Norway’s EV revolution shows us the urgency of government action on transport

The Driven

The rapid growth of wind and solar will make decarbonising grids look easy, but transport remains a problem around the world.

Combustion engine vehicles are ubiquitous, companies are selling bigger, more emissions intensive vehicles and consumers are buying them, and there seems to be a firm reluctance to engage with change on the scale we’ve seen it in the power sector. It’s going to be a hard road – we know that for sure. It is therefore worth looking to the world leader in the electrification of transport: Norway.

It is a country known for two key climate things: oil and electric vehicles. When it comes to EVs, they’re incredibly hard to miss (actually, they’re quite easy to miss, as they’re mostly silent and thus require some extra caution if you’re a cyclist or pedestrian).

This alternative to combustion engine vehicles has been aggressively incentivised by the Norwegian government, and consequently, Norway easily leads the world in their deployment. Living in Oslo, easily the region of Norway with the highest concentration of EVs per vehicle, it’s easy to see how the country’s aggressive government policy has resulted in change.

Of the total new cars being purchased each month, an increasing proportion of those are electric. In recent months, these proportions just keep increasing.

This is extremely good news: these vehicles will stick around for decades, and they’ll run on Norway’s clean electricity grid. In October, just over 60% of new vehicles were pure electric.

To read the full version of this story, please go to our EV-focussed sister site, The Driven and click here…