So you’re saying I should hang back and supervise?”

“I’m saying you should lay off the vape until we’re done.”

Rather than wait amidst the throng, which she knew would stress Max, Maja decided to cut through the centrum greenhouses and catch the bus from a less crowded stop. The night chill was still burning off, and so passing through the ‘airlock’ entrance came with an invigorating blast of humid, fragrant warmth—waste heat piped in from the various industrial facilities that called Skellefteå home. They stopped, and Maja helped Max out of his coat before continuing on.

Local food had been a priority for Skellefteå since the early boom days, a rare luxury in the north. ‘The City of Glass Houses’ it sometimes called itself on tourist promotional materials. Groceries offered fresh-grown fruits and vegetables year-round, and many families kept a plot in their neighborhood’s indoor gardens.

And so the glass-covered city center was the pride and joy of Skellefteå, and that pride was well deserved. The ceilings were high enough to accommodate not only the dense gardens that provided much of the city’s vegetables, but also exotic fruit trees. Refugee birds lived in the greenhouses year round, driven out of their tropical habitats by extreme heat. Max loved the place, found it familiar and calming, and Maja loved being able to take him so often.

“Mom. Mom. Was the tall man right?” Max asked, once he had finished reacquainting himself with his favorite trees and plants. “Or the short one?”

Maja thought back until she remembered what men Max meant, then said, “The short one.”

Max mulled this over as they took their accustomed path, passing doors that led directly into restaurants, shops, and the big Sara Kulturhus. A few older people—not up for climbing around on rooftops—tended garden patches. Maja waved to a friend, who waved Max over to taste a winter strawberry, plump and warm from the grow lights.

Holding his strawberry as they walked, but not yet eating it, Max returned to their conversation. “Why would the tall man say that then?”

Maja had been wondering all morning when she would need to explain this to Max, and how. She knew, from long years of motherhood and from the advice of experts, that the best strategy was to be clear and direct. But how to do that about big, complex socio-technical systems that, despite her son’s budding interest in them, were bigger than any eleven-year-old could grasp.

“He said that because he was upset with the decision the city made last night,” she tried. “They voted to stop funding the rooftop solar program. No one has to stop using the solar they have, but eventually each panel will need to be replaced, and the power company has decided they won’t pay for it. Which some people think will mean the end of our peculiar Spring Fires Day and All-Saints Day traditions.”

“Why do they want to stop?”

“They don’t want to stop the traditions, but they have plans for a new energy system they believe will be better. The powerlines will be switched to start bringing electricity up from the south. And there is a big hydrogen pipeline connecting Sweden and Finland. You remember the huge wind park we saw on our trip to Kukkola last summer? In Finland they never stopped building new energy, so they make hydrogen to sell to industry. Soon the pipeline will reach Skellefteå. They think this new system of electricity from the south and hydrogen from Finland will be better than if we collect our own energy and make our own hydrogen.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s cheaper. Because our solar panels are getting old, and replacing them is going to be expensive.”

Maja steeled herself for a long stretch of more ‘why’ questions, demanding she explain perspectives she only kind of understood herself, and didn’t entirely agree with—the failure of photovoltaic recycling programs to ever really work as promised (though they had always been underfunded), or the rising cost of certain metals and minerals now that the Global Minimum cut down on cheap, easily exploitable labor (or was that price gouging by the mining companies?). But instead Max declared simply,

“Because of mines.”

“Yes, that’s part of it,” Maja acknowledged, suppressing her sigh, and she was glad to let the conversation lapse.

Soon they exited the center, redonned their coats, and boarded another bus. On the ride Max pondered what his mother had told him. He liked the city’s bright-black solar—always warm to stand in front of on those early sunny days before Spring Fires Day moved the panels back onto the roof. He didn’t like the idea of living in a world that would stop doing something perfectly good based on ‘cost’—that distant abstraction that seemed to always be changing for no apparent reason. On the other hand he was also learning, from school and from his peers, that the way adults were used to doing things and making things was bad and could not last. It was a contradiction he was not sure how to resolve. The older he got, the more of these he encountered, and he did not like this at all. But he was starting to realize, unhappily, as all children eventually do, that he did not have a choice in the matter.

#

Once upon a time, Skellefteå had been a boomtown. The world had needed to change—fast—and Skellefteå had said, “you can change us.” So green industry, looking for friendly territory and cheap power, had moved to Skellefteå, bringing lots of workers and lots of money. Skellefteå was not a metropolis, however, not a cultural hub where people were clambering to live. It was far from the action, and cold to boot. Many workers lived in barracks, temporary accommodations to be endured before returning to one’s home town or country. Many executives adopted the ‘fly-in-fly-out’ lifestyle, committing climate crimes in the name of the transition. Skellefteå did not want to be a glorified industrial zone.

So, in order to create a city that could house and keep and satisfy the influx of people, Skellefteå had remade itself along radical lines. The kommun brought in visionary architects, designers and city planners, the thinkers on the very bleeding edge of sustainability. They built beautiful apartment buildings inspired by Red Vienna, and they topped them with seasonal solar panels and small, silent wind turbines originally designed to generate electricity on small boats. They pushed cars out of most of the city center and covered the streets with greenhouse glass, and filled those greenhouses with flowers and gardens. They pumped waste heat from the factories into the district heating, and used that to warm the greenhouses. For those newcomers not used to Norrland’s long, cold winters, the ability to walk through a warm city center all year round was a big draw.

For a while Skellefteå prospered and grew, welcoming new residents by the thousands, there to work not only in the factories but in restaurants and groceries, in the schools and health centers, in arts and culture, in the greenhouse farms, and in building and maintaining all the new housing and civic infrastructure. They came from India, China, Thailand and Bangladesh, from Southern and Eastern Europe, from the Americas and Africa, and even from elsewhere in Sweden, where word began to spread that Skellefteå was not a sleepy frontier town anymore but a bustling nugget of multicultural neo-modernity.

And in doing so the city not only made things the world desperately needed— copper and batteries and biofuels and more—but also demonstrated how cities could, if they chose to, change quickly and for the better even amidst the chaos and horror the climate crisis promised to bring down.

But nothing lasts forever. Soon enough “green business” was just “business.” Skellefteå’s head start drained away as the rest of the world laggingly caught up. Industry did not keep coming to Norrland; there were just cheaper places to set up shop, once other countries built up their own clean energy infrastructure—often leapfrogging Sweden’s aging hydropower supply to build terawatt-scale solar installations in the planet’s growing equatorial deserts. Many of the workers that had come to Skellefteå to build the new factories did not stay once construction was finished, as the age of automation meant running the factories took fewer hands, and there were soon more exciting opportunities back in their home countries. And there were some missteps, perhaps, some fumbled opportunities. NIMBYism and frets about spoiling idyllic hunting ranges all got in the way of building the massive wind farms that had promised to keep the party going. Not everyone wanted Skellefteå to be a new metropolis.

When the smoke cleared at the end of the frenzied transition decades, Skellefteå was bigger but not very big, and had become a kind of strange jewel in the north. The rest of Sweden looked on, bemused, at the greenhouse parks, not quite getting it. But for the people who lived there, the transformation the city had undergone in the boom years was the best thing that had ever happened to them.

There was good housing and good jobs for all, and the pioneering designers that had been given free rein to reimagine Nordic urbanity had built in a philosophy of localized production and resilience that kept the cost of living down. And the world, as a whole, was getting wiser, having learned from the social agonies of the teens and twenties a great deal about how to curb the excesses of capitalism and ensure that violence and reaction did not seem more appealing than peace and progress.

And yet, as Maja had said, money still talked, and there were pressures to change, to conform to each decade’s idea of what it meant to be modern and sustainable, what it meant to repair the mistakes of the past.

Maja remembered her own anger, as a youth and a refugee from Spain, at the broken world her parents had left her. She and her generation had done so much, sacrificed so much, to get the energy transition limping, and then running. And yet, here she was, facing perhaps the same kind of frustration from her own child. Now that the tables had turned, she did not so much like being the target of such blame.

Was this just the way of things, now? Would every generation despise the previous one for their complicity, for not delivering the utopia that, amidst the power of modernity, seemed like it surely must be possible?

#

They reached their stop and walked, boots crunching grainy slush, to the house where Emil’s older sister Karin lived. The electric bicycles belonging to Karin’s two grown twin sons leaned by the door. Max got excited. He liked his cousins, who rarely treated him like a child, despite them being, to him, impossibly adult and cool. Spring Fires Day was one of the few days of the year when he got to see them both.

Aunt Karin met them at the door, abuzz with holiday responsibility. “Max, you go around back,” she ordered, amidst hugs. “Hugo and Leo are getting started. Maja, can you help me with these lunches?”

So Max went around back, and his mother stayed and assisted her sister-in-law with assembling sandwiches for the boys and for the neighborhood volunteer crew. Karin, as was her habit, immediately started talking politics.

“All this ‘back to baseload’ bunk is just an excuse to squeeze homeowners,” she said. “I think we should talk to the grandparents club. There must be someone there who remembers how to blockade a pipeline.”

Maja laughed. It was a tempting idea, and after all, pipelines had their own complications and dangers and downsides, didn’t they?

“Imagine if it was all older people chaining themselves to the worksite this time around, instead of young,” she said, though she knew it had been a multigenerational effort that had used their bodies to make fossil fuels unprofitable.

“They’ll pry my PV from my old, dead hands,” Karin joked, or half-joked “But seriously, you know what my mother used to say? She’d tell us to never trust anyone who wants to make the terms of your survival more centralized. That kind of move is for fascists, which is what these teenage mine critics are. They understand the liberatory power of solar and want to roll it back before they start going after the rest of our way of life. That way we won’t be able to resist once we’re hooked on their hydrogen.”

This take was, perhaps, a bit further than Maja was willing to go, but she was reminded of her earlier disagreement with her husband. She let out the sigh she’d been suppressing all morning.

“Emil was very conciliatory about it,” Maja said. “Didn’t seem ready to push back on Hydroline.”

Karin was the kind of sister-in-law who could be counted on to never take her brother’s side. Today was no exception.

“Well, that’s just like men, isn’t it?” she said, tearing a lettuce leaf with gusto. “Always the last to realize the blood in the water is their own. That’s why it falls to women to close the door on this sort of nonsense before the jackboots have made themselves comfy by the hearth.”

Maja laughed again, though a bit nervously this time. There would be no living with either of them if Karin and Emil ended up on different sides of this debate. Why did life always have to get so complicated?

#

Out back, the day was warming to its promise, and around the neighborhood one could sense many people bustling and chatting. Max was watching his cousins intently, holding the coats they’d stripped off as the sun got higher. They were removing the large photovoltaic panel from the brackets that attached it upright to the south-facing side of the house. Hugo was holding the panel steady, while Leo worked a screwdriver.

“Want to do the honors?” Leo asked Max, once he’d gotten to and loosened the last screw. Max eagerly obliged, carefully twisting out the screw and placing it in the little cloth bag they were using to save the bracket hardware for when they’d need it again in the fall. If they’d need it again, Max realized.

Then they had to wait their turn to use the ladders that were circulating around the neighborhood—the standard one affixed to the side of the house being not quite enough for the two-person job. While they waited they brought out rags and sponges and began to scrub and wipe the panel down.

“Will we get to do this every year?” Max asked, anxious again as he helped clean.

“Sure, pal,” Hugo said, and Leo nodded.

“But everyone else is going to stop, aren’t they?”

The twins looked at each other, then back at Max.

“Eh, who knows,” Leo said. “But if you like it, we’ll keep at it as long as we live here, even if we have to buy our own panels from an antique shops. Until we’re all too old, that is, and we get our kids to do it for us.”

This was what Max had wanted to hear, but as soon as he’d heard it, he wondered if it was actually what he wanted.

The ladders arrived, then, handed over by a neighbor that avoided Max’s eye. Once this was extended and locked in place, the twins got on either side of the big panel, grabbed onto the handles, and began to walk it up one rung at a time to the roof.

There was a moment then, when Hugo’s grip slipped, perhaps still a bit soapy, and Max, who was standing well back, envisioned the panel crashing to the ground. In that moment, Max thought of the whole life cycle of a panel, the materials from the mines, the manufacturing process, the supply chain, the vast dumps in China and America where mountains of broken and obsolete panels were discarded, which his teacher had shown them in class. And yet, despite all that, the panels produced more energy than they consumed, powering Max’s school tablet, his reading lamp, their oven and fridge, flowing into the city’s grid to charge buses and bicycles and everything, all things they needed. In that moment, it seemed too impossible and overwhelming that this should be how the world worked. Not just for solar panels but for shoes and coats and electronics and batteries and toys and everything. Everything made and thrown away, and no matter how much they reused and recycled still the mines would get deeper. How could the world live with this? And what other way to live could there possibly be?

Then Hugo’s fingers found the handle again, and Leo said “whoa!” Max covered his eyes and then uncovered them. The brothers wobbled and found their balance, and laughed with relief. Max laughed too, and his strange feeling faded.

Once the twins were safely on the roof, Leo came down and held the ladder while Max climbed up too. Maja and Karin came out of the house and joined them, bringing sandwiches in a backpack.

“Almost time,” Karin declared, watching the time on her phone. From up top they could look out and see others around the neighborhood getting into position. At noon there was a tradition, one the city had adopted in lieu of the bonfires of old. “Now!”

The twins got up and lifted the panel, not yet snapped into its brackets, and twisted it to catch the sun. The PV cells blackly caught the light—a momentary evocation of leaping flame. And there were other glints too, other flashes, coming from other rooftops. Max looked around at this little patch of Skellefteå, alight with captured sun.

They had lunch on the roof, and got the panel bolted down. Then Maja and Max went home. Neither of them knew quite what to think of the day, what might or might not be the last Spring Fires Day. But for the all the worry and debate, they had spent it with each other, and with others, and that had made it a good day, one perhaps worth repeating.