- These are the world's first all-electric,
passenger ferries.
So, what are these men doing? Take a guess.
- They're about to charge it?
- I was talking to the audience, but yes, Dusty-
that's right.
This is one of Oslo's all-electric ferries,
and it only takes six minutes to charge the battery
for this ship's 60-minute round trip.
What you're about
to see is the complicated way these ferries get charged.
Yeah, I was surprised, too.
That's it. How freaking simple is that?
We are in Oslo to explore how they are electrifying,
essentially, all of their transportation.
- Look at that crazy dude. He's skiing on asphalt.
Holy s***! I've never seen that before.
- Oslo is electrifying, essentially, everything.
Trams, buses, cars, ferries, bikes, scooters-
and they're doing this because they have some
of the most audacious climate emissions cut goals
in the world.
Like, for real.
By 2030, Oslo's climate budget calls
for a nearly 100% reduction
in greenhouse gas emissions compared to 2009 levels.
These targets actually put Oslo in line
with the 1.5 degrees Celsius target set
by the Paris Agreement.
Norway is seen as one of the most sustainable places
in the world.
Yet, paradoxically, its largest industry is oil and gas,
and it's made them incredibly rich-
but more on that later.
Oslo's government is investing heavily
in key sectors they think can help them
reach their emissions goals.
The construction and transportation sectors together account
for 67% of emissions in Oslo.
So we came here to see how they're electrifying everything
from construction sites down to scooters.
Norway has the most electric vehicles
of any country in the world,
so we're gonna call an Uber to take us
to our filming site today,
and we're gonna see if it's electric.
- Well, maybe we'll get the electric car.
- Yeah.
- All right. - Yeah.
- We got our Tesla.
- So I got one too.
Yeah, it's gonna take a little while to get here.
We headed out from our hotel to visit our first location,
a construction site.
- Nice to meet you. Jason.
- Hendrik, yeah. - How are you doing?
We wanted to see the machines, tools, and methods
that Oslo was using to make the transition
towards clean construction.
Oslo has mandated that by 2025,
all municipal construction sites have to be zero emission.
This construction site is already fully electric.
Even the vehicles that bring the workers
in and out are electric vehicles.
With construction alone responsible for 20% of emissions,
Oslo began paying more for municipal construction projects
to help incentivize the creation
of an electric construction equipment industry.
We're ready for you to show us around the site.
- Yeah, all right.
- This is Kai Vegard Ostnes?
I am really sorry, Kai.
- Yeah, that was good, huh?
Yeah, that was some good Norwegian?
- Yeah.
- Upwards.
- So this is an excavator, and this is fully electric.
- This is electric, yes.
- It is noticeably quieter.
- This is the power core for the excavator.
This has approximately 50 meters in cable.
- Okay.
- That automatically goes in and out.
You can see inside here.
- Oh, wow. - This is the control unit.
- So this itself, this is not a battery.
This is connecting this-
- This is not a battery.
- To the power grid.
- Yes.
- That's very cool.
- This is why I love my job.
Thank you very much, sir.
Thank you.
Can I ask you a question?
What's the difference for you
in operating this versus a gas-powered one?
- Technically, no difference,
but just have this cable you need to be careful with.
- I mean, is it a pain in the a** being connected?
- Okay.
So what is this machine?
- That's a compactor to make ground solid.
- So this is electric?
- This is electric, yes.
- This is electric.
- This one, we have built ourself
because there's no one in the market
that can provide you with it.
- So with all of these devices that are plugged
into the grid, what happens if there's a power outage?
- Long lunch break.
- We just learned
that all the public parks in Oslo are serviced
by electric trucks to pick up trash,
and that's what this is.
Is this big truck electric?
- This is electric.
You want to film while he's tipping?
- Yeah, that'd be great.
And this is a battery-powered one.
- Battery-powered wheeled excavator.
This one's operating totally alone.
Yeah, we charge during lunch time,
and we can also detach the batteries and replace them.
- What you're about to see is-
- So I'm switched.
- That was it? That was the battery switch?
- Yes. This is empty, and now I switched to this.
It's full.
- Okay.
- Yeah, it's not complicated.
So what is this guy doing?
- Oh, he is going to charge during lunch break.
- Fully charged in 60 minutes with the fast charger,
but the excavator only needs 30 to 40 minutes of charging
at lunch to get through the remainder of the day.
If it's being used for light work only,
the excavator doesn't even need to be charged at lunch.
- That's it?
- That's it.
- So this excavator is battery-powered.
This charger is a standard charger that can charge a car.
Kai told us that you could pull this
into a gas station in Norway
and plug it into a normal charger, and you could charge it.
Norway now exports electric construction equipment
to other countries-and Oslo is ahead of its 2025 goal
to make all city construction sites emissions free.
While the city of Oslo is making great progress
towards its emissions goals, the country, well, not so much.
- My name is Sigrun Aasland.
I am the director of ZERO,
zero emission resource organization in Norway.
What we do is promote solutions
to the climate crisis, really.
Norway has a history in the climate policies
of setting many goals over many years,
and not achieving them.
I think in Oslo, what's made it possible is
that Oslo has this climate budget
where they actually commit politicians to cutting emissions.
- Believed to be the first of its kind,
the climate budget integrates decision-making
about emissions alongside financial budgeting,
elevating the practical importance
of addressing climate change.
- Oslo implemented its climate budget in 2016,
and it's not a very complex and complicated instrument.
We need to count CO2 as we count money,
so there is a budget that you cannot exceed.
It makes politicians accountable to actually keep to it.
- We called another car via Uber
and we're gonna see if it's electric.
Looks like it is a Prius, and it is Prius Hybrid, so half.
Road transportation accounts for nearly 50%
of Oslo emissions with the single biggest contributor being,
you guessed it, scooters.
- I almost hit that girl. I almost hit that girl.
- No, no, not scooters!
Cars. Cars.
So we decided to rent an electric car to explore-
I'll let Dusty tell you.
So Dusty, what are we doing today?
- Oh, yeah. Um, I'm not really sure actually.
I think we're just getting
in this car and going for a joy ride, right?
- I mean, yeah, neither of us have driven a Tesla
before, so Freethink credit card.
- Oh my God. How does this work?
- Get in the car.
Hi, crew.
- Hello. - Hello.
- I don't know if it's on.
I don't know where the keys are, and I haven't owned a car
since I was 16, so this will be interesting.
- Sounds scary.
- What could possibly go wrong?
- I will say, Norwegians are horrible drivers.
There's a lot of traffic accidents, so.
- Okay.
- Just hit the gas pedal.
- By 2025, all new cars sold
in Norway must be zero emission.
The country's already known
for having the most electric vehicles in the world,
but that didn't happen by chance.
Government policy going back to the 1990s, well ahead
of the rest of the world, has incentivized the purchase
and use of EVs through lower taxes,
free parking and charging, emission-free car zones,
and ring tolls that penalized drivers
of petrol cars, or gas cars
for my fellow American cowboys out there.
- We're at a busy intersection in Norway,
the electric vehicle capital of the world,
and we're gonna see how many electric cars we can call out
as they pass.
I'm going by the rule thumb
that if it doesn't have a tailpipe, it's electric.
Nope, gas. That was gas.
This is gas. I'm gonna say gas, gas, gas.
You think that Jeep is gas?
This intersection is undermining our whole story here.
We got a Tesla. That looks electric.
If it's futuristic, I'm gonna say it's electric.
That's electric.
There's still a decent amount of gas cars
but, you know, I don't know.
Anywhere else in the world,
can you stand on a corner and see this many electric cars?
I think that's probably the point, right?
They still have the most, even if not every car is electric.
This is the best-selling Norwegian vehicle of all time,
the only electric vehicle currently manufactured in Norway.
This is the Paxster.
I mean, it's basically a golf cart, right?
- I'm not an expert on golf carts.
- Well, me neither. This is Catherine Lund.
She works at the company that makes this kind
of golf cart, the Paxster.
- We developed the Paxster together with Norwegian Post.
So they needed a vehicle that was green, of course,
ergonomic, efficient, in their daily delivery.
- Norwegian Postens enter and exit their vehicle
over 700 times a day when delivering the mail.
That's why the Paxster doesn't have doors,
even though Oslo winters are pretty cold.
Over 3,500 Paxsters are in use across Europe,
and not just to deliver all that wonderful junk mail.
- Food delivery companies, bakeries, public sectors,
e-scooter companies like Bolt, it's fun to drive.
- The Paxster right here,
it's a vehicle that we use on our daily operations
to help change the batteries on the scooters
and the bicycles.
- Using two Paxsters and a couple electric vans,
Bolt replaces the batteries on their entire fleet
of vehicles across Oslo every two days.
- It's a much more efficient vehicle.
It's more versatile as to where you can park,
and I don't know if this should be on camera or not,
but you can also cut the lines on the bike lanes and so on.
Very simple to slide them in and slide them out
and then replace them on our vehicles.
- The Paxster can carry a half day's load
of batteries, which are then swapped out at lunchtime.
The Paxster's battery lasts for an eight-hour shift
before being fully charged in six to eight hours overnight
via existing charging infrastructure.
- This has a much smaller battery,
but still gives us more than a hundred kilometers range.
- Awesome. Well, could I maybe give it a drive?
- Oh, of course. Definitely.
- Okay, I'm gonna get seatbelted in.
Do you seatbelt yourself in when you drive?
- Of course I do.
- Of course you do. But do you really?
- Yeah. - Yeah.
But do you really?
- Um, yeah. - Yeah.
- Don't be scared of using the whole accelerator.
It's kinda fast.
- Don't be scared of using the whole accelerator-
okay, here we go.
As a last mile delivery or service vehicle in urban spaces,
the Paxster seems like a decent solution.
Maybe it's nothing more than a golf cart,
but it got me thinking:
Maybe reducing emissions
through electrification isn't just about remaking the buses,
cars, trams, and ferries we already have.
Maybe it also means we need to invent new,
in-between options, customized to different needs.
And if they're fun to drive, that doesn't hurt either.
We're here in Oslo exploring electric transportation.
I'm gonna get dizzy if I keep doing that.
Yeah, okay we're good.
Oh s***, hold on.
So, I've been trying to find an electric scooter,
and the three that are within walking distance are all dead.
All the batteries are dead.
- Yep. - There's one!
- That one's not dead.
Almost all of Oslo's public mass transit,
from trains to trams to buses, is already electric.
And by the end of 2023,
an additional 450 electric buses will replace the remaining,
diesel-fueled ones currently on the roads.
This will make Oslo the first capital city in the world
with an all-electric public transport system.
Designed in Norway and built in Turkey,
these are the first all-electric passenger ferries
in the world-and they're whisper quiet.
So that's the water making noise,
but the engine's not very loud.
Those engines are being powered by 1,017 kilowatt hours
of batteries on board-
and this is the battery that powers the ferry,
the operator, the ferry operator.
A six-minute,
2,000-kilowatt supercharge gives the ship all it needs
for a 60-minute round trip.
A ferry could operate for three hours straight
without recharging, and has backup generators just in case.
Batteries on board mean the risk of fire, but what's wild is
that a battery fire can't actually be extinguished
by the crew.
All they can do is cool the batteries
with a water mist system,
and contain the fire long enough to evacuate passengers.
It takes the fire department
and their special equipment to put out the blaze.
- On a national level,
Norway is a country with many small fjords
and many ferries all across the country that have now,
since 2014, been very rapidly electrified-
and that has happened much faster
than anyone thought was possible just a few years ago.
- I'm determined to take as many modes
of electric transportation as possible while in Norway,
so next up is the tram.
How do the people of Oslo feel about this electrification?
Well, Oslovians, Osloites? Hm-
One inhabitant of Oslo told us
that people don't generally notice as long
as the train or tram they need each day shows up
when they need it.
This sign is essentially saying, "Give your car a rest,
and choose to be green and ride public transit."
Our experience with public transport was
that it was clean, frequent, busy but not overcrowded,
and one app for purchasing fares made it simple
and easy to use.
And maybe when it comes
to cutting emissions in the transportation sector,
these quality of life issues are actually quite vital
because it makes sense to me
that someone is more likely to leave their car parked
at home and to take the bus, not because it's electric,
but because it's safe, affordable, and reliable.
- Dude, we rode a tram for like, what, 10 minutes
and we're like...
- In the mountains now-
and the city just disappeared.
We climbed up this hill and then we're like,
on the foggy hillside now.
Crazy.
We've arrived at the contradiction
at the heart of this story.
Even though Norway is powered almost entirely
by clean, abundant hydropower, the country sells
over two million barrels of oil a day
for the rest of the world to burn into the atmosphere.
Profits from that oil enables their aggressive,
climate response.
- While Norwegian electricity is very clean, oil
and gas is still a large source
of emissions on a national budget
because of the production phase of the oil.
- Yeah, tell me a little bit about that:
As I understand it,
oil and gas is the biggest industry in Norway?
- It's the biggest industry.
It's also a large revenue
for government's finances, of course.
- Thanks to oil profits,
Norway owns about 1% of all listed global stocks.
That's over $200,000 for each one
of the five million Norwegian citizens.
Instead of ramping down oil production
in the immediate future, Norway is trying
to make their oil extraction business run
on clean wind power.
- A lot of people have their jobs related to the oil sector,
a lot of qualified personnel, a lot of capital,
a lot of expertise in workforces
that many people argue we could now use,
building new green industries.
- Norway exports oil,
but uses clean power domestically.
Is that hypocritical, or is it a clever use of the power
of oil profits in service of a sustainable transition?
- The main concern in the environmental movement,
of course now, is that we take all those resources
and those people and that capital,
and we make sure that we use that
in building green industries, on the back of oil and gas.
- 'The fight against climate change requires new,
innovative approaches.
We aim at least to triple our funding
for climate adaptation and resilience.'
- As we've seen, there are a number
of reasons electrification makes sense
for Oslo as their path to a cleaner future.
And that path might not make sense
for other cities with their own unique circumstances,
but Oslo can be seen as a case study, a role model even
for how a city can leverage its built-in advantages
and get truly aggressive about addressing climate change-
even when its own country isn't moving as deliberately.
But recently, Norway actually followed the city
of Oslo's lead in adopting its own national climate budget.
Cities can lead countries,
and cities can be inspirations to each other.
What innovations are just waiting to be unleashed
in cities across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas
that efforts like Oslo's can inspire?
The electrification of Oslo could maybe be the kindling
that lights the fire of urban climate action worldwide.
- I don't know if Dusty's gonna come back to work.
- The turning radius is pretty impressive.
- aOur sound guy can't get out
of the way fast enough.