How Norway became the electric car capital of the world

This article was originally published on Nexus Media News is a non-profit, editorially independent news service covering climate change and was published in conjunction with Reasons to be cheerful.

When Trondheim-based Magnus Korpås bought his first electric car in 2019, he opted for a Tesla, the car model that offered the most charging stations available at the time. However, in just a few years, Norway built up its charging infrastructure so quickly that no matter what type of electric vehicle (EV) you choose, there’s practically always a charging point nearby.

“In Norway, we are quite used to electric vehicles. This is the common car now,” says the Norwegian University of Science and Technology professor. “You really deviate from the standard if you buy something else.”

Over the past three decades, Norway has doggedly pushed to electrify its vehicle fleet, using a combination of infrastructure investment, subsidies and regulations to push people into electric cars. The results have been remarkable: 20% of cars on the road are electric vehicles, and Norway was the first country in the world to see sales of electric cars start to overtake sales of fossil fuel cars. Today, 80% of new cars sold in Norway are electric.

In comparison, the United States lags far behind. It is estimated that less than 1% of cars on the road in the United States are electric, and while sales of electric vehicles are growing rapidly in the United States, they still represent just under 5% of new cars sold in the country. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) aims to help accelerate the transition from fossil fuel cars to electric vehicles as part of a bid to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, about 27% of which are attributable to transport.

While the IRA is designed to promote EV adoption through purchase subsidies, it simultaneously aims to greatly expand the US EV charging network. Range anxiety, the worry that a car will run out of charge while on the road, is a big factor keeping Americans from buying electric vehicles. While many climate advocates argue that reducing transport emissions requires strengthening public transport options and making cities more walkable and walkable, promoting the adoption of electric vehicles is the most prominent solution in the IRA .

“There is a strong consensus that the electrification of vehicles is a big part of the [climate] solution But you can’t do that without charging infrastructure,” says Ben Shapiro, manager of the carbon-free transportation team at the clean energy think tank Rocky Mountain Institute. “From a climate perspective, it’s essential”.

According to Shapiro, the US needs “orders of magnitude more charging infrastructure than we have today” to meet its goal of making half of all vehicle sales zero-emission by 2030. Norway, which has the most electric vehicles per per capita and more chargers per electric vehicle. , than any other place in the world, offers a road map to know how to get there.

To this point, EV charging infrastructure in the US has been driven largely by private investment. Tesla has installed more than 163,000 chargers across the country, but its chargers only work in Teslas for now (though that’s set to change soon). In January, Mercedes-Benz announced it would install 2,500 high-power chargers that will work with any car by 2027, following Volkswagen’s 2021 announcement that it planned to have 10,000 fast chargers in North America by 2025.

In Norway, too, Tesla was the first major commercial player to start building public charging stations in an effort to make its product more attractive. As the adoption of electric vehicles continued to increase in the 2000s and 2010s, the Norwegian government stepped in to ensure that charging points were easy to use and equitably distributed. It invested 7 million euros to create 1,900 charging points in 2011.

Parallel measures to increase charging accessibility began to increase in the US with the passage of recent spending bills such as the IRA and the bipartisan Infrastructure Act (BIL). The latter invests $7.5 billion in electric vehicle charging with the goal of building a network of 500,000 chargers nationwide by 2030, while the former restores expired tax credits for installing electric vehicle chargers in low-income communities and rural areas. The Biden administration finalized new standards that will make America’s charging infrastructure available to everyone, no matter what brand of car they drive. (The previously Tesla-exclusive Supercharger network will soon be open to all electric vehicle brands.)

Norway offers additional lessons for prioritizing equity. As more than 82% of electric vehicle users in Norway charge their vehicles at home, housing associations can apply for grants subsidizing up to 50% of the cost of purchasing and installing common chargers. The Norwegian government also created “a law that parking lots have to set up the basic infrastructure, like having electricity available,” says Norwegian EV Association Deputy Secretary General Petter Haugneland.

Analysis by S&P Global estimates that the United States needs to quadruple the number of electric vehicle chargers between 2022 and 2025 to keep pace with the number of electric vehicles on the road. If Norway’s experience is any indicator, encouraging the adoption of electric vehicles could be the best tool the United States has to increase the proliferation of chargers.

According to Korpås, Norway’s road to saturation of charging points began by stimulating more demand for electric vehicles, just as the US has done with tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles built into the IRA. But while the US only incentivizes purchases of electric vehicles, Norway also discourages purchases of non-electric cars. Its “polluter pays” principle means fossil fuel cars pay more tax than electric vehicles. Purchase tax on fossil fuel-burning cars is calculated using a combination of weight and emissions, meaning bigger, more polluting cars are more expensive.

As Norway is a cold country that had already built up extensive grid capacity to handle the population’s heating needs, most of which are covered by electricity, the Norwegian grid was decently equipped to handle the demand of energy from electric vehicles, says Korpås. In other words, the network infrastructure was already up and running even if the public chargers were not.

Like Norway, about 80% of electric vehicle charging in the US is done at home. But the US grid does not have as much relative capacity as Norway’s, in part because the US tends to rely more on natural gas for heating. Expanding electric vehicle charging infrastructure in the US will depend more on building overall electric grid capacity than building more public charging ports.

Another factor contributing to Norway’s success in EV adoption is its deep pockets, which are due in large part to its status as a major oil exporter. The country of 5 million people collected nearly $90 billion in tax revenue from the oil and gas industry last year, according to Norwegian officials, and its per capita gross domestic product is $20,000 more than that of the United States, according to data from the World Bank. And while the IRA has freed up funding for climate initiatives in the U.S., many decarbonization projects have and will continue to hit dead ends until the U.S. begins to more proactively plan its grid-building.

“There’s a pretty significant investment that’s going to be needed to support all of this new electricity demand,” says RMI’s Shapiro. “This is not just an electric utility issue, it’s also a regulatory issue. We have a lot of work to do from an electric sector public policy perspective to enable utilities to move faster on this to move forward -se to the growing demand for cargo”. Part of what that means, he says, is streamlining the permitting process so utilities can quickly invest in infrastructure that can anticipate future electricity needs.

According to Haugneland, members of the Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association use public fast chargers about twice a month, and a number of third-party charging companies are stepping in to take advantage of the growing market. Companies such as Recharge and Eviny are establishing fast chargers, which can charge an electric vehicle battery to 80% capacity in 30-45 minutes. These stations are found everywhere from traditional gas stations to grocery stores and McDonalds’, with a growing number of chargers outside of major cities for when people take longer trips.

According to Haugneland and Korpås, one of the biggest frustrations for Norwegian electric vehicle drivers is that there is no easy, centralized way to find or pay for charging on all the different platforms. If the U.S. can get ahead of this problem by ensuring a more standardized approach to locating and paying for public freight, as the Biden administration has promised, it will benefit drivers, Haugneland says. So will a streamlined permitting policy that allows electric utilities to build grid infrastructure more quickly so they can meet the increased demand for electricity from electric vehicles, Shapiro says.

“The European and American markets may be five years behind, but hopefully you’ll catch up very soon,” says Haugneland. “Of course you can’t copy everything, but I think there’s a lot to learn from the Norwegian market.”