I’d like to read more about how Norway’s EV adoption curve is going with respect to the electric utility infrastructure.

Here’s a short article I found about Oslo, more about the city history with EVs and the consequent decrease in pollution, but still interesting. For your listening and dancing pleasure I’ll hit a few highlights for those who can’t be bothered to click.

infrajournal.com - Oslo capital EV cars

It’s not just about acting on vehicles: the Norwegian city took a whole plan about infrastructures, incentives, mobility and public transport, to abate its emissions and thereby encouraging the passage from fossil fueled car to EVs.

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By 2021, the number of EVs entering Oslo's toll ring exceeded the number of petrol cars, and Oslo’s EV adoption set the pace for the country’s mass market. Christina Bu, NEVA’s secretary general, says 79% of new cars sold in Norway in 2022 were EVs.

Growth and maturity in the EV market inevitably leads to end-of-life battery challenges such as recycling, repair and safe reuse of old batteries plus recovery of valuable materials such as lithium, cobalt and nickel. Ruter AS, Oslo’s public transport authority, is taking steps to meet these challenges by including circular recycling requirements in e-bus tenders.

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Here’s another article that’s more on point:

pditechnologies.com - Norways EV growing pains convenience industry

One big issue cropping up in Norway is the capacity constraints on the electrical power grid. With thousands of new EVs hitting the roads, the grid is getting overloaded in some areas of the country. It turns out that Norway’s electrical grid was never built to handle large clusters of EVs charging at peak times. And upgrading the infrastructure turns out to be extremely expensive and time-consuming.

In other words, it sounds like the same issues facing every other country.

I’d just point out that progress - any progress (and especially disruptive progress) comes with costs. The Internet hasn’t been kind to newspapers, and Amazon didn’t make friends with Borders. WalMart shoved K-Mart and Sears aside, and cell phones obsoleted a lot of AT&T copper, while building ugly towers all over the planet.

EVs will not be without growing pains or costs, but they are coming regardless. Unlike Norway, which provided multiple financial and convenience incentives, the rest of the world is moving more glacially. With the arrival of Chinese entrants, at least in the non-US world, it could herald the end of the ICE age (get it? Ice age? Glacially? Oh, I amuse myself.) Eventually. But it’s coming, and the effects will be significant to a whole range of countries, companies, products, and industries.