My name is Espen.
I'm the co-founder of Brim Explorer
together with Agnes Arnadottir,
my friend from university.
We started the company two years ago and our goal was to set a new standard of
sustainable tourism or sightseeing ships.
Since we started the company two years ago, we built the ship that we're on right now,
which is called the Brim
and it's a battery-operated ship.
It has 800 kilowatt hours of batteries,
which means that we can cruise for about 10 hours on electric power.
We're operating our ships in Norway and our
power production is hydropower.
So we're running on 100% sustainable electricity.
The reason why we built Brim and why we started the company is that
both Agnes and I, we were running a small tourism company using old sailing boats.
And we saw a huge potential in the industry that
we could improve the quality of what was offered to our guests.
In terms of comfort onboard a ship, in terms of engine noise –
we wanted to eliminate the engine noise because when you're out to experience nature,
the engine noise can get in the way of the experience.
With a hybrid electric ship and when running on pure electricity,
there is no noise from the engines.
We're seeing more and more reports coming out that ocean noise pollution
is causing a lot of trouble for marine environments.
You see that even small fish are dependent on sound to communicate
And that's obviously one of the advantages of our ship
and we see that when we're doing whale watching,
when we're encountering wildlife at sea,
that we make less of an impact on their surroundings and that's
a value added to the experience that you see –
that you're on a ship that has a more gentle approach to wildlife.
That's why we also designed the –
our hull and our propulsion system in a way
to kind of minimize the noise that we use, so
on the ship that we have – it's a 25 meter-long catamaran.
It's 11 meters wide, but our propellers are abnormally large –
we have,
our propellers are 1.5 meters in diameter.
That allows them to rotate at a much slower speed,
which then produces less cavitation and less sounds underneath.
When you combine that with an electric drive,
you get to use the torque of an electric engine
much more efficiently because the electric engine can produce a lot of power –
it has instant torque, no matter the RPM.
And when you don't have the vibrations and the sound from the diesel engine
that resonates through the shaft, through the drive shaft,
you eliminate noise in the water as well.
The Brim Explorer was finished in October 2019.
And we've successfully operated it for a whole season up north,
taking tourists out to see whales, see Northern Lights
and do sightseeing cruises in Tromsø.
Two weeks ago, we had our second ship delivered.
So those are our first two ships.
In the pipeline, we are designing two full electric ships
to go in, in shorter distances inside the Oslo fjord,
where we're now operating Brim
and also at a destination further north in Norway.
What we'll see in the future is that more and more actors will build these ships.
And I think, by paving the way and showing that it's possible to
to build sustainable ships, without it costing a fortune –
that's one of our driving forcesthat we can actually showcase what we have
of available technology and how that actually improves your experience onboard.