The people behind the expedition.
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Some teams form around a pitch deck. This one formed around a road trip, a film festival, and a video podcast recorded on a winter evening in Amsterdam while the light festival lit up the canals outside.
More than a decade ago, Roel Swierenga started taking companies, policymakers and sustainability professionals on electric road trips through Northern Europe. He called them Hansa Green Tours, after the historic trading network that once connected these regions. The idea was simple: get people out of conference rooms and into the places where change was already visible.
The first edition set out in 2010, aiming to drive electric cars to Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen. Most people thought it couldn't be done. Hans Erdmann, an architect from Amsterdam, showed up anyway, in his electric Lotus. The two spent the next decade on the road together, chasing energy stories across Europe and testing what these cars, and this continent, were actually capable of.
When COVID grounded the trips, Roel picked up a camera. What started as a way to keep the stories moving became a craft, then a body of award-winning documentary work: DECARB (Finland, 2026), Before the Oil (Norway, 2024). At a festival in Helsinki in 2024, he met Spanish award winning filmmaker Chavi, whose film Forced Renewables (2025) told the story of an energy transition that lost rural communities along the way. They recognised the same instinct in each other's work and became friends and collaborators.
Roel then asked Sonja, who had written the script for DECARB, to help translate technical energy stories into ones people actually want to watch.
A team formed around those films: backgrounds in industrial architecture, environmental filmmaking, and deep tech communications. Different ways of reading the world, one shared frustration: the work was extraordinary, and it still wasn't reaching the people who needed to hear it.
We built Powerhouse Europe to answer it.
Roel Swierenga
Initiator and Director
In 2008, Roel Swierenga co-founded Electric Mobility Netherlands, importing the electric Think City from Norway with two friends who ran a car leasing company, years ahead of most people in the energy world at the time. Two years later, he organized the first Hansa Green Tour, an electric road trip through northern Europe for companies, policymakers, and sustainability professionals who wanted to see the future up close. He ran those tours for a decade, documenting much of it along the way.
When COVID stopped the tours, Roel picked up a camera. His documentaries have since won awards across Europe and the US, including Pushback (2021), 48,000 Names (2022), Before the Oil (2024), and DECARB (2026), on Finnish cleantech company Hycamite's turquoise hydrogen technology.
Roel has been thinking about European energy security, geopolitics, and the role of technology in all of it for longer than most. The road trip north is his answer, this time as a cinematic storytelling adventure built to reach a global audience
Hans Erdmann
Co-Initiator and Co-Protagonist
In 2008, Hans Erdmann had a fully electric Lotus built to his specifications: top speed 320 km/h, range 250 km, under 1,000 kg, with fast charging. It's said to have been one of the things that inspired Elon Musk's thinking about the first Tesla Roadster.
Hans is an architect with a worldwide portfolio of sustainable and innovative buildings, and the creative force behind the Amsterdam Light Festival, now in its fourteenth year transforming the city's winter canals into one of Europe's most distinctive public art events.
On the road, Hans is one of the series' two protagonists. As co-founder and director he lead Ce. Architects & Designers in Amsterdam for 40 years, a strategic design agency specialised in branded spaces, and he's co-owner of Oas·us, building concepts with a future, a soul, and a story. His credo 'Dare 2 Dream' and his ability to capture the world we see in beautiful sketches, will come to life on screen while we are on the road to find Europe's energy solutions .
Chavi Nandez
Co-Initiator and Director of Photography
Chavi Nandez has been organizing photography tours to Iceland for seventeen years. He knows winter landscapes, how light falls on cold water, and how to find the human story inside a place most people experience only as scenery.
Based in southern Spain, he works through Bordonada Films on feature-length documentary projects that combine environmental urgency with genuine cinematic craft. His films like Forced Renewables, on rural communities displaced by the green energy transition, won awards at festivals worldwide.
On Powerhouse Europe, Chavi leads the cinematic team. He is the reason the films will look the way they look, bringing energy and technology stories to life with beautiful cinematography.
Sonja Björkroth
Strategy, Brand and Communications
Sonja Björkroth's background is in deep tech communications: making complex, technically dense innovations legible to the investors, policymakers, and industry audiences who need to understand them. She has spent years at the intersection of emerging technology and the people who decide whether it gets to change anything.
She joined Powerhouse Europe as a founding partner, responsible for strategy, brand, and commercial development, and for making sure what the project builds is as useful in the real world as it is compelling on screen.
Team documentary portfolio
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