Norway's Electricity Crisis is About to Hit Britain.

[NNadir]

Norway’s electricity crisis is about to hit Britain Kathryn Porter, 30 Aug 2025.

The article is behind a paywall, but I accessed it from a library.

Excerpts:

European countries like the UK have become too reliant on cheap hydro from Scandinavia

Stop someone on the street in London and ask them about interconnectors and chances are they will look at you blankly. But in Oslo, energy trading through these massive undersea cables has become a major issue. And one with huge implications for Britain.

There is a real chance that Norway will run out of water this winter, meaning it will not be able to maintain electricity supplies to Great Britain. Norway could be forced to restrict exports under new powers which allow them to be restricted if there is a prospect of hydrological shortages. And not just once the shortages manifest.

With elections to the Norwegian parliament on Sept 8, this is a hot button issue – as low water levels lead to high prices for consumers.

Reservoir levels in southern Norway are now well below the 20-year average and heading towards 20-year lows. This is hugely concerning. Norway has almost no pumping capability which means that once the water has been used, it will not be replaced until it rains or the snow melts.

The south of Norway is the main region of tension. This is where the interconnectors to Britain and Germany land, and where the population is highest.

Since these two interconnectors opened in 2021, the region has seen higher prices. The issue of high and volatile prices has led to them becoming an issue of concern among the general public.

Earlier this year, the governing coalition collapsed when the Centre Party left over disagreements with the Labour Party over interconnectors and energy policy. The Centre Party opposed implementation of the EU 4th Energy Package which is a legal requirement, and wants to cancel the interconnector deals with Britain and Germany.

Even the Labour Party agreed to defer implementation of the Energy Package and not to approve any more interconnection in the face of widespread public opposition.

Almost all of the parties competing in the upcoming election are against interconnection promising either no new cables, or the cancellation of existing ones.

Notably, there is consensus that two of the Skagerrak links with Denmark which are coming to the end of their lives in the next year or so will not be renewed, which will cut cross-border capacity with Denmark by almost a third.

This is highly significant – Norway cutting electricity trading with one of its Scandinavian neighbours reflects the strength of public opposition to the cables. But Denmark also acts as a transit country for electricity exports from Norway to Germany, Great Britain and the Netherlands, so this move will have a wider impact...

The Norwegian Government collapsed during Germany's long episode of Dunkelflaute this past winter.

The Norwegian Energy Minister States It Bluntly: "It's an absolute shit situation."

Let's be clear on something OK. Making energy supplies dependent on the weather, a feature of so called "renewable energy," precisely at the time we have destabilized the weather because so called "renewable energy" is ineffective at replacing or even ameliorating the use of fossil fuels, is unworkable, to the point of insane.

The reactionary enthusiasm for "renewable energy" is solely and wholly in existence to attack the only sustainable form of energy that there has ever been, that discovered and developed by the finest minds of the 20th century, nuclear energy.

[Ocelot II]

1. This brings to mind a TV series from a few years back, "Occupied,"

in which Norway had been devastated by a weather event caused by climate change, and had decided to switch from fossil fuels to a newly-developed nuclear technology based on thorium. So, not wanting to make climate change any worse, they decided to shut down their offshore oil operations, meaning they wouldn't being supplying any more oil and gas to the EU, which of course went nuts; then the Russians got involved and took over the government in a "soft" coup and restarted the oil rigs. The US had previously left NATO and refused to get involved, and the ousted PM went rogue and took on the Russians. Great series, was on Netflix, think it's on Amazon Prime. It brings up some of the messy international implications of energy productions.

I wonder if wind energy will become more or less feasible, considering that more extreme weather conditions seem to be creating more and higher winds.

[NNadir]

2. In a Dunkleflaute event as that of the recent winter, wind energy is useless all through Europe. Wind energy is junk.

This isn't science/political fiction, but Norway is considering "going nuclear" against climate change, which to my mind is the only viable approach, as late as it is because of the pernicious success of the antinuclear movement, that has had the effect of vast planetary scale destruction.

Nuclear power plant proposed for north-eastern Norway

Norsk Kjernekraft has submitted a proposal to Norway's Ministry of Energy for an assessment into the construction of a power plant based on multiple small modular reactors in the county of Finnmark. The company said it marks the first step in the formal process to establish a nuclear power plant there.

In April last year, the municipality of Vardø in Finnmark proposed nearby Svartnes as a possible site for a nuclear power plant to Norsk Kjernekraft, which aims to build, own and operate SMR power plants in Norway in collaboration with power-intensive industry. Vardø municipality and Norsk Kjernekraft entered into an agreement to prepare a report with proposals for a study programme in June 2023.

In collaboration with Vardø, Norsk Kjernekraft has mapped the energy situation in Finnmark, and considered the local conditions at Svartnes. Based on this, a nuclear power plant is proposed with a capacity of up to 600 MWe and an annual output of up to 5 TWh - "enough to triple the power supply in Finnmark".

Norsk Kjernekraft said the report it has now submitted to the Ministry of Energy "describes local conditions for the construction and operation of a nuclear power plant at Svartnes outside Vardø, and which topics will be described in a future impact assessment. The available information suggests that the location is suitable for the purpose..."

...The report says that electricity is currently generated in Finnmark using hydro plants and wind turbines. "In periods of low wind, Finnmark is dependent on supply of power from other parts of Norway and from Finland," it says. "The nuclear power plant will produce electricity completely independently of the weather, thereby providing a significant improvement in the reliability of the power supply throughout north Scandinavia, as well as helping to cover the expected power demand..."

Norway, like Germany, suffers from Dunkleflaute conditions.

It appears that the extreme global heating we now observe because the "renewable energy" scam was successful at attacking nuclear energy - its only reason for being - leading to the atmosphere collapsing.

It will get worse, as the glaciers in Switzerland disappear, and in Asia, when the glaciers in the Himalayas, major sources of water for India, China, and Pakistan, recede.

Have a nice day.

[Ocelot II]

3. Thanks for the information - very interesting, and worrisome.

I had to look up Dunkelflaute - a condition where there's insufficient wind or sunlight for energy production. It's not a thing I was aware of - it's been unusually windy where I am - and it deserves more attention. So it looks like at least one country is trying to deal with it (strangely, like in the TV series!).

[NNadir]

4. It's historically observed. This winter it led to extremely high prices in Europe, with Sweden, Norway and other...

...countries threatening to cut off Germany. It still may happen again.

I have somewhere in my files, a paper suggesting that Dunkelflaute events - the word was originally German but has gone international as it's been observed, with consequences for all of Western Europe - are likely to become more frequent as the atmosphere continues with its accelerating degradation.

I contend that the atmospheric degradation is a function of the last 40 years of the successful, but stupid, demonizing of nuclear energy. It's now too late to "wake up" to reality, vast damage is now irreversible, but that said, it is still the best and only option we have, to go nuclear against fossil fuels, cutting the useless wind and solar businesses out of the loop. I do see, after 40 years of making this point, as something of a voice in the wilderness among my fellow political liberals, that attitudes toward nuclear are becoming more positive, but regrettably, most of the energy money is still sunk into so called "renewables" - even though the land and mass requirements leave a question of whether "renewables" are actually renewable. My view is that "renewables" are not sustainable, never have been sustainable, and can't be made sustainable. They will continue to do what they have been doing, make things get worse faster and doing less than nothing to address the clearly unsustainable use of fossil fuels, on which in fact, "renewables" depend, battery and hydrogen bullshit notwithstanding.

Whatever the case, Dunkelflaute is a very serious matter, and Europe is waking up to it and its consequences are causing political instability.