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....