From the market's point of view selling to Germany distributes the goods more efficiently. Germans don't freeze in the Winter, while you don't keep office buildings lit up at night just because electricity is cheap. It feels like you're losing here, but on average everyone wins.

(also, there's the whole invasion of Ukraine going on, which has caused a massive disruption to the market)

Oh the offices are all on at night. No worries there.

Can’t for the life of me understand that particular Scandinavian peculiarity in what would seem otherwise very rational society. I assume it must have been logical or still is?

To be honest I have no idea. I'm baffled/enraged to walk at night and see rows of tall buildings completely lit up with nobody inside.

It's basically impossible to see anything in the sky other than Jupiter here, because of the insane light pollution.

For most homes and offices the primary source of heating is electrical, so in the winter it doens't really make much difference whether you turn the lights off or not, heat is heat. In the summer there's no excuse though. Old habits die hard, or something like that.

That said, modern LED-lighting doesn't really use that much electricity, all lights in my apartment use a total of 100Wh, or 75kWh per month. I could turn off all lights in my apartment for a year and it still wouldn't be close to the energy needed for a single transaction on the bitcoin blockchain. But clearly some speculative investment has more utility than me not stumping my toe when going to the bathroom at night.

> For most homes and offices the primary source of heating is electrical

Source? I only know that people in isolated villa use electrical heating. Most apartments get hot water from a nearby garbage incinerator owned by the city.

> But clearly some speculative investment has more utility than me not stumping my toe when going to the bathroom at night.

We were talking about office buildings being fully lit 24h a day. Where nobody sleeps. Nobody is saying people should go to bed at 2pm in the winter.

Latest data is from 2012[0], but to counter to my own argument, I have district heating in my apartment. Outside of Oslo or any of the other "larger" cities in Norway I think you're hard pressed at finding anything like that, the population density is so low that it economy of scale for systems like that doesn't work out.

I'm not going to pretend that these office buildings don't exist, but usually they're not really empty. I've yet to be in an office without obnoxious motion sensors that don't work properly so you end up sitting in the darkness when working either early in the morning or late in the evening.

All that said, light pollution is a huge problem here. When I'm out hiking I don't really need a compass or anything to know the direction of Oslo, I can just look at the sky. I think the point I was trying to make is that lighting is a very small percentage of electricity usage, especially now with LED-lighting. In the winter I use the equivalent of 2000kWh/month for heating and hot water. Lighting would be 75kWh if I left all light on, all day, all night.

[0] https://www.ssb.no/energi-og-industri/statistikker/husenergi....

Yea, that was when we refused to buy natural gas from a dictator attacking sovereign countries.

And due to how the market was built, Germany's over-reliance on Russian gas affected everyone for a good while.

On the other hand I've been enjoying pretty much free electricity for about 6 months now. A few rare spikes up to 40c/kWh, but it's mostly been under 1c/kWh.

> A few rare spikes up to 40c/kWh, but it's mostly been under 1c/kWh.

The cheapest rate I can get in NL is ~30c/kwh, and that’s with a dynamic price contract.

The government has applied an artificial limit of 40c/kwh for 2023, after energy companies here fleeced everyone last year. Unfortunately, it expires by 2024.

The worst part is that NL privatized the energy market long ago, to give people “choice” - which has only led to coordinated exorbitant pricing.

Finland now has the opposite problem where the market price is negative at times. Our neighbours (Sweden, Estonia) are not able to import as much as we produce excess on good days. Luckily, more cables are being built and the variably cheap electricity attracts new industry that can make use of it (green hydrogen and green steel production).

I was one of those people who got fleeced. I moved here in the fall of 2022, right before winter started. My monthly fee to Vattenfall was €400/mo for an "A" rated new build apartment of 90m2. I had just moved and didn't know any better. I knew the war was contributing to energy prices but I had no idea to what extent.

Last winter, we kept the heat on to a minimum and tried to keep the lights off. Really, the killer was the price of gas for heating (in-floor) and hot water. But even by comparison, my 20 minute hot shower once every 2-3 days wasn't really the issue. Our "usage" for January was over €550. Luckily, I used basically nothing the first two months I lived here so it averaged out so I didn't need to pay anything. Had I known what I know now, I would have purchased electric space heaters and ran them 24/7... it probably would have been cheaper and I could have walked around my apartment naked while it was -2 outside.

I've switched to Tibber (Swedish company I think?) on a variable rate plan and have been much happier. It would be one thing if I could have locked in a rate at Vattenfall, but even that wasn't possible. You still pay out the ass for all of your usage, so I might as well not overpay when it's cheaper to produce. In the meantime, I'm saving some money each month for winter and will still likely invest in a couple of space heaters since the price of natural gas is still pretty high.

Now we've seen what some families have had to deal with paying their year-end balances and that is/should be criminal. I've seen people receiving bills for thousands of Euros. Their only crime was living in an older home with 2 kids. Got forbid you want your family to be clean and warm! I understand there is some personal responsibility to be taken, but obviously something went very very wrong.

Norway had trouble with hydro power because of low water levels. Compared to 2021, hydro power was down 10%, imports went up by 60%, and exports remained the same. And for the record, Germany didn't have any trouble with electricity last year, they exported records amounts of it, even increased the usage of gas to meet other countries' demands. Germany exported more electricity to Luxemburg than Norway exported to Germany - and while it seems popular for Norwegians here to claim that Germany wrecked their electricity market, I've yet to see a German claim that little Luxemburg caused electricity prices to explode in Germany.

I'm not saying it's Germany's fault, we're the ones selling them energy. Or rather a couple rich guys make shitloads of money while everyone else pays for their profits.

Nothing against Germany.

By "a couple of rich guys" are you referring to the fact that roughly 90% of all power production capacity is owned by the public via municipalities, regions and the state? (https://energifaktanorge.no/en/om-energisektoren/eierskap-i-...)