The Electricity Exporting Chickens Come Home to Roost in Norway

“It’s an absolutely shit situation.” That’s 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 UK, Germany, Denmark and other European countries.

It’s an outcome that many warned the Norwegian government would come about years ago as the decisions were made to build the interconnects to provide power into the EU 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. 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.