Norway Provides An Object Lesson On How Not To Make Energy Policy

“It’s an absolutely sh*t situation.” That is the assessment of Norway’s energy minister, Terje Aasland, about his country’s electricity costs rising to record levels due to its exports of power to the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark and other European countries.

It is an outcome that many warned the Norwegian government would come about as the decisions were made to build the interconnects to export power into the European Union and the UK. Those critics were of course ignored as those in charge of Norway’s fortunes at the time felt compelled to genuflect to the demands of the EU and other globalist organizations.

Norway derives the vast majority of its electricity from hydropower, which currently provides 90% of the country’s power generation. Most of the remainder comes from wind power, and the nation enjoys a large excess of generating capacity on most days. Thus, all other factors being equal, it made some financial sense to establish those interconnects to sell the surplus into other countries.

But it only made sense when those other countries were taking care to ensure the continuing health and adequacy of their own electric grids. That certainly has not been the case in either the UK or Germany, whose governments have in recent years chosen to discard a former wealth of reliable baseload capacity provided by coal and nuclear plants in favor of relying too heavily on intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar.

Now, when the wind stops blowing and the sun isn’t shining, those customers of Norwegian power exports drain the host country’s surplus, causing the extremely high energy costs to flow back upstream, hitting Norwegians with abnormally high utility bills. It all came to a head this week when low wind speeds, combined with abnormally cold temperatures on the European mainland, caused power rates in Norway to spike to as high as €1.12 ($1.18) per kilowatt hour (kwh).

By comparison, the average electricity rate per kwh in New York is around 22 cents, while Texans typically pay around 15 cents per kwh. What that price spike meant for Norwegians on December 12 is that taking a 5-minute warm shower would have cost them $5. Doing the same in Texas would have cost around 16 cents.

Naturally, public outrage in Norway over these needlessly high electricity rates is now causing policymakers there to run for political cover. The Financial Times reports that both the ruling leftwing Labour Party and conservative Progress Party are now making plans to campaign next year on platforms to limit or end the export of electricity via these international interconnections.

That is a prospect that no doubt sparks fear in the hearts of the central planners in both Germany and the UK, where electricity imports from Norway play a central role in their own emissions reduction plans. Those plans involve the willful destruction of reliable baseload power stations and forcing power costs to dramatically increase, which in turn results in heavy industries like steelmaking and other manufacturing to leave the country. In that way, these governments are essentially exporting their emissions to China, whose own government is only too happy to serve as home to these heavy industries and power them with the hundreds of coal-fired power plants they build each year.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom and his fellow Democrats have pursued essentially the same strategies in California in this century, with predictable results: Californians pay among the highest power rates in the United States as their power grid has become overloaded with intermittent generation and increasingly reliant on imports from other states. Rather than exporting its emissions to China, California exports them to Nevada and Utah and other U.S. states.

The Biden administration has attempted to take the entire country down this same economically ruinous path for the past four years. Fortunately, voters awakened just in time this year to head off the most damaging impacts now being seen in Germany and the UK.

For Norway, is this an example of the law of unintended consequences setting in? Sure, to some extent. But it is also a clear example of entirely foreseeable consequences stemming from poor policymaking by multiple national governments flowing across borders. This “sh*t situation” was all avoidable, and frankly should have been.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.