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The Wind Power Pioneer Still Pushing the Frontier · What's Your Problem?

• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Pushkin.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: Wind power is big, and it's getting bigger. Wind generates
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: about ten percent of the electricity in the United States,
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: even more in parts of Western Europe, and companies like
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: Vestas Wind Systems sell billions and billions of dollars of
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: giant wind turbines every year. To a large extent, this
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: giant global industry was created by a few tinkerers in
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: rural Denmark in the nineteen seventies. They weren't PhDs, they
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: weren't running venture backed startups. They were students and farmers
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: and teachers who were reacting to the skyrocketing price of
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: electricity and trying to figure out a way to make
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: clean power in a windy place. Maybe the most important
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: tinkerer was Henrik Steesdale. He started out as a farm
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: kid who liked to build stuff, and today, almost fifty
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: years later, he's still building. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: today is Henrik Steesdale. Over the past several decades, Henrick
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: has solved lots of big wind power problems. His latest
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: is this, how do you build giant floating wind turbines
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: cheaply enough that you can have offshore wind power anywhere
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: in the world. Henrick got a start in wind power
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: back in the nineteen seventies when he was just out
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: of high school. The price of oil had gone way up,
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: and he wanted to help his parents figure out a
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: cheaper source of electricity for their farm. So his dad
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: took him up to a small college near the farm
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: where a few people were trying to build a wind
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: turbine to help power the college.
• 2:00
  Speaker 3: So we've end office so that and was fascinating. It
• 2:03
  Speaker 3: was fascinating because of, so to speak, the spirit of
• 2:06
  Speaker 3: it that they had an issue then they did something
• 2:10
  Speaker 3: about it. It was really a sort of intriguing and
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: exciting when you when you have this attitude, at least
• 2:19
  Speaker 3: the perceived problems are not that big. So when we
• 2:23
  Speaker 3: came home from that visit, we immediately went to work
• 2:27
  Speaker 3: and built a little rotor that we mounted on a
• 2:32
  Speaker 3: water pipe so that you could hold it in your
• 2:34
  Speaker 3: hand and then you could go out in the wind
• 2:36
  Speaker 3: and have its spin and get a feel. I still
• 2:39
  Speaker 3: have it. Actually it's a little more than a meter diameter.
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: Okay, and so what is it it's like a metal
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: pipe with with with the.
• 2:47
  Speaker 3: Arms on it, it looks like a two bladed propeller.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: Okay. And did you have a little welding shop or something.
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: How do you even build that?
• 2:56
  Speaker 3: No, there was just built out of wood.
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 2:58
  Speaker 3: So, and then the shaft was bolted to the wooden
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: propeller and then you could take it and go out
• 3:06
  Speaker 3: in the wind. And it didn't work very well. And
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: then we experiment with the shape of the blade and
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: suddenly we got it right. And then it just went mad.
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: You know, you went without There was a windy day,
• 3:18
  Speaker 3: as many days a windy here, and then it started
• 3:22
  Speaker 3: rotating and then it kind of ran away in your
• 3:24
  Speaker 3: hand and spupun with many hundred revolutions per minute, about
• 3:28
  Speaker 3: six inches from your nose.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: This is an exciting moment.
• 3:33
  Speaker 3: It is. I can tell you if you do that,
• 3:36
  Speaker 3: you actually shouldn't try this at home, because once you
• 3:39
  Speaker 3: do that, then you were hooked for life. So based
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: on that, and given that I had some time before
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: I was called off for the army, I said, could
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: we do something bigger?
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: Something bigger, like to generate power.
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: It's something bigger, to learn more, but just has an
• 3:54
  Speaker 3: experimental device.
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: So you're just kind of playing.
• 3:58
  Speaker 3: At this point, we were just kind of playing. It
• 4:00
  Speaker 3: was mostly me. My dad helped me every now and then,
• 4:02
  Speaker 3: but he was working and didn't have much time. So
• 4:07
  Speaker 3: what I did was that, since it was just for
• 4:09
  Speaker 3: experimental purposes, I built a frame on the farm wagon,
• 4:14
  Speaker 3: and then I could run the wagon out in the
• 4:17
  Speaker 3: field when it was windy and do experiments with it,
• 4:20
  Speaker 3: and then I could take it back into the barn
• 4:23
  Speaker 3: again when I was done.
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: So this like a wagon that you hitch to the
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: back of a tractor or something.
• 4:29
  Speaker 3: Yeah, pull it out with a tractor, and then we
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: could test it out there. I was able to measure
• 4:36
  Speaker 3: that on a windy day, this little rotor could produce
• 4:40
  Speaker 3: significantly more electricity than what we used on the farm.
• 4:44
  Speaker 3: Then you can take me onto something. And based on that,
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: I said, couldn't I build a turbine that should power
• 4:50
  Speaker 3: the whole farm even when it was not that windy,
• 4:53
  Speaker 3: mounted on a tower and build it genuine wind turbine.
• 4:57
  Speaker 3: And that is what I did. I bought a welding
• 5:00
  Speaker 3: machine and taught myself to weld, so I could build
• 5:02
  Speaker 3: a tower. We bought a lath so that I could
• 5:06
  Speaker 3: turn the shaft and so on. At the junk It
• 5:09
  Speaker 3: cost us at that time fifteen cents a kidro.
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: So you're saying it was at the junkyard. So they
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: were selling it like for scrap. When you say fifteen
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: cents a killer, they're selling it like by the pound. Essentially, Yes, exactly, fantastic,
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: but they worked. You took it home and you plugged
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: it in and it worked.
• 5:26
  Speaker 3: No, no, no, no, it was from nineteen fourteen. So
• 5:30
  Speaker 3: I took it home and made it work. Let's put
• 5:33
  Speaker 3: it like that. But once it worked, then I could
• 5:36
  Speaker 3: use it for this, for these things. So it all
• 5:40
  Speaker 3: worked out, and in seventy eight we were able to
• 5:42
  Speaker 3: install the turbine and it ran for thirteen years.
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: So you build this tower for your family farm, how
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: do you come to license it to this? What it
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: was then a you know, local little cream manufacturer vest Us.
• 6:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so it was actually not mighty signed here for
• 6:05
  Speaker 3: the family farm. That was licensed, okay, because there was
• 6:10
  Speaker 3: something I had welded myself. I'd built the blades myself.
• 6:14
  Speaker 3: I had found old equipment at the junk yard and
• 6:17
  Speaker 3: so on that was not licenseable. You could not base
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: a production.
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: You can't license buying an fifty year old lathe and
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: fixing it up.
• 6:28
  Speaker 3: Ay, that doesn't work. But I happened to meet a
• 6:31
  Speaker 3: local blacksmith who was also wind interested, and there were
• 6:35
  Speaker 3: a lot of people who were interested in winter at
• 6:37
  Speaker 3: the time. And he was not a bookish person. He
• 6:41
  Speaker 3: didn't read or write well, but he was a very
• 6:44
  Speaker 3: very good craftsman. And then gradually we figured out we
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: could work together in the way that I could design
• 6:51
  Speaker 3: it for him, and then he could in return do
• 6:55
  Speaker 3: some machining for my turbine that I didn't have equipment for.
• 7:00
  Speaker 3: So I ended up and he didn't have any money.
• 7:02
  Speaker 3: I didn't have any money he wanted. It is still
• 7:05
  Speaker 3: done from new parts, because he was already thinking about
• 7:08
  Speaker 3: doing it professionally. So we of course had an issue
• 7:12
  Speaker 3: how would we get such a thing funded? But then
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: I discovered, purely by chance, that there was a new
• 7:20
  Speaker 3: sort of subsidy that had been created for inventors within renewables.
• 7:26
  Speaker 3: And I wrote to the government body that arranged this,
• 7:30
  Speaker 3: and then they actually wrote back and said, we'll send
• 7:34
  Speaker 3: over somebody to speak to you, and then a very
• 7:36
  Speaker 3: nice person came over spoke with him, and then two
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: weeks later I had a check for about ten thousand
• 7:42
  Speaker 3: dollars in the mail, and then it was kind of
• 7:46
  Speaker 3: now we had the means, Now we could do it.
• 7:48
  Speaker 3: So I designed a turbine and he built it, and
• 7:51
  Speaker 3: he built it and installed it at his workshop which
• 7:53
  Speaker 3: was out in the countryside, and it worked, and then
• 7:57
  Speaker 3: we kind of said, could be there actually something here
• 8:01
  Speaker 3: that really could become a business. So purely by chance,
• 8:06
  Speaker 3: a friend of ours was it. He had the use
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: of a small plane and was flying, I think mostly
• 8:14
  Speaker 3: for pleasure, and he had flown over Vests and had
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: seen that they had a wind turbine installed. It was
• 8:21
  Speaker 3: not operating, but one could see that they were interested
• 8:25
  Speaker 3: in wind, otherwise they wouldn't be doing.
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: This, just to be clear. He'd flown over the sort
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: of headquarters of this local company called Vestes, Okay.
• 8:34
  Speaker 3: And then I basically picked up the phone and called
• 8:37
  Speaker 3: them and said, we know that you're interested in wind,
• 8:40
  Speaker 3: shouldn't you get a license to a proper turbine? Which
• 8:44
  Speaker 3: was a little cheeky, if you can say, but they
• 8:47
  Speaker 3: were interesting enough to come over and have coffee.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: They were a company that had made farm equipment and
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: cranes and that sort of thing.
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: Yes, yes, there were a couple of hundred people and
• 9:00
  Speaker 3: they were interested. So we made a deal whereby they
• 9:03
  Speaker 3: would pay a certain amount for each turbine. And that's
• 9:08
  Speaker 3: how they got started in wind. That was biting out
• 9:10
  Speaker 3: this license and starting to do the production of our machine.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: And Vestas became a giant, right, a global giant in
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: making wind turbines.
• 9:20
  Speaker 3: Yes, yes, they very quickly, they were, They were really good.
• 9:24
  Speaker 3: They very quickly got a significant share of the market
• 9:28
  Speaker 3: here and Denmark. And when then the California market started
• 9:33
  Speaker 3: booming around nineteen eighty three due to some test credit
• 9:39
  Speaker 3: arrangements that were implemented to motivate people to invest in wind,
• 9:45
  Speaker 3: they were very well positioned to go in and take
• 9:48
  Speaker 3: a good part of that market. And that is what
• 9:50
  Speaker 3: they did.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: And I remember I happened to grow up in California
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: in the nineteen eighties, and I remember there was a
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: wind farm, a bunch of wind turbines you would see
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: east of San Francisco when we were driving to San Francisco.
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: Were those based on your design? Those those turbines.
• 10:08
  Speaker 3: There may have been forty different manufacturers, so you may
• 10:13
  Speaker 3: well have seen some of our turbines, and you would
• 10:16
  Speaker 3: surely have seen a wide rain sell of other turbines
• 10:20
  Speaker 3: if they were running and operating every day. There would
• 10:23
  Speaker 3: have been hours just.
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: Joking how ones that were spinning were the ones that.
• 10:27
  Speaker 3: You built the ones who are spinning years.
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: Henrik worked with Vestas for several years. He helped put
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: the company on a path to become one of the
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: biggest wind companies in the world. Today, Vesta sells around
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: fifteen billion dollars worth of turbines every year. He went
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: on to work for another wind company, where he helped
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: build the world's first offshore wind turbines in the early
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: nineteen nineties. He retired in twenty fourteen, and then he
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: unretired in twenty sixteen and started his own company. And
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: today he's still at the frontier of wind power, trying
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: to solve a new set of problems.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: That's after the break. Now back to the show.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: When Henrik retired in twenty fourteen, he thought he'd go
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: back to his roots as a tinkerer, but at a
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: bigger scale. He didn't want to work for a company.
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: He didn't want to run a company, but he wanted
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: to keep working on offshore wind offshore wind is great.
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: You get nice steady winds out in the ocean. You
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: can put the turbines out of sight in the sea,
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: but still relatively close to dense populations on the coast.
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: But there was this big problem with offshore wind that
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: Henrik wanted to help solve. Offshore wind turbines are built
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: on platforms that have to sit on the ocean floor,
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: and that limits where you can put them.
• 11:49
  Speaker 3: They can't go out to maybe sixty meters water deips,
• 11:53
  Speaker 3: but most of the world has much deeper waters than
• 11:56
  Speaker 3: sixty meters. We have been able to build up a
• 11:59
  Speaker 3: very big offshore wind industry in northwestern Europe because the
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: north sea dead water is quite shallow and you can
• 12:07
  Speaker 3: build very large offshore wind farms out there. We have
• 12:09
  Speaker 3: built large offshore wind farms, but most of the worlds
• 12:12
  Speaker 3: you can't do that because it gets too deep.
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: There is a potential solution to this, build turbines on
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: floating platforms. If you can do that, you could have
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: offshore wind basically off of any coast in the world.
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: It would be amazing. People have been working on this
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: problem for years, but it's hard. Offshore wind turbines are gigantic,
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: like almost as tall as the Eiffel Tower. And when
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: Henrik looked at the work people were doing on floating
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: wind and reflected back on his decades in the wind business,
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: he saw this one problem in particular, people were not
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: paying enough attention to making floating wind turbines cheap enough
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: to be widely adopted.
• 12:52
  Speaker 3: I was just slightly annoyed that they were not doing
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: it in an industrial manner. Industrialization is the way that
• 12:59
  Speaker 3: things get to be cheap a hah. So wind started
• 13:02
  Speaker 3: out as being more costly than fossil fuels. Now it
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: is cheaper than fossil fuels. Solar powers the same will
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: was very costly twenty years ago. Now it's much cheaper
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: than fossil fuels. And there you could of course ask
• 13:15
  Speaker 3: yourself how what is the difference? And it's a mixture
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: of technology development that we got better at designing the stuff,
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: but much more importantly that we got professional in the
• 13:28
  Speaker 3: manufacturing of the equipment. So it was made in syrup.
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: Essentially economies of scale rather than crafts, people building them
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: one by one, figuring out how to exactly use factory
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: mass production to bring down costs.
• 13:42
  Speaker 3: Yes, as you and I city and talk. I have
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: an iPhone. I think I paid five hundred dollars for it.
• 13:48
  Speaker 3: It has, you know, as people said, more computing power
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: than nasahead when they sent people to the Moon. It's
• 13:53
  Speaker 3: a small video camera, it can show films, it can
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: do everything. I paid five hundred dollars for it. If
• 13:59
  Speaker 3: I was going to get the only one in the world,
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: I'll probably pay fifty million. But I pay only five
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: hundred dollars because a million or millions are.
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: Made, hundreds of millions, I'm sure. Yeah. So that's the
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: problem with floating offshore wind turbines is they're making them
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: one at a time, and as a result, they're extraordinarily expensive,
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: prohibitively expensive.
• 14:20
  Speaker 3: Yes, and I thought, maybe I could do something that
• 14:23
  Speaker 3: was suited for cereal production. That's what I don't want
• 14:26
  Speaker 3: to run a company make it. Maybe I could make
• 14:27
  Speaker 3: something that I just kind of presented to the world
• 14:30
  Speaker 3: and say, here has some good ideas, there's a design,
• 14:32
  Speaker 3: go out and do it. So that's what I spent
• 14:35
  Speaker 3: the first years of my retirement on was to develop
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: things like that. At the end of the day, I
• 14:41
  Speaker 3: had to realize that that would not work because they
• 14:43
  Speaker 3: did not want something that was, so to speak, open source.
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: You were just trying to make a design that anybody
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: could use.
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: The big developers, the people actually making wind farms happen,
• 14:54
  Speaker 3: they did not want something that was in the open
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: source and was a free fall. They wanted there firm
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: and fixed design that had a cost associated with it.
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: And that meant that in the end I had to
• 15:06
  Speaker 3: run a company. I had to establish a company.
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: What I did, what's happening with the floating wind project?
• 15:13
  Speaker 3: That's going well. We set out with this idea of
• 15:16
  Speaker 3: industrializing so that we simply took up the challenge of
• 15:21
  Speaker 3: making a very big steel structure in a factory. The
• 15:26
  Speaker 3: wind ship and itself is a very big steel structure.
• 15:29
  Speaker 3: Each blade is significantly longer than a football field. And
• 15:34
  Speaker 3: there could say, how can you ever build such a
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: big machine two hundred and fifty meters tall in a factory,
• 15:39
  Speaker 3: And the answer is you don't. You build the components
• 15:43
  Speaker 3: and then you just put it together out in the field.
• 15:46
  Speaker 3: And we simply took inspiration from that saying, okay, what
• 15:49
  Speaker 3: we have been doing there, and myself had the good
• 15:51
  Speaker 3: luck to be part of that, was to figure out
• 15:55
  Speaker 3: a way to do big structures but still have the
• 15:57
  Speaker 3: benefit of mass production. Let's use that thinking also for
• 16:00
  Speaker 3: the floating foundation. So that's what we have done. All
• 16:03
  Speaker 3: the components are made in a factory. We have then
• 16:06
  Speaker 3: figured out a way to connect them in the port
• 16:09
  Speaker 3: so that they actually end up constructing a hole floating structure.
• 16:13
  Speaker 3: But all the components were made in a factory benefiting
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: from this mass production. So we have had a good
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: luck to have some big power companies fund the project
• 16:26
  Speaker 3: for us. They're not co owners of the company, but
• 16:29
  Speaker 3: they had us pay for the prototype. So we built
• 16:33
  Speaker 3: the components in twenty and launched it in twenty one
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: and it has been operating since then off the coast
• 16:39
  Speaker 3: of Norway.
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: Right now, it's floating out in the sea, spinning and
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: generating power even as we speak.
• 16:44
  Speaker 3: Yes, as you and I are sitting here talking, is
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: out in the sea at two hundred meters water depths
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: producing today on the order of three make wads of
• 16:56
  Speaker 3: power all the time. It powers something like a thousand households.
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: As you and I sit.
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: Here and talk, your goal with the project was to
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: get to mass production, right is that happening?
• 17:07
  Speaker 3: Yes, off your wind is and that goes aso for
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: floating is somewhat burdened with very long planning permission times.
• 17:17
  Speaker 3: So what we're doing now is we're building a small
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: demo project with a number of turbines, but much larger
• 17:25
  Speaker 3: than the first one. That's a really big machine, two
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: hundred and thirty six meters diameter, and it'll go off
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: the north coast of Scotland. Hope to get it out
• 17:35
  Speaker 3: in a couple of years. We have started welding on it.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: Now, So it's a very long time that you have
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: been doing this now, and you know, you started when
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: there was essentially no wind industry and now it is
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: this giant, international, billion dollar industry. And I'm curious, if
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: you step back from that, do you feel like you
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: have some insight into kind of how to make big
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: industrial change in the world.
• 18:04
  Speaker 3: And good question. The conditions when we created the wind
• 18:09
  Speaker 3: industry were very favorable. There was a big poor from society.
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: Society wanted things to happen. There was a very big
• 18:19
  Speaker 3: support from the government sort of mentally and also so
• 18:22
  Speaker 3: cunderstand economically for people to establish things, and that way
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: we hit, without knowing it at the time, as sweet
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: spot of making such a thing happen. But I learned
• 18:35
  Speaker 3: a lot about what it takes to make things happen,
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: and to a very last extent, it's about a motivation
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: from service society, and then it's a matter of getting
• 18:45
  Speaker 3: what we call frame conditions right, the surroundings of what
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: you do need to be right for the development. Then
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: you can essentially make anything happen.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: Now it's time for the lightning round.
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: So I'm just going to ask you a bunch of questions.
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: Now it's sort of fast and we can kind of
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: run through them. I have a couple of Denmark questions
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: for you. What's one thing I should do if I
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: go to Jutland.
• 19:20
  Speaker 3: If you go as a private individual, Yeah, again, good question.
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: Go to the west coast and visit some of the
• 19:28
  Speaker 3: small port cities or port towns and see how life
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: is there. It's very different from big city life. If
• 19:36
  Speaker 3: you are traveling in a more professional manner, make sure
• 19:39
  Speaker 3: to go and visit the wind turbine factory or a
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: steel tower factory. It is they are in the middle
• 19:45
  Speaker 3: of nowhere, in the flat countryside and it's super exciting.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: I think if I were there on vacation, I might
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: still want to go to the wind turbine.
• 19:54
  Speaker 3: Factory, Yes you should.
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: Yes, are Vikings overrated or underrated?
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: I think most of us are somewhat embarrassed about having
• 20:08
  Speaker 3: your national identity resting on plunder and murder. I think
• 20:15
  Speaker 3: that they were. They were extraordinarily sharp when it came
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: to their tools, So they made these wonderful ships that
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: could go anywhere. They went as far as you know,
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: up the big Russian rivers and down to Constantinople.
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: And to North America and America in.
• 20:35
  Speaker 3: An open boat. So I think that for their skills
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: they are definitely not overrated. For their human qualities, I
• 20:44
  Speaker 3: think that sometimes there are a few sort of compassionate elements.
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: Lacking underrated as engineers, overrated as humanists.
• 20:56
  Speaker 3: Perhaps, yes, that could be a good way to put it.
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: If everything goes well, what problem will you be trying
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: to solve in say, five.
• 21:04
  Speaker 3: Years, if everything goes well. My biggest personal ambition is
• 21:10
  Speaker 3: to make a difference on the climate when it comes
• 21:14
  Speaker 3: to implementation. So that's actually not an engineering task. That's
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: more about trying to solve this conundrum that everybody knows
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: what needs to be done for the green transition. It
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: can't go too fast. It is going much too slow.
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: How do you make that happen? And if I could
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: in five years time say there are things that happened
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: because of our efforts that wouldn't always have happened, that is,
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: of course, would be a fantastic thing.
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: What's one piece of advice you'd give to someone trying
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: to solve a hard problem.
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: I think that the most important thing is that you
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: are not seduced by your own rhetoric. The most important
• 21:59
  Speaker 3: thing when you're developing new stuff is to be honest,
• 22:02
  Speaker 3: not only about the positive prospects, but also about the challenges.
• 22:07
  Speaker 3: You should not fool yourself with false oaps. And as
• 22:10
  Speaker 3: somebody also said, persistence is the biggest virtue. Persistence in
• 22:16
  Speaker 3: the face of adversity which will surely come.
• 22:24
  Speaker 4: Henrik Steesdale's company is called Stevesdale Makes Sense. Today's show
• 22:30
  Speaker 4: was produced by dath Russello. It was edited by Sarah
• 22:33
  Speaker 4: Nix and engineered by Amanda Kwong. You can email us
• 22:37
  Speaker 4: at problem at Pushkin dot fm, or you can find
• 22:40
  Speaker 4: me on Twitter at Jacob Goldstein. I'm Jacob Goldstein and
• 22:43
  Speaker 4: we'll be back next week with another episode.
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: Of what's your problem,