Norway is Showing the World How to Electrify Transportation
As EV sales soar, the focus is shifting to planes and ferries
If you come from a colder part of the world, you’ve probably heard some variation on the line that while electric vehicles (EVs) might work in California, they won’t work in places with long winters. That view seems fueled by the recognition that batteries can be less efficient in the cold, paired with a range anxiety that has failed to keep up with developments in battery technology.
It’s absolutely true that EVs have a lower range in cold weather, but that’s also true of gas-powered vehicles; and many new EVs now have ranges between 300–500 kilometres (186–310 miles), far longer than the distance most people drive in a whole day, let alone a single trip. However, there’s no better refutation of this notion that EVs can’t work in cold countries than Norway, where it’s not just vehicles that are going electric, but all modes of transportation.
Norway’s Electric Vehicle Revolution
Norway has long been a leader on the adoption of EVs. The most recent numbers show that 52.2 percent of all new car sales in 2017 were plug-in electric or hybrid vehicles, including fully electric vehicles reaching 20.8 percent and plug-in hybrids at 18.4 percent, while diesel vehicles continued their sharp decline to only 23.1 percent.
By the end of 2016, plug-in vehicles represented 5 percent of the passenger cars on Norwegian roads — a number that has since grown — while Norway has the highest concentration of plug-in vehicles in the world at 21.5 registered vehicles for every 1,000 people. By comparison, California’s rate is 5.8 plug-in vehicles per 1,000 people.
The success of EVs in Norway is, in part, a result of the government incentives designed to encourage citizens to buy vehicles so it can hit its target of 100% plug-in vehicle sales by 2025, when the sale of vehicles running on fossil fuels will be banned. People who drive plug-in vehicles don’t pay import tax or VAT, have a reduced road tax, are exempt from many tolls and road fees, can drive in some bus lanes, and get free parking. In short, there are a lot of reasons to go electric, and there’s little risk that emissions are simply being moved from the tailpipe to the smokestack because 98 percent of the country’s electricity is renewable, mostly coming from hydro sources.
But Norway isn’t stopping its push for electrification at the automobile.
Electrifying Planes and Ferries
Domestic flights might generate just over two percent of Norway’s emissions, but that doesn’t mean the country is ignoring them. Avinor, the public operator of Norway’s airports, wants all short-haul flights up to 1.5 hours in the country and to neighboring Sweden and Denmark to be electric by 2040. To encourage the development of electric planes, it will offer a tender for a commercial route with an electric plane to begin in 2025, and it’s retrofitting airports to make them more efficient, including installing solar panels and using snow to cool buildings.
Norway has also put two electric ferries into service, the first in 2015 and the second in 2017, and the results were even better than operators imagined. Carbon emissions have been reduced by 95 percent and operating costs dropped by 80 percent — and people have taken notice. The company that made them now has a backlog of 53 orders.
If a country like Norway, with its cold winter temperatures, can lead the way on transport electrification, there’s no reason that other countries can’t follow suit. It is possible to get off fossil fuels, but only if we take the initiative to do so, and on this issue, Norway is showing the world the way forward.
While Norway leads the world on EVs, China has emerged as the leader on high-speed rail. Its network is the largest in the world and its tech is going global; it may even help build a line from Oslo to Stockholm. Read more:
