Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a climate stalwart who based his past presidential run on the issue, traces his passion for clean energy in part to a trip he made to Stockholm decades ago.
He recounted that visit in his keynote presentation at the Nordic Innovation Summit, held this week in Seattle. In his travels to the Swedish capital, he discovered double-paned windows, which at the time were a cutting-edge technology not yet popular in the U.S.
“I said, ‘These people are smart,’ ” Inslee recalled. “They were ahead of us by 20 years — they might be still ahead of us. We’ll see about that.”
The summit, which is billed as the top Nordic innovation event in North America, featured business and government leaders from the Pacific Northwest and Scandinavian countries discussing artificial intelligence, nuclear power, carbon neutral cities, and other shared issues of interest.
Speakers included Chris Levesque, CEO of the Bill Gates-backed nuclear power company TerraPower; Peter Zonneveld, president of Neste US, which is producing clean aviation fuels; Alex Algard, CEO of Hiya; Mary Snapp, Microsoft vice president of strategic AI initiatives; and ambassadors from Denmark and Finland, among many others.
The event was held May 13 and 14 at the National Nordic Museum in Ballard, Seattle’s historically Scandinavian community.
Several of the sessions explored the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, including the risks to privacy, the push for transparency in training AI models, and the need for government regulation and consumer education.
But much of the attention was on climate-related issues.
The first day of the summit included a panel on hydrogen fuel, which can provide zero-carbon power and has been dubbed the Swiss Army knife of clean energy for its versatility. Efforts are underway worldwide to grow the production and use of hydrogen, but bolstering its adoption requires significant public and private investments.
Moderating the session, GeekWire’s Lisa Stiffler asked if progress in climate tech and hydrogen would be undone if former President Trump is reelected and unravels President Biden’s climate initiatives upon returning to office.
Panelist Sveinung Odegard, who is working on hydrogen fuel cell technology for the green maritime company Corvus Energy, said that as hydrogen supply and demand become more robust, politics become less relevant.
Chris Green, chair of the Pacific Northwest’s hydrogen hub, agreed that the field is becoming less dependent on government support. While his effort won $1 billion in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, that’s being matched by $5 billion or more from the private sector to back 17 hydrogen projects planned for the regional hub.
“It’s not just government policies anymore,” Green said. “It’s not just government saying, thou shalt do X, Y, or Z with your energy strategy.”
“As long as states keep up their good work, I still think decarbonization will make progress in the United States, although maybe we’ll lose the race to Europe.”
– Tony Pan, CEO of Modern Hydrogen
Major corporations and investors are pursuing these technologies around the world, he said, adding, “the No. 1 industry where private-sector funding crosses international borders for foreign direct investment is clean energy.”
Panelist Tony Pan, CEO and co-founder of Modern Hydrogen, a startup building devices that produce hydrogen from methane gas, said that federal climate policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act have funded numerous energy projects in red states and will be unpopular to halt. He also noted that, in his particular situation, most of his customers are utilities that are guided more by state than by national rules.
If federal climate support disappears, “as long as states keep up their good work, I still think decarbonization will make progress in the United States, although maybe we’ll lose the race to Europe,” Pan said. “But it’s OK. Competition is good. No matter what, the planet wins.”
A new study released Thursday, however, predicted that if Trump wins in November, there would be “an immediate deceleration” in support for carbon-cutting programs, and the peak for fossil fuel demand would be pushed back a decade to 2040.
In some situations, Nordic countries were held up as examples for Washington state and the U.S. to follow.
Mikko Hautala, Finland’s ambassador to the United States, cited the country’s shift from being a net importer of energy to becoming energy self-sufficient, with 94% of its electricity produced without emissions.
“That’s a massive development for my country,” Hautala told the audience.
Referencing discussions at the event about the need for cheap, reliable, sustainable energy for data centers, fueled by the rise of artificial intelligence, he delivered a pitch to the crowd.
“Where should these data centers go?” he asked. “Come to Finland.”
A forcing function in Finland’s energy shift was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which prompted Finland to halt all energy imports from the neighboring country. A key factor was Finland’s ability last year to bring online the largest nuclear plant in Europe, which increased nuclear to more than 40% of its overall energy mix.
In an interview with GeekWire at the event, Hautala said Finland’s reliable, clean energy supply and connectivity to European data networks were key factors in Microsoft’s decision to build three large data centers in the country, and in Google’s move to expand its existing data center in Finland.
Hautala, who was previously Finland’s ambassador to Russia, gave a pragmatic take on the war in Ukraine, saying that it will be necessary to both defend national interests and make progress in innovation simultaneously, with the assumption that the conflict will continue for an indefinite period of time.
He called it a “dual mission,” using the American phrase, “walking and chewing gum at the same time.”
Sessions from the event can be viewed on YouTube.