I wonder what they will do next with that obscene amount of money.
Are Teslas popular in Norway?
> Tesla was Norway's top-selling car brand for a fifth consecutive year, with a 19.1% market share, followed by Volkswagen at 13.3% of registrations and Volvo Cars at 7.8%.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/norway...
https://bestsellingcarsblog.com/2026/01/norway-full-year-202...
But for me, that does not change the fact, that they still did great making the investment in EV.
You have to start somewhere.
A few broken assumptions here that are common:
- The existing system is 100% efficient. It's not. We have a lot of non utilized generation that is effectively discarded. Windmills that are not milling aren't generally broken but turned off because there is over production. In the same way, a lot of solar energy is not consumed and lost. We have electricity cables that are not running at full capacity. And so on.
- Existing fossil energy needs to be replaced with the same amount of electrical energy. Michael Liebreich refers to this as the primary energy fallacy (as opposed to final energy). The mistake here is that a lot of fossil fuel energy is effectively used to heat the universe rather than do anything useful. About a third or less is useful (final energy). The two thirds that are lost don't need replacing. An EV is much more efficient with its energy than an ICE car. That's why you can get the same mileage with only about 2-3 gallons of petrol worth of battery capacity. Reason: petrol engines produce mostly heat and a little bit of movement. So, the 20 gallons that go in a car mostly don't move the car. In the same way, a heat pump is way more efficient than burning gas is.
- The added load is constant and people have no control over when to consume energy. This too is nonsense. We are conditioned to think like that. But we have batteries and a lot of other technology now that can be charged when energy is cheap and discharged when it is not. Also, we can use pricing to stimulate people to optimize when they buy power and charge their batteries. A lot of new energy load is flexible. Cars can charge at night or during the middle of the day. Data centers can play with pricing to stimulate people to shift loads when energy gets more expensive. We're producing batteries by the multiple twh per year. There will be tens / hundreds of twh available to charge/discharge at moments of our choosing. That's why gas plants are being marginalized by grid batteries.
For EVs it's actually very simple. They need energy. The total amount of energy needed is a function of the amount of distance driven. About 3-4 miles per kwh is common. For Norway, trucks and cars drive a combined ~30 billion miles per year. So, if all that becomes electric and you assume a conservative 2 miles per kwh, it needs about 15 billion kwh or 15twh per year. Maybe a bit more. Let's call it 20twh. Norway's grid generates 157 twh/year. So, we're talking about ~10-15% of total energy generation. With pricing, batteries, etc. they can probably nudge that around peak energy demand in e.g. evenings and mornings to make the existing system more efficient. Also, this does not happen overnight. New cars are electric. But they still have a lot of older vehicles. It will be quite a few years before all traffic is electric. So, this isn't a shock to the system but more of a very gradual, predictable shift with a lot of potential for efficiency improvements along the way.
It's the same everywhere else. This is what a great investment opportunity looks like. Norway got clued in earlier than most countries; indeed helped by the massive amounts of clean energy they have.
Others should be able to benefit as well. IMHO, the economics are clear enough at this point that oil companies should start calculating their year on year demand declines for petrol/diesel. It's no longer a growth business. China did in fact import about 10% less diesel year on year last year. Like the shift to EVs this is a gradual decline. Not a system crash. Not yet. I do expect this to accelerate massively as the economics improve.
A switch to 100% EV on the scale and pace of Norway would absolutely flatten our grid. The only way we could do it would be to build lots of additional fossil fuel capacity with the intent of rapidly making it redundant. Which seems like a wasteful way to proceed.
The reason EVs have such a small impact on the grid in Norway is that they had already electrified their economy far above average due to the abundant hydro resources they been diligently exploiting since the 19th century.
There have also been various other initiatives that have significantly driven up the electricity cost and made industry almost entirely non-viable.
10/10 Labour government. Top A #1 top economy. Amazing Inflation creation capabilities and expertise. Everything is better except for the things which are worse which is everything.
With those being able to afford when economies of scale didn't kick into very high gear yet enables products to grow into those scales, and less affluent consumers to afford them.
So yes, it's an outlier, it's also a sign of a new technology taking hold.
> Qatar’s EV Market reported an impressive surge, with YTD sales up to September up by 119.6%. However, it remains under 2% of total light vehicle sales, with demand still lagging behind. The government has reaffirmed its commitment to scale up EV adoption in the future, establishing the goal to reach an EV share of 10 percent of domestic sales by 2030
https://www.focus2move.com/qatari-new-vehicles/
> In 2024, electric or plug-in hybrid cars made up 28% of new registrations in Switzerland (compared with 30% in 2023). This was the first setback for such vehicles after steady growth since 2015.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/climate-solutions/electric-car-...
If anything I'm surprised that this is happening in an area that hasn't benefited as much from dramatic reductions in electricity costs (places with Wind + Solar without large tariff regimes) rather than Australia or the southern latitudes of the US.
Particularly for the Southern US, I feel that the costs will continue to drop until the transition will be very sudden, and there will be a rude awakening of sorts.
The rude awakening is when US customers used to buying $60k gas guzzlers are able to buy a $20k EV.
Solar panel leases are so long (50 years on top of the decade to interconnect), so they come with additional negatives as you are often signing up the next generation for a relationship that they had no say in.
Costs for installation and certification in Italy is around 8 times the cost of the panels.
Panels costs are irrelevant nowadays.
The best scenario would be to focus on technology that makes it trivial to connect to your home grid so people would be able to do it on their own safely.
Arguments were (likely) made that the cost of wiring a house could buy 20 hand-cranked washing machines or some other phooey that came from an old paradigm.
I'm asking because my uncle has a business of selling and installing swimming pools, he has the electrician working for him and it contemplated the possibility of installing solar panels for his customers (the more sun, the higher electricity consumption in the swimming pool because you need to filter out algaes before they bloom, so it's a perfect match and he has to do the wiring anyway) and the main reason why he abandoned the idea was the cost of the panels themselves.
I feel there's a huge disconnect between the talk about technology and real life. It's like when people keep talking about how battery cost have plummeted in recent years and how they now dirt cheap, yet when you want to buy one, electric cars are not cheaper than 4 years ago.
But boy how much the mounting system costs - it's at least 3 times the cost of the panes if you buy them in 2xN or 4xN bulk and I'm excluding labor here.
For the lowly homeowner looking to get a few panels, you're buying something that has 4 middlemen's hands on it already.
Though in the US there's probably a 100%+ tariff on non-US panels...
However, it also helps that they are good at long term planning.
Electricity has been comparatively cheap (to DK at least) for a long time due to all the hydro.
I remember as a kid when visiting family in Norway, we were surprised that there were no rules on turning off the lights when closing the door to an empty room :)
The US fucked up, but give it time.
(Sidenote: Why̱ are they̱ writing their y̱'s like that?)
If you replaced 5500 kilograms of fuel with 5500 kilograms of modern batteries, you would need an improvement in battery efficiency of around 20 times. Batteries increase in small % over decades, not by magnitudes.
Essentially, you would need batteries that store 20 times as much energy as the best technology does now at the same weight and density.
And there's another catch: airplanes burn less fuel as they travel, because burning tons of fuel make them lighter. So it's not really a 1:1 comparison and you likely need more than 20 times to compensate.
There's other catches: cooling such batteries would be an engineering nightmare, but safety would be another concern.
If you live near Holmenkollen you do not need battery charger at all. With regenerative charging you have already %30 when you are in Oslo and you need only some more charge from Vinmonopolet parking lot to get back home. Basically free energy created from thin air.
Right now, even minor accidents that touch the battery pack often result in a total loss because there is no standardized way to verify battery integrity or repair individual cells safely at scale. If Norway figures out the circular economy for used/damaged EVs before the rest of us, that will be the real breakthrough.
Petrol prices, however, were roughly the same.
These subsidies have insentivised more car culture. It hasn't fixed most of the issues around cars, just shifted the type of cars. Even possibly increased the amount of cars in the cities. Cars are dangerous, noisy, needs lots of space, microplastics from the tires etc etc., and we should've spent this money on things that could've helped to remove this reliance on cars.
40 billion NOK in subsidies each year. That's a new metro line every year. Or faster trains between cities. Things that could've improved our cities tremendously. You pay more in taxes for buying a new bike than people pay for a new electric car. It cost more for a ticket on public transport than all toll roads driving an electric car from far away into the city in rush hour. Of course people then drive instead of biking or taking the bus.
Yes, the incentives were great and needed in the beginning. But it has gone way, way too far.
Uhhh..
Noise is a relevant factor in that discussion, not compared to internal combustion engines[1], but compared to fewer cars in general.
[1] The acronym for this did not age well
Plus there’s the “whoo” sound they all play when reversing ;)
More so than a typical engine above 25 to 30mph.
So sure, electric helps, but as noted there is more traffic than before, which doesn't.
As public transport improves, traffic decreases, and the value a car provides increases.
A 20 minute commute with no traffic and parking right in front because everyone else took the bus/train? Sign me up.
The above plays out over decades of course, and there are lots of competing factors.
But anyways, the order of causation is probably reversed. Cities with high density are forced to invest in good public transport by sheer public demand and pressure.
The point about equilibrium you're not thinking through fully. If you'd have the 20 minute commute with no traffic and parking right in front of whoever you're going, everyone would do it and you'd just wind up with, well, not that.
But as transit* improves you are able to do more with less, and instead of spending insane amounts of money on 5-lane highways and McDonald's for all and the extractive economics that come with that, you can maintain your existing infrastructure and give folks who can't, shouldn't or would prefer to not drive the option to get to whoever they are going without doing so. That frees up the existing highway infrastructure a little bit, reduces costs across the board, and has a lot of other nice benefits.
You are effectively arguing against other transit methods and models because you'd rather sit in traffic, because without the introduction of alternatives that's what you are advocating for - again because everyone will be in the car and you'll never alleviate traffic and you'll never have a 20 minute commute with free and easy parking.
* We should move away from the "public transportation" frame of reference. Highways are public transportation too, fully funded by taxpayers (in general, it maybe be uniquely different in some countries) and are an entrenched lobbying group that justify projects at the expense of the public too.
Just like the fact I can't stop my neighbours from littering but I can certainly control my own behaviour.
that's not going to last forever
hcfman•1h ago
vanviegen•1h ago
IshKebab•1h ago
Plus most people charge cars overnight when there's a surplus of power.
Oil and gas income I will give you though... I don't think most countries could afford this.