Name: Is tourism in the Norwegian Fjords going green? | BBC News
Uploaded: 2026-02-28T12:02:40.000Z
Duration: 5 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

A trip aboard a tour boat is a fairly standard activity for tourists in Norway.

Adverbs of manner

But increasingly, how these boats are powered is changing.

This trip is a gentle cruise around the Oslo fjord.

It's not particularly fast, but powering this boat below deck is 20 batteries.

When we started the company, we set a goal of changing the way we experience the ocean.

We also said that we want to be a world pioneer in electrification and electric tourism at sea.

So this room contains 400 kilowatt hours of battery, equivalent to four, four to five electric cars.

Is weight the biggest challenge when it's come to putting the batteries on the boat?

As you see, these batteries are held in place by a rack system.

Then the whole room is insulated according to Martin regulations.

So they charge with approximately 88 kilowatts of power for an 800 kilowatt hours battery pack.

That would take 10 hours from empty to full.

But we're never below 20% and we're seldom above 95%.

So seven hours to full charge, there's never a danger that you're going to have a boat somewhere out on the tour and runs out of juice.

No, the captain wouldn't leave port if that was a risk.

We've had to rethink how we'd electrify a vessel.

We developed a philosophy that we call electric by design, where we're going through basically every component on board the ship.

What we have in mind is that the most efficient component is the component that you don't put on board.

So if we can make the vessel more efficient by eliminating components that you don't need, that's how we unlock longer range.

Alright, so let's go down to the heart of the electric vessel.

We've designed a rotor and a stator for high torque.

The whole setup comes in one installation.

And all of this is custom built for your ships.

We searched most motor producers worldwide looking for a direct drive application, and

we were unable to find something that was ready for the marine market.

How does driving electric boats compare to what you've driven before?

By going electric, Brim Explorer hopes to capture a more environmentally focused customer.

But there is also regulatory pressure pushing companies to adopt more electric ways in the western fjords.

The area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

And from this year, smaller passenger boats need to be zero emissions.

Norway has been a testbed to get things moving, but we're seeing a global market.

And do you think that is starting to accelerate or are people still really hesitant to adopt this technology?

that's also a lot of the motivation that we have, we see that the cost of operating this vessel is one third of the cost of operating a hybrid electric vessel, because the maintenance cost of a fully electric system is very low.

I drive an electric car and I've had it for four years, never done anything maintenance wise to it.

That's going to be a new revolution when it comes to electrification of vessels.

Norway has been in a strong position to adopt this kind of technology.

It's a fairly wealthy country and it has already seen good adoption of electric cars.

For other places to follow, there will be bigger challenges.

Technology optimism is the word that I like the most, because there are a lot of dark news in the world.

There's a lot of things that aren't going as good.

What we're seeing is that there is now starting to be a competitive advantage to go electric.

And I think in a hundred years, it doesn't make sense anymore to burn stuff, to move or to create energy.

We'll use renewable energy in a lot bigger sense going forwards, and that's.

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Is tourism in the Norwegian Fjords going green? | BBC News

equivalent

eliminate

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