The first meeting of the day took place in the municipality of Lääne-Harju with Deputy Mayor Erki Ruben and his colleagues, who introduced the green municipality concept. The idea, which grew out of the concerns of the members of the community committee, unites four parties in the development of the municipality: the community, the business environment, the local government and the cooperation network. Several environmentally friendly initiatives have already been undertaken together. For example, the municipality was the first in Estonia to use food boxes, maintained on a voluntary basis, to prevent food from being wasted. The action of the plastic-free municipality was born in cooperation with Tallink, from which reusable cloth shopping bags were born from the old curtains received from the company. In addition, Ambassador Král learned about the vision of future development of the municipality, which is also very green and sustainable.  

Lääne-Harju municipality hosts the biggest onshore wind farm in Estonia, thanks to extremely favourable natural conditions - it is windy in 340 days in a year. But Paldiski has a potential of becoming a major logistic hub of the region, too. Thanks to a sufficient depth of the seabed, it hosts a cargo port which Ambassador Král had a chance to visit. As Paldiski South Harbour is formally part of Port of Tallinn, company’s business manager Viktor Laurmaa and captain Andres Kungla gave a concise presentation about Port of Tallinn business fields as well as future plans and showed the harbour. Paldiski South Harbour can play an important  role with the intended development of offshore wind farms in the Bay of Riga and near the island of Hiiumaa, as it will be necessary to ship large components of the windmills. And there is a plan to build another pier to support logistically the Enhanced Forward Presence of Allied troops in Tapa (i.e. shipment of military equipment).

Paldiski is already an energy hub – it hosts oil refinery and a gas compressor station of Balticconnector, linking gas systems of Finland and the Baltic countries, and it also has an underground hydroenergy storage facility. But perhaps most importantly, there is a development of LNG terminal underway, which will be able to host FSRU (floating storage regasification unit) ships to bring LNG that can after regasification be send both northwards to Finland or southwards to Latvia and Lithuania. The terminal will be built in record time – the pier will be finished by the end of October and the pipes connecting it to the pipeline by the end of November. The Ambassador had a great opportunity to see the LNG terminal under construction and hear more about its completion thanks to the representatives of the Paldiski Association of Entrepreneurs. Namely, Ambassador Král met its board member Nikolai Pitšugov and CEO Ester Tuiksoo, with whom they discussed, among other things, opportunities for economic cooperation and the possibility of finding potential business partners in the Czech Republic.   

A very nice meeting also awaited the Ambassador at the Paldiski Ühisgümnaasium, where he conducted a presentation introducing the Czech Republic to the students of the local gymnasium. The students participated actively, asking a lot of questions about the country, culture, politics and economy. Ambassador even tought them some basic Czech phrases and he was very happy that the students recognized many of the Czech brands an companies. Of course, Czech chocolates and candies were not missing from the meeting either. As a gift, the students gave the Ambassador a beautiful painting they had created.

All in all, it was a very interesting and useful trip. Ambassador Král hopes to visit the region again soon, as Paldiski offers many opportunities for the Czech partners and companies.