Wiebe Wakker
June 4, 2016
For breakfast I had this tasty but a bit strange meal. It’s normally eaten as a dessert but for breakfast it’s fine too. It’s called Koldskål, a mix between buttermilk and cream and they put tiny cake’s in it. After you finished that you get some kind of strawberry sauce and I thought it would be nice to mix it but they told me I have to leave Denmark now as it’s an insult to mix it, weird people here.
I went to Copenhagen. I had been looking forward to this as I saw many great pictures and heard good stories about this city. Today was not a sightseeing day though, my first stop was at the Dutch Embassy. I send them an mail a few weeks ago to let them no I was traveling through Denmark. They invited me for lunch and to recharge the car. They were very nice and thought of ways to help me. They send mails to other embassies in countries were I’m going to, to ask them if they could be at help. They let me do a pitch on video which they uploaded on their Facebook page and I already got some new invitations.
Then I visited State of Green, right in the middle of the center. It is an organization which is 50% government and 50% private owned, mainly focussing on marketing campaigns to promote sustainability in Denmark. Iver told me a lot about what the country has been doing since the oil crisis in the 70’s to make it more sustainable. The city of Copenhagen has the goal to be carbon neutral by 2025 and the county has to same plan to do so by 2050. That seems like a long time but to ban fossil fuels and come with alternatives takes time and effort. You will find and extended review about this meeting later on this website.
My next stop was at Martin Messers place. He is a member of the FDEL, the organization that had this meeting last Sunday where I spoke. Martin took me into town to meet Willet Kempton, he calls himself the “father of V2G”. V2G stands for ‘Vehicle To Grid’ which is a system where electric cars can provide energy to the grid. Willet has invented this system in 1997, pretty crazy considering I heart about EV’s just 2 years ago. According to him this is the way to go to a fully sustainable energy system.
A problem for today was that I didn’t had a place to sleep yet, also not for tomorrow night. Martin posted a message on his Facebook asking people if they could host me and quickly received a reply from Mads that I could stay at his place on Saturday. Just before the meeting with Willet someone contacted me though Facebook that I could stay at his place. His name was Poul and he lived in Uvelse, 30km outside of Copenhagen.
Poul is IT specialist and Tesla driver, the youngest one I ever met, just 28. He lives with his girlfriend Laila in this house which they recently bought. Very friendly, welcoming and interested people. They just went for a road trip to Spain with their Tesla. While charging at a supercharger they met a Dutch / Spanish guy with a YouTube channel called El Holandés Errante (The Flying Dutchman). He wants to buy a Tesla with a caravan to live completely off-grid and doesn’t need to pay any subscriptions. Because you can charge for free with a Tesla it would be possible but kind of an adventure.
