Electricity Prices… wtf 😖

So… Please forgive me if this is really stupid to ask but I am trying to get my head around energy prices this year as it’s the first rental contract I’ve had without it included in the rent since I moved to Norway a little over a year ago.

Four days into December, average temperature probably -13, I live in an older wood house of 70m² in a smaller town in commuting distance to Oslo, and my work. So not the most modern, but insulated and double glazed and fairly typical for the town. Since the last couple of weeks, I am basically just living in one room upstairs kept warm with my own 700kwt infra red heater because prices are so high.

There’s cables in bathroom/kitchen/living room, which I don’t have experience with, but they are not connected to a thermostat and am only keeping them on the lowest setting to stop pipes freezing which is maintaining a tropical 13 degrees downstairs. I deliberately cook outside peak times now and put a timer so the electric water heater only operates from 1-4am when the electricity is cheapest, not the most efficient but probably cheaper over all, and will hopefully also stop my peak usage going into a higher nettlei tariff like last month. I also blocked off a couple of windows and put a curtain over the front door.

Without government support, and not including nettlei, my cost for a basic spotpris contract with Motkraft is 456nok for four days, averaging about 60kwh a day, to have a home that for the most part, very cold and uncomfortable. I think the support will reduce that to about 250 NOK, or around 60nok a day before nettlei, but realistically, for the month it will be over 2000kronor to live quite uncomfortably in your own home while being very careful about consumption. If I wasn’t being as careful, and heating my entire house to 18degrees using electric panel heaters that are installed, I think I would be looking at closer to 120kwh a day and 6k NOK a month, which is entirely unaffordable for me and probably a lot of people living alone. It also makes me wonder how families who need to heat more than one bedroom etc are coping…

Am I doing something wrong or do I just need to accept this is the new ‘normal’? I looked at moving to a more modern apartment that might have better energy performance, but there’s nothing locally with a green rating and only thing I could maybe afford/wanted to rent for location etc in Oslo was much smaller and built in the late 90’s, but when I checked it still has a red energy rating, and will cost far more in rent and transport too. As a reseller, I understand Vibb might be slightly cheaper because of no surcharge, but if I wanted to get the same functionality as I have with Motkraft I’d need to pay extra anyway, and Motkraft is not for profit so politically I support that.

How is everyone coping with this? I find it surreal that instead of re-nationalising the energy system the government is just subsidising predominantly hydropower produced electricity with money from the oil fund too 😩

by ConstantinVonMeck