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.
People buy new cars (~10m/year in US) and when they are at that decision point, follow this algorithm.
1) Is there any way you can walk instead?
2) Can you bike?
3) Can you use an e-bike?
4) Can you use public transportation?
5) Can you move to a place where 1-4 are doable?
6) If none of the 4 above work, are you a 2 car family (most are), then one of the cars can be EV. While you have a gas car for longer trips, most likely a minivan.
7) Can you buy a used EV? (which is already manufactured!)
8) Can you buy a used plug-in hybrid? A plug-in hybrid can be 99% electric miles, most trips are short.
9) Can you buy a new EV?
10) Can you buy a new plug-in hybrid?
11) Can you buy a used gas car? A 2023 manufactured used gas car is identical to 2024, the delta of new features is negligible (maybe new colors?).
You're right that cars aren't going away, and I don't think it's a serious goal.
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.
You can't sign up - at least not for long. As public transit improves companies quit putting in parking places up front - they still have shipping/receiving in back, but only delivery vehicles allowed. The parking lot is sold to someone else who just wants a building, increasing density. Meanwhile all those people riding transit means there is more demand for better transit.
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.
Above ~30 km/h the noise of a car is mainly from the wheels etc., not the motor. Trust me, you don't want to live next to a highway even if all the cars on it are electric!
EVs use regen for 99.09% of stops. Honking and loud music is a street problem and has nothing to do with cars. In the horse and carriage days, drivers would be required to carry a bell and whistle to move your butt out of their way.
When I was looking for a house in Seattle, I checked out a nice townhome in Wallingford beneath the I5 ship canal bridge that had a great view of the city. But this was during COVID and the noise was still horrible, so I noped out of that quickly. It was all tire noise.
Which "win"? There were multiple complaints here, not just noise. These EV incentives have actively hampered other goals and projects for a decade, one could argue it's a net loss.
The point is not about "stifling EV adoption", it's reducing problematic levels of over-dependence on cars in general. EVs don't solve all the issues that cars raise.
Noise is a relevant factor in that discussion, not compared to internal combustion engines[1], but compared to fewer cars in general.
Tire noise is the major contributor at speed, and it looks like even in a typical US residential street with 20-25 mph speed limits, tire noise already dominates.
It’s a stupid take IMHO because it’s not an either thing in politics. But yes, even EVs are noisy because there’s road noise from the tires which is the dominant noise on highways and can be substantial when lots of cars even at street speeds if there’s a lot of cars. And the wheel’s generate a lot of fine invisible particulate pollution in the air too.
Plus there’s the “whoo” sound they all play when reversing ;)
A person who drives 12k miles per year in an small vehicle will need about 4000 kWh of electricity or about 600 gallons of gas. Australians are able to buy solar panels that will generate that amount of electricity for a generation for the price of gas for one or two years. Of course there are more costs associated (Installation, batteries, etc) but the cost equation is shifting very quickly.
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.
Yeah, the problem isn't panels, but installing them indeed.
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.
While the panels and inverters will wear out over the course of a couple of decades, the wiring will not. This is a similar bootstrap-type of situation when urban and rural electrification first took place.
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 keep hearing about the low price of panels but where do you find the panels that cheap?
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.
Don't know where you are, (US probably?), but here in the Netherlands I can find many suppliers offering decent panels at about $90-110 each. I'm guessing wholesale pricing (or importing yourself) would be cheaper.
Though in the US there's probably a 100%+ tariff on non-US panels...
I don't know what part of the world are you from, but here in Poland, ordinary 400W Bi-Facial panel costs around $80/pc, when buying from wholesaler which are plenty and accessible even to non-companies (as a proof, I did buy 4pcs myself). And if you buy in bulk, it can even be $50/pc.
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.
Norway has abundant hydropower. But like you've mentioned, this transition will happen in Australia and US, it might just take longer due to incentives.
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.
What are the returns for a landowner leasing a solar farm vs passively growing pines? My state has a lot of land to use and a good portion of the rural part is pine. Some landowners harvest pine trees on unused land.
For pines, not great. Timber farming was so heavily encourage for so many years that there is a glut and prices have stayed about the same in real dollars for decades.
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.
The US would lose its superpower status before that happens, the awakening won’t be so drastic because we would have already started sliding into being a much poorer country than we are today. It’s already started at any rate.
I should say, a surprise for anyone who is completely unaware of the developments around the world, which a lot of people in the US are.
I don't this requires the loss of "superpower" status really. Already, if you dropped all EV, solar, battery tariffs in Florida, I think people there would be blindsided by how fast things start to take over.
US people pay about 2-3x more for just the red tap than Australians pay for the total price of getting solar installed. Including all the hardware, labor, and red tape. In the EU it's slightly better than in the US but not a lot. Also a lot of red tape, permitting and other friction.
> If anything I'm surprised that this is happening in an area that hasn't benefited as much from dramatic reductions in electricity costs
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 :)
If you compare Norway to other countries, you should always keep in mind that Norway is just blessed with energy. They have more hydropower than they consume, so electrifying everything just makes sense, even if you ignore consequences for climate and environment. They also have their own oil, and electrification will also allow them to sell more of it abroad or keep in the ground for future generations.
However, it also helps that they are good at long term planning.
Also, outside of the zone of influence of an imperialist authoritarian power which would prevent them from handling the exploitation of their resources for the benefit of their nation instead of the profit of foreign oligarchs. See Petro-Canada privatization.
The interesting downstream effect of this 100% adoption will be the secondary market and insurance.
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.
It's fantastic and to be applauded but also worth mentioning that Norway has a truly staggering amount of hydro power (130TWh/y) to support all the increased demand on the grid with carbon neutral electricity.
People make all sorts of assumptions about increased grid pressure that come with electrifying the economy. It's true that we'll consume more energy overall but not that we'll have to get all of that with new generation.
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.
I live in a country that is struggling to meet electricity demand as it is and our grid requires substantial investment to exploit our renewables, which are spread out and intermittent.
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.
Good for them. Good for "the planet" (and uh... Tesla I suppose). But... most of incentives for the transition has been substantially funded by the nation's massive oil and gas revenues.
I wonder what they will do next with that obscene amount of money.
> 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%.
Every new technology starts with adoption by the most affluent: cars, telephones, TVs, computers, internet, etc.
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.
There are other affluent countries that doesn't do nearly as well, so there's more to it than that.
> 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
> 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.
Norway is also particularly Not Suitable for petrol-powered autos.
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.
Electric air transport is unlikely to happen for commercial transport.
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.
Norway has been on this steady path for quite a while. I remember some years ago, when we still lived in central Europe, I compared the prices for electricity and in Germany, they were about 3x (!) higher per kWh than Norway.
This is great, so long as the country cares more about becoming electric than tax income. I can assure you that in the Netherlands this is not the case.
As opposed to the Netherlands, Norway has an abundance of hydro electric power to fuel the cars and significant oil and gas income that can easily finance these policies.
Most countries aren't close to a level of electric car penetration where that would really be a problem. Even in Norway this is new car sales. The actual percentage of cars on the road that are fully electric is 32%.
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.
Hydro doesn’t really care if it’s used day or night, they can just open or close the gates as needed. It would be more of a thing if they used nuclear or coal, which is hard to ramp up and down.
Unfortunately we're here selling ourselves too cheap. Municipalities gets blinded by big tech asking for cheap electricity and land and give them all they want, thinking it will lead to massive activity, affluent jobs etc. But after everything is built, there's a few janitors left and it's all controlled from abroad. But now the citizens pay more for their electricity, and have to build new water facilities to deal with the water usage from the centers.
Our economy is modern in that it has been reorganized to divert tax revenue to unemployed migrants who then use that to buy up property and other goods and services, thus driving up the living cost for taxpayers.
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.
> Battery-electric vehicles have had exemptions from the 25 percent value-added tax and from the CO2- and weight-based registration tax that apply to combustion-engine vehicles.
I find it hilarious that people applaud Norway, whose economy is heavily driven by exporting petroleum gas and crude oil, for leading the world in clean energy adoption.
What would you like Norway to do? It's been more successful than other countries (generally speaking) insulating its economy from Oil. Would it be better to _not_ also try to drive adoption of clean energy?
Climate change is a global problem.
Fossil fuels burned in Norway or somewhere contributes the same amount of CO2.
It's kinda like shipping your plastic trash to another country and have them dumping it into the ocean and going "look how clean we are, 0 plastic trash!"
My point is that whatever is working for them is not even remotely applicable to 90% of the other countries. They are better than Saudi Arabia and other rich countries, but that's about it.
The challenge is not the total energy generated by solar, but the instantaneous power capacity. The grid collapses if supply does not perfectly match demand in real-time
Subsidies where needed 10 years ago, today the US and EU have to put massive tariffs on mass produced, cheap, superior EVs to keep their own ICE auto industry alive.
Before celebrating this too much, I urge people to read this article about how it has actually played out: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23939076/norway-electric-...
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.
People buy new cars (~10m/year in US) and when they are at that decision point, follow this algorithm.
1) Is there any way you can walk instead?
2) Can you bike?
3) Can you use an e-bike?
4) Can you use public transportation?
5) Can you move to a place where 1-4 are doable?
6) If none of the 4 above work, are you a 2 car family (most are), then one of the cars can be EV. While you have a gas car for longer trips, most likely a minivan.
7) Can you buy a used EV? (which is already manufactured!)
8) Can you buy a used plug-in hybrid? A plug-in hybrid can be 99% electric miles, most trips are short.
9) Can you buy a new EV?
10) Can you buy a new plug-in hybrid?
11) Can you buy a used gas car? A 2023 manufactured used gas car is identical to 2024, the delta of new features is negligible (maybe new colors?).
The incentives were obviously temporary and are already in the phase out stage with some starting being phased out since 2017.
Cars are not going away, there is one statement that ensures it:
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.
You're right that cars aren't going away, and I don't think it's a serious goal.
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.
You can't sign up - at least not for long. As public transit improves companies quit putting in parking places up front - they still have shipping/receiving in back, but only delivery vehicles allowed. The parking lot is sold to someone else who just wants a building, increasing density. Meanwhile all those people riding transit means there is more demand for better transit.
The above plays out over decades of course, and there are lots of competing factors.
I'm curious. Where has this played out?
Manhattan, Toyoko... People still drive in cities, but the better transit is the worse driving becomes.
> A 20 minute commute with no traffic and parking right in front because everyone else took the bus/train? Sign me up.
Indeed. I am not a people person so the idea of a solitary commute is massively appealing to me no matter the mode.
I don't know any city with amazing public transport where driving a private car isn't nightmarish.
It appears that driving a private car in the Netherlands isn't near as nightmarish as elsewhere.
The Netherlands is peculiar in that cyclists reclaimed their rights to the cities by kicking cars out of them.
Singapore.
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 nightmare there is paying for the car.
Singapore has an expensive plate tax that has to be renewed. They make owning a private car very expensive.
Cars aren’t going away, but it is very easy to disincentivize their use in urban areas.
Luckily in these situations it's likely that huge tax costs will be pushed onto private cars. Sign me up to that
I'd argue rather than go too far, now-ish is the right time to start addressing the issues you raise around reducing car culture.
There's a separation between how many cars we should have and what kind of cars those should be.
Sure, but the incentives for the latter affect the former. I don't think those two can be separated in a debate?
>noisy
Uhhh..
Above ~30 km/h the noise of a car is mainly from the wheels etc., not the motor. Trust me, you don't want to live next to a highway even if all the cars on it are electric!
I lived near a train line with a train every 5-15m 24h, Trust me, you don’t want to live near it either…
Add honking, brakes squeals, people blasting music with open windows, etc.
EVs use regen for 99.09% of stops. Honking and loud music is a street problem and has nothing to do with cars. In the horse and carriage days, drivers would be required to carry a bell and whistle to move your butt out of their way.
When I was looking for a house in Seattle, I checked out a nice townhome in Wallingford beneath the I5 ship canal bridge that had a great view of the city. But this was during COVID and the noise was still horrible, so I noped out of that quickly. It was all tire noise.
Saying EVs are still too loud, trust me is the knife's edge of complaining to complain. Just take the win.
Which "win"? There were multiple complaints here, not just noise. These EV incentives have actively hampered other goals and projects for a decade, one could argue it's a net loss.
EV road noise is not a valid and mature complaint for stifling EV adoption.
Good thing I had other arguments and a whole article linked as well, then?
The point is not about "stifling EV adoption", it's reducing problematic levels of over-dependence on cars in general. EVs don't solve all the issues that cars raise.
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
They don't solve all problems, but they do make solving the "too much CO2 cooks the planet" problem easier.
I'm all for fewer cars too!
Tires cause a large amount of pollution and noise.
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.
Tire noise is the major contributor at speed, and it looks like even in a typical US residential street with 20-25 mph speed limits, tire noise already dominates.
It’s a stupid take IMHO because it’s not an either thing in politics. But yes, even EVs are noisy because there’s road noise from the tires which is the dominant noise on highways and can be substantial when lots of cars even at street speeds if there’s a lot of cars. And the wheel’s generate a lot of fine invisible particulate pollution in the air too.
Plus there’s the “whoo” sound they all play when reversing ;)
A person who drives 12k miles per year in an small vehicle will need about 4000 kWh of electricity or about 600 gallons of gas. Australians are able to buy solar panels that will generate that amount of electricity for a generation for the price of gas for one or two years. Of course there are more costs associated (Installation, batteries, etc) but the cost equation is shifting very quickly.
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.
Yeah, the problem isn't panels, but installing them indeed.
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.
While the panels and inverters will wear out over the course of a couple of decades, the wiring will not. This is a similar bootstrap-type of situation when urban and rural electrification first took place.
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 keep hearing about the low price of panels but where do you find the panels that cheap?
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.
Don't know where you are, (US probably?), but here in the Netherlands I can find many suppliers offering decent panels at about $90-110 each. I'm guessing wholesale pricing (or importing yourself) would be cheaper.
Though in the US there's probably a 100%+ tariff on non-US panels...
The prices you see in articles are usually for utility scale solar, where thousands of panels are purchased in bulk from the manufacturer.
For the lowly homeowner looking to get a few panels, you're buying something that has 4 middlemen's hands on it already.
I don't know what part of the world are you from, but here in Poland, ordinary 400W Bi-Facial panel costs around $80/pc, when buying from wholesaler which are plenty and accessible even to non-companies (as a proof, I did buy 4pcs myself). And if you buy in bulk, it can even be $50/pc.
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.
I recently ordered two 500w panels from Amazon for 200€.
Norway has abundant hydropower. But like you've mentioned, this transition will happen in Australia and US, it might just take longer due to incentives.
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.
What are the returns for a landowner leasing a solar farm vs passively growing pines? My state has a lot of land to use and a good portion of the rural part is pine. Some landowners harvest pine trees on unused land.
For pines, not great. Timber farming was so heavily encourage for so many years that there is a glut and prices have stayed about the same in real dollars for decades.
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.
A rude awakening?
As in, the rest of the world transitions with economical EV's, panels, and batteries from China while the US protects its auto market.
The rude awakening is when US customers used to buying $60k gas guzzlers are able to buy a $20k EV.
The US would lose its superpower status before that happens, the awakening won’t be so drastic because we would have already started sliding into being a much poorer country than we are today. It’s already started at any rate.
I should say, a surprise for anyone who is completely unaware of the developments around the world, which a lot of people in the US are.
I don't this requires the loss of "superpower" status really. Already, if you dropped all EV, solar, battery tariffs in Florida, I think people there would be blindsided by how fast things start to take over.
A surprising and unpleasant discovery that one is mistaken.
Norway has lots of hydro, it’s in their best interest to use as much electricity as possible since it’s very cheap to produce.
US people pay about 2-3x more for just the red tap than Australians pay for the total price of getting solar installed. Including all the hardware, labor, and red tape. In the EU it's slightly better than in the US but not a lot. Also a lot of red tape, permitting and other friction.
> If anything I'm surprised that this is happening in an area that hasn't benefited as much from dramatic reductions in electricity costs
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 :)
Norway already had cheap, clean electricity thanks to hydro, so it makes sense they would lead on EVs and heat pumps.
They also have lots of oil which makes the transition more remarkable.
Oil they prefer to export rather than use. They had built up a nice sovereign fund accordingly.
If you compare Norway to other countries, you should always keep in mind that Norway is just blessed with energy. They have more hydropower than they consume, so electrifying everything just makes sense, even if you ignore consequences for climate and environment. They also have their own oil, and electrification will also allow them to sell more of it abroad or keep in the ground for future generations.
However, it also helps that they are good at long term planning.
Also, outside of the zone of influence of an imperialist authoritarian power which would prevent them from handling the exploitation of their resources for the benefit of their nation instead of the profit of foreign oligarchs. See Petro-Canada privatization.
Real talk: For the US, one equation to make this palatable is the ability to produce its own solar panels and batteries at comparable cost.
The US fucked up, but give it time.
The interesting downstream effect of this 100% adoption will be the secondary market and insurance.
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.
It's fantastic and to be applauded but also worth mentioning that Norway has a truly staggering amount of hydro power (130TWh/y) to support all the increased demand on the grid with carbon neutral electricity.
Norway just keeps winning when it comes to energy. I suppose it's a good thing because it is cold up there.
They struck out with food, so it's only fair they got a free money machine from hydro, wind, and oil/gas ;)
Not a fan of wind dried puffin?
How much of their imported goods are produced in countries with dirty energy?
If you want to go in that direction, you might rather want to argue that norway sold and sells directly lots of oil themself for other countries.
But for me, that does not change the fact, that they still did great making the investment in EV.
You have to start somewhere.
is this whataboutism?
People make all sorts of assumptions about increased grid pressure that come with electrifying the economy. It's true that we'll consume more energy overall but not that we'll have to get all of that with new generation.
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.
I live in a country that is struggling to meet electricity demand as it is and our grid requires substantial investment to exploit our renewables, which are spread out and intermittent.
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.
Good for them. Good for "the planet" (and uh... Tesla I suppose). But... most of incentives for the transition has been substantially funded by the nation's massive oil and gas revenues.
I wonder what they will do next with that obscene amount of money.
> and uh... Tesla I suppose
Are Teslas popular in Norway?
Very.
> 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...
19.1% market share in 2025.
https://bestsellingcarsblog.com/2026/01/norway-full-year-202...
Quite a bit less now than they used to be but there's still a lot of them.
Yes.
Norway is an outlier since it's one of the most affluent countries in the world.
Every new technology starts with adoption by the most affluent: cars, telephones, TVs, computers, internet, etc.
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.
There are other affluent countries that doesn't do nearly as well, so there's more to it than that.
> 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-...
Society generally moves towards affluence, so it's an interesting bellweather.
aside: interestingly it's spelled bellwether and comes from shepherds putting a bell on a wether (a sheep) — it's unrelated to weather
TIL thank you
Norway is also particularly Not Suitable for petrol-powered autos.
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.
Also, many tunnels. Less fumes makes a difference.
I suppose next is either electric air transport, or more/better trains? Trains in Norway are really not great.
(Sidenote: Why̱ are they̱ writing their y̱'s like that?)
Electric air transport is unlikely to happen for commercial transport.
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.
Power-to-X, ie electrolysis seems a much better path for CO2 neutral flight, and norway is ideal for that as well.
What about ferries?
Norway already has electric ferries.
Norway has been on this steady path for quite a while. I remember some years ago, when we still lived in central Europe, I compared the prices for electricity and in Germany, they were about 3x (!) higher per kWh than Norway.
Petrol prices, however, were roughly the same.
Finally, an article that satisfactorily answers their headline! Commercial EV adoption is lagging. They will pursue this next.
This is great, so long as the country cares more about becoming electric than tax income. I can assure you that in the Netherlands this is not the case.
As opposed to the Netherlands, Norway has an abundance of hydro electric power to fuel the cars and significant oil and gas income that can easily finance these policies.
Most countries aren't close to a level of electric car penetration where that would really be a problem. Even in Norway this is new car sales. The actual percentage of cars on the road that are fully electric is 32%.
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.
Hydro doesn’t really care if it’s used day or night, they can just open or close the gates as needed. It would be more of a thing if they used nuclear or coal, which is hard to ramp up and down.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46821415
Norway will be a good place for datacenters with all that electricity, modern economy and ambient coldness.
Unfortunately we're here selling ourselves too cheap. Municipalities gets blinded by big tech asking for cheap electricity and land and give them all they want, thinking it will lead to massive activity, affluent jobs etc. But after everything is built, there's a few janitors left and it's all controlled from abroad. But now the citizens pay more for their electricity, and have to build new water facilities to deal with the water usage from the centers.
Except it is remote and flat land is scarce and very expensive.
Our economy is modern in that it has been reorganized to divert tax revenue to unemployed migrants who then use that to buy up property and other goods and services, thus driving up the living cost for taxpayers.
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.
110% :P (or well more public transport so less cars ? :P)
> Battery-electric vehicles have had exemptions from the 25 percent value-added tax and from the CO2- and weight-based registration tax that apply to combustion-engine vehicles.
that's not going to last forever
I find it hilarious that people applaud Norway, whose economy is heavily driven by exporting petroleum gas and crude oil, for leading the world in clean energy adoption.
What would you like Norway to do? It's been more successful than other countries (generally speaking) insulating its economy from Oil. Would it be better to _not_ also try to drive adoption of clean energy?
Well, the easy path would have been to keep burning fossil fuels because they have plenty.
Just like the fact I can't stop my neighbours from littering but I can certainly control my own behaviour.
Climate change is a global problem. Fossil fuels burned in Norway or somewhere contributes the same amount of CO2. It's kinda like shipping your plastic trash to another country and have them dumping it into the ocean and going "look how clean we are, 0 plastic trash!"
My point is that whatever is working for them is not even remotely applicable to 90% of the other countries. They are better than Saudi Arabia and other rich countries, but that's about it.
The challenge is not the total energy generated by solar, but the instantaneous power capacity. The grid collapses if supply does not perfectly match demand in real-time
With V2G a large EV fleet would actually stabilize the grid.
Hydro can help a lot with that. Grid stability is a big issue with non-synchronous power sources (SNSP).
It only works until the money printer aka subsidies are around.
Subsidies where needed 10 years ago, today the US and EU have to put massive tariffs on mass produced, cheap, superior EVs to keep their own ICE auto industry alive.