 I'm the energy man coming to you live and direct from Paradise on Earth, Kailua, Hawaii. And my guest today is going to give us a little bit of an international look at clean energy. And this is kind of a mandate actually from the owner of Think Tech, Hawaii. He wanted us, number one, to use our fuzzy background on Zoom so you can see I have a fuzzy background now. And number two, that we kind of bring in a more international look at the topics that we cover and minds clean energy. So we have Ida Taylor from who grew up in Scandinavia and is familiar with some of the energy initiatives going on there. And currently lives in Paradise on Earth here in Hawaii. She might even say Paradise on Earth is Norway, but she's living in a warmer place than Norway. I can guarantee you that. And so welcome Ida, good to have you on the show today. Thank you Stan, aloha. Thank you for having me on the show. It's really exciting to be here and talk about my background as well. I was born and raised in Norway, but has lived in Scandinavia for the first 30 years I guess of my life, among one of the places I live was also Iceland, then decided to move to Hawaii in 2015 to pursue my master's degree in sustainable development. And I also did my MBA at HPU. So I've been always been interested in the environment. I guess it started, I had my first environmental club, I believe, when I was six years old with a couple of my neighborhood friends where we picked trash and reported it to a youth organization back home. Yeah, so been very passionate about energy, I guess, and how we can utilize the natural resources we have. And coming from Norway, that's kind of the upbringing we are so dependent on hydropower. That's our main main resource for electricity. So it was kind of changed moving here to Hawaii and see how much we're dependent on fossil fuel on this, as you say, paradise, island. Yeah. When you say hydropower in Norway, do they have mostly dams or do they also have like in-stream hydro where the water keeps running and they just have turbines in there? The most of it is in-stream. Oh, that's great. Yeah. One of the things that I've actually talked about here that is underutilized is Hawaii used to have a lot of pineapple and sugarcane, and they have aqueducts and streams to move the water all over from where it's caught up in the mountains all the way down to the fields and the plains. And right now, that water, for the most part, is still flowing, and we could be using it for hydroelectric, and maybe we should visit Norway and get some hints from Norway on how to do in-stream hydro, because I really think we could probably get maybe up to 15% to 20% of our electrical requirements just from in-stream hydro like Norway. So what are some of the other innovations that you remember from your younger days in Scandinavia about that region's look at renewable energy, clean energy, the transition into like North Sea wind, and maybe if you know much about hydrogen, some of the things that are being done in hydrogen up in Scandinavia and in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and even Iceland, which I guess is kind of sort of like Scandinavia, some say it is, some say it's kind of like, eh, we'll tack it on because they're nice people, but it's not technically part of Scandinavia. Well, I think we include them, so yeah, we can call it Scandinavia. Well, I think the biggest thing growing up was clearly the electric car. And we had a factory in Norway that created an electric car. It did not become the huge success that Tesla has been, but it was surely an adventure. And I remember seeing it for the first time in this, being taken away by how quiet it was and how rapid it moved. So that was a huge milestone. Another milestone I think also was when we started using biofuel, especially in Stockholm, they were early on using grease from the restaurant industry to power their transportation, especially the buses. So that was huge thinking back. What time frame was that? Oh my god, that's a, I would say it was like early 2000s. Okay. And then, yeah, all of the wind power stations has been, of course, we have had the same discussions as people are having here in Hawaii with having them offshore, having them in lands, being an ice ore, killing the animals. So kind of participated in all that. It was huge when they built all of these fields out in the ocean, both outside the Netherlands and also outside the UK, on the southern eastern side of the UK. Did the folks in Norway come to any kind of consensus or is it still kind of split whether the wind is a good idea or a bad idea? I would say I think that the population is still divided. Okay. Everybody wants the energy created from the renewable energy sources. I think we all agree that that is way better than the historic energy sources. But when you have it in your backyard, I guess, that changes the outlook a bit and I can understand that. And that's why they tried to build it in those areas where offshore for once where it doesn't affect people's environmental or nearby surroundings and also in those areas where people don't live. I think one big difference between Hawaii and the North Sea that people don't really think about is that the North Sea is actually quite a bit shallower when you get offshore than here in Hawaii. Off of like the Waianae coast, you can be offshore less than a mile and the water is already a mile deep and you don't get anywhere near that on the North Sea. So the North Sea wind turbines are actually anchored to the seafloor and the distance that you have to lay the cables to get to shore are still pretty reasonable. You can maintain them because they're not super deep. By the time you get 12 miles offshore in Hawaii, you're in like three miles deep water and it's really kind of rough terrain in some of it where it's uneven and I don't know how good it would be to lay cables down that deep and have to work on them and keep them maintained. But that's something in Hawaii where we have an added complexity to doing offshore wind and then like you say, there's a big pushback. We have an acronym. It's not just a Waian acronym, but it's pretty well known. It's called NIMBY, not in my backyard and the NIMBY folks don't want to see wind turbines right off Waikiki or right off of their neighborhood on the North Shore. It would really upset a lot of people and I've talked to the legislators that have their districts in the North Shore where we have wind turbines on land and a lot of the community is pushing back even though they accepted them at first. They've kind of found them kind of disturbing and annoying. But like you say, we all want cleaner air and we all want clean water and we all want a clean environment. But it's kind of tough when it impacts you personally at your house or on your farm or in your residence. So I was just kind of curious. It sounds like Hawaii and Norway are pretty much feeling the same. There's some folks that really see it's important, but folks that get impacted personally, they probably are still going to push back even with clean energy. Yeah, I think you're right on that stand. Norway has I'm familiar with a ship that was being built by Kawasaki heavy industries in Japan to move liquid hydrogen from some part in Norway to some island communities in Norway. Do you know anything about that project or anything about where it's being used? If you're referring to that electric to ammonia to electricity project. Yeah. So yeah, so we have this arch blogger up in the North called Swalberg. So that is one of the places that's being considered for that kind of project. And Swalberg is very unique given that it is an island far up in the North with all of the all of the constraints that the weather and the cold Arctic weather can put on a place. And it lives a pretty small population over there. And they don't have they used to have half the island used to be Norwegians and the other half used to be Russians. So they used to have a coal mine over there, which is inactive at the point. They still need energy. So yeah, this is my understanding was that the government is trying to eliminate all of the coal power fired power plants. And that's why this community was moving off. And the ammonia compared to liquid hydrogen, ammonia is kind of another way to move a lot of hydrogen because it's NH3, if I remember right, so it's it's some nitrogen from the air and some hydrogen, three atoms of hydrogen, one atom of nitrogen. When you mix them together, you have a pretty dense hydrogen molecule that's easy to transport. Whereas if you have liquid hydrogen, it's like minus 200 something degrees Celsius, it's super, super, super. As cold as it gets in Norway, liquid hydrogen is way colder than Norway ever gets. And moving that kind of liquid and dealing with what we call boil off, which is even when you have it that cold, if it if it warms up just a little bit, it starts to turn back into a gas and it's really hard to move it. So hearing that they're actually starting with ammonia makes sense to me that because Japan is doing the same thing. Japan buys a lot of hydrogen from Australia in the form of ammonia, they ship it in and they reconstituted back into nitrogen and hydrogen and use the hydrogen for transportation and for their grid. Are you familiar with any projects in in Scandinavia that do hydrogen on the grid for like power generation at all? I haven't been working closer with on hydrogen. But what I know is that we are heavily invested in it. Like based upon the Paris Climate Accord, there's multiple countries that are are now getting the government is funding projects that are hydrogen based, both in the Netherlands, England and also in the Scandinavian countries. Kind of one of the obstacles with that has been with hydrogen is that it's expensive and that is what we are trying to accommodate. And I know for hydrogen vehicles, especially in Norway, I think there were was 1000 vehicles that were sold that are hydrogen based, but we don't have enough fueling stations for those. So it makes it inconvenient, right? You can't fuel up your car. And so they're working with working to standardize the the loss around us, providing the businesses that operate in this area with kind of a framework. And I know one of our biggest companies within the industry sector, Auken Solutions, their hydrogen branch just recently did a real push towards hydrogen and trying now to to get production up and running both in Norway, but also in their factory in Chile. OK, we're going to take a quick break, Ida, and we'll be back in about a minute and we'll keep talking about I want to talk about ice a little bit, because that's just a fun place to talk about, whether you're talking energy or not, it's just a really interesting place. So we'll be back in about 60 seconds. Welcome back to Stand the Energy Man here in Think Tech, Hawaii. We're talking to Ida Taylor, who grew up in Scandinavia and Norway specifically, and we're kind of talking about some of the contrasting Hawaii and Northern Europe and Scandinavia and Norway in particular on clean energy initiatives and how things are kind of being looked at in both places. And we had a couple of questions. I'm going to try and roll them into one general question, which is, you know, it's here in the United States, we're actually kind of trailing other than California, the rest of the United States is really trailing most of Asia and Europe in fuel cell electric vehicles. I think there's five or six thousand in California now. But like you mentioned before the break, the refueling stations are still the weak point in the system. So one of the questions was for electric vehicles, how widely are they used there? And you started basically said that in Norway specifically, you still have the same problem as California where they're building stations, but they're trying to keep up with the demand. And I can tell you from experience to the overall Europe is much farther ahead than the U.S. in general on clean hydrogen or clean energy and hydrogen. But I can tell you right now specifically that every day there are international articles coming across my stream that talk about how everybody is really lashing onto hydrogen as the energy storage component and running because it's clean, it's, you know, not polluting and it's available to everybody because if you have water, you have hydrogen, if you have methane, you have hydrogen, if you have natural gas, you have hydrogen, if you have oil, you have hydrogen. So there's no country or island left out of the picture. Even Pacific Island nations surrounded by the Pacific Ocean or Atlantic Islands, they still have hydrogen because they're all surrounded by water. And you can make the electricity and hydrogen. You can get that from the ocean. So are there any other comments from, you know, how you how you compare like electric vehicles to what's going on in Norway right now? Because right now, believe it or not, we do have hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in Hawaii, but only on Oahu right now. And that's because our Toyota dealer built a hydrogen station, but our state legislature still catching the laws up that allow them to sell hydrogen once the cars are out of the release. They're currently their hydrogen cars come with the hydrogen for three years. But after that, and the time limit is almost up on those leases, we're not sure how they're going to sell their hydrogen because the state hasn't figured out how to regulate the metering of hydrogen and certifying the stations to dispense it. So that's where the government comes in. The government has a role, even if it's not subsidizing stations, it's making it so that the that the commercial folks can actually sell their product. So do you have any any insight as to me? You started to mention how Norway is trying to encourage more stations. Are they actually subsidizing the stations or are they just finally getting laws to catch up where the stations can operate a little easier? I think the latter is the important factor, like having the laws and the frameworks in place so that both the stations are built after the requirements and also what has been discussed back home is the part when you are fueling the station that has they had a couple of incidents where that didn't go according to code and according to book. So making sure because it's it's a material that can be highly flammable as well, right? And yeah, so with regards to that, having laws, I think Norway has with regards to clean energy transportation done a lot with all of the electric cars and electric vehicles, I think they have per today Norway has the most electric cars per capita. And the reason why they have that is because the government went in and highly subsidized the cars. We tax a lot on new vehicles back home. And when electric vehicles started to bloom, the government removed that. You were also allowed to drive in them HV lane and you were also allowed to park free. So there was tons of incentives to drive an electric vehicle compared to a fossil fuel driven here in Hawaii. We have some of the similar benefits, HV lane and free parking and things like that. I'm not sure how long those will stay in place. But in terms of subsidizing infrastructure, we're still way behind on charging stations for electric vehicles and way, way, way behind on hydrogen stations for fuel cell vehicles. Yeah, and I think right now we have one gas station gas company that has built out some of the hydrogen refilling stations. And it seems like they're just waiting for the government to catch up. And if they haven't been filed, I think the new laws are supposed to be going to place early this year. So yeah, there's a second part to one of the questions that was sent by one of the viewers and he said, are you aware of any challenges with using electric or fuel cell vehicles in the winter when it gets really, really, really cold? I mean, most Americans that live in the frozen north of near the Canadian border are familiar with having to have block heaters where they plug their car in so that keeps the engine block and the oil from getting so thick it won't let you turn your engine over or the batteries don't perform as well in cold weather. And so you don't get the mileage you should if it was warmer. Have the vehicle manufacturers kind of solved those problems in Norway when it's really, really cold? No, unfortunately they haven't. So I know last winter was rough for a lot of electric vehicles. Drivers back home, it was was cold and the battery goes away quicker. So I know my family back home was complaining. They had to recharge their vehicles after each trip that they took. So unfortunately, that is still a problem that needs some improvements. But we don't have to worry about that too much here in Hawaii. So we're OK. Let's let's talk a little bit about ice and what we still have a few more minutes left because I know you've been there and I've been there. And, you know, people, I think until you've been there, you really don't have a good feel for an entire country that uses, like in Iceland's case, geothermal to run everything. They do their electricity off of geothermal. They do all their heating for their buildings off geothermal. It's it's so it's so widespread through the country that everybody is so used to it. And it's just a really neat even where they put the cooling water from the geothermal is now the blue lagoon and you can go swimming in it. And even the kind of the minerals that are in the bottom of the blue lagoon, people put it on their faces like a make up thing to kind of help their skin. So what were some of your experiences in Iceland when you were there? I think having so much or so much access to geothermal and also having that generating the power to the outdoor swimming pools. That was something that kind of was amazing to me, because it didn't matter. If I think about Iceland, it's 300 and it was 280,000 when I lived there. And now I think there are 320,000 people living on this island. And every little town had a swimming pool. And it didn't matter if it was 30 or 1000 people living there. They had a swimming pool and the reason why they could have a swimming pool and maintain that was because they were getting that heated from geothermal resources. And for those of you that aren't familiar with the weather in Iceland, I was doing aviation for the military in Iceland and it's a real experience because you can literally be in almost a balmy autumn or April day there. And within 20 minutes, you could have snow blowing sideways at 40 miles an hour. It changes so fast, you literally had to have survival gear in your car. Just in case you were driving to the store and the weather changed radically because you could freeze to death just by a short trip down to the next city or something. If you got caught in one of these winter storms, it just kind of shows up on your doorstep. So did you have any of those strange experiences of Iceland as well? Yes, I did. You're just rapidly, I would say, but the first three months for me was going around and trying to cover my neck because I was living really close to the ocean and the winds were coming and they were gusting. But I had so many beautiful experiences as well with the weather. It was truly amazing, cold, but an amazing country to live in. So my whole crew was from Hawaii and you haven't seen anything funnier than a bunch of Hawaiians in Iceland. I mean, we were literally taking the cushions off of our couch in our quarters to go sledding on the hills and there weren't many hills on base. But we went in the housing housing area where the military people lived and we were sledding with the kids down the hill on the cushions from our sofa. So it it was really a neat place. But Iceland really has adapted to using geothermal across their entire country and considering that the northern part of their country is above the Arctic Circle. So think about Alaska, probably North Alaska to be more exact for Iceland. That's the kind of climate zone you're in. And like Ida says, they're right on the ocean. So it can be extremely cold and the wind shell factor can be extremely drastic when a storm blows in with 30 or 40 or 50 mile an hour winds and super cold temperatures and it can change radically. I've never seen any place where the weather changed so radically, so quickly as Iceland. But but that's what they deal with. And the geothermal, like you say, really helps them have a nice swimming pool in their community where kids can go swimming in the middle of winter and not not worry about the water temperature and the electricity costs are pretty low because it's easy to produce. And I'm hoping that we can become more accustomed to using geothermal here. And I'm going to have a guest on again. I've had her on once that says there's geothermal available actually on Maui, on Oahu and on the big island that we could be could be using with newer technology that's much safer than what we currently use. So Ida, we're actually down to our last minute. Is there anything that you want to pass on to the viewers regarding your experiences with sustainability and encouragement for the rest of your friends that live here in Hawaii? Yes, my final comments. I think we are on we are on a fine path in Hawaii. There's so much there's so many people I want to make that change. I want to want to create that clean, renewable energy for a sustainable future. So just keep doing what what you guys are doing. And love to be on your show, Stan. Stan, this was this was a treat. So thank you for having me. I'm glad you could join us and thanks to Michael Markridge for introducing us. And we'll have you back on if you do some more talk to some of your friends back in Europe and and have any stories for us. We'll collect a few of them up and we'll have you back on and you can share those with us. OK, for sure. All right, well, thanks, Ida. And to everybody else out there, this is Stan, the energy man signing off for this weekend. We'll see you next Tuesday at 3 p.m. Hawaii Standard Time on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha.