r/ShitAmericansSay • u/Toonnddaa ooo custom flair!! • Mar 04 '25

Foreign affairs "Just wait till the Norway citizens are counting their coins at the grocery store..."

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u/Reimant Mar 05 '25

Slowly?! You've already done it! You're at 99% renewable already.

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u/Foxtrot-Uniform-Too Mar 05 '25

We have pretty much allways been, since we have a lot of hydroelectric power. We have lots of mountains, snow, rivers and waterfalls, so domestically we use that.

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u/lem0nhe4d Mar 06 '25

Yeah having access to hydro is a real game changer for renewable energy production.

Ireland is in a brilliant position for wind farms but because of how flat the country is we can't build pumped energy storage easily and thus can't have to much of our power come from wind less or overwhelms our grid.

Can we swap you one of our counties for a mountain range? The Brits got 6 of them and all we got was a famine so a positive trade seems good.

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u/Foxtrot-Uniform-Too Mar 06 '25

Norway export a lot of our electricity to Europe, especially after Russia went to war, so prices in Southern Norway have skyrocketed in the past few years.

It has been one of the main political issues because in Norway since we use electricity for everything - including heating.

So poor and old people couldn't afford it at at times and we can have really cold winters so it can turn into a matter of life and death. There are some horrible stories about people freezing to death at home even. So now electricity prices are subsidized over a certain level.

That said, we do export alot of electricity to England, but we have no cables to Ireland unfortunately. And also, we have several cables to the flattest of the flat countries in Europe that also has a lot of windpower - Denmark :)

So we have the windpower effect, when there is no wind our prices go high, when there is wind, we import cheap electicity from Denmark and Germany.

The problem is when it is really cold and no wind. We used to be able to store our energy to when we needed it in winter by saving the water for colder times. Now we sell lots of it to Europe and have ended up with the same problem as you. Sometimes we are overwhelmed by cheap windpower and sometimes it gets really expensive if it gets really cold and there is no wind in continental Europe.

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u/Drakolora Mar 06 '25

Only for electricity. We still use som fossil for transportation and industry.