Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Imagine running a business where, for nearly a month out of the year, you have to pay your customers to take your product. It sounds like a terrible business.
But if you operate a wind farm in northern Sweden, that’s just how you operate.
Industry analysts generally agree that the Nordic electricity market just works. It is frequently viewed as a model for the global energy transition. This is because Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark built a system featuring massive amounts of renewable energy, highly stable infrastructure, and a deeply integrated regional market managed through the Nord Pool power exchange.
They achieved this success by relying on a simple, sound market design that effectively diluted the power of local energy monopolies. While other regional grids have collapsed under the pressure of severe supply and demand shocks, the Nordic market has consistently kept the lights on.
For instance, it survived a massive supply crunch in the early 2000s by relying on ruthless, efficient market signals. Today, it faces the exact opposite problem.
The region has built so much wind and hydro power that electricity is effectively free, or even negatively priced, during peak production hours.
This dynamic is breaking the traditional utility business model and comes with its own set of unique challenges. It also offers a perfect preview of what happens when the global green energy transition actually succeeds.
Surviving a Drought with Free Markets
The Nordic region relies heavily on hydropower. Norway, for example, generates roughly 90 percent of its electricity from falling water.
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This is usually great, but sometimes it does not rain. In the autumn of 2002, a massive drought hit the region. The hydro shortfall equaled about nine percent of the area’s annual electricity consumption.
A few years earlier, California faced a similar supply shock and collapsed entirely. California had also capped retail prices. So, because consumers felt no financial pain, they kept running their air conditioners. Wholesale prices skyrocketed, utilities went bankrupt buying expensive power to sell at fixed low prices, and the grid failed.
During its own crisis, the Nordic market took a completely different path, betting on free market dynamics. It simply did not cap retail prices.
When the water ran low, the wholesale spot prices jumped to two or three times their normal levels. Retail prices followed closely behind, and consumers deeply felt the pain.
Consumers looked at their soaring electricity bills and simply turned down the heat. The market cleared perfectly. Politicians resisted the urge to intervene, allowing the high prices to naturally reduce demand.
Building Too Much of a Good Thing
Source: Nordic Statistics Database, ENER08
Source: Nordic Statistics Database, GREE21
Fast forward to today. The problem is no longer scarcity. The problem is abundance.
The Nordic countries generate about 430 to 440 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity every year. They only consume about 395 TWh.
This makes them a massive net exporter. The vast majority of this power comes from low-carbon sources.
Sweden generates 99 percent of its electricity from low-carbon sources, leading the European Union. Denmark gets more than 50 percent of its electricity just from wind.
Because they built so much renewable energy infrastructure, they produce wildly fluctuating amounts of power. You cannot easily control the wind. When a storm rolls through, every single wind turbine in Scandinavia produces maximum power at the exact same time.
If you are a wind producer, this is a financial disaster. Your product is completely undifferentiated, and you produce it precisely when all of your competitors are also producing it.
The Cannibalization of Wind
Middelgrunden offshore wind farm (40 MW) in Sweden. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
This creates a structural phenomenon called value cannibalization.
When the wind blows hard, the supply of electricity overwhelms demand and the price of electricity collapses.
A typical wind farm might only capture 55 to 60 percent of the average wholesale electricity price over a year. Solar plants fare even worse, capturing around 45 percent.
Last year, electricity prices in northern Sweden fell below zero for 679 hours. That is almost a full month of negative prices. In a negative price scenario, the price per kilowatt-hour (kWh) drops below zero, meaning the electricity producer essentially pays the consumer to take the energy.
A study by Jönköping International Business School found 1,000 of Sweden’s 5,200 wind turbines belonged to projects currently facing financial difficulties. Today, an onshore wind farm is expected to sell electricity at 15–30% below the average market price.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean Swedish households don’t pay any utility bills during those times. While the energy price itself is negative, consumers often still pay fixed grid fees, taxes, and VAT, so the total bill may not be zero or negative, even if the electricity usage fee is.
Still, for the power producers, the economics look grim. They have to supply clean energy regardless of the financial return.
“There are several different price areas in the Nordic market, and in some of them — such as northern Sweden and Finland — it’s fair to say the electricity prices have collapsed,” Sigbjørn Seland, chief analyst at StormGeo, told Atmos.
“Every time you put a new wind turbine into the market, you cannibalize the value of the wind power. Many of these companies end up in a terrible economic situation. You have a lot of wind power companies that go into bankruptcy or need to be restructured. The wind turbines continue, but the producers can go bankrupt. It’s accepted this will happen, though, in a way, as this is the nature of the market,” Seland added.
The Flexibility Fix
If your market frequently produces too much electricity, you need to find a way to store it.
You need to build a massive energy sponge, and in this regard, Finland is leading the way in the northern European peninsula. Instead of simply turning off wind turbines when prices drop, Finland is focusing on system flexibility.
By the end of 2025, Finland installed roughly 3,000 megawatts of electric boilers. When electricity is cheap, these boilers turn the free power into heat for industrial processes and district heating.
Finland is also aggressively pushing dynamic electricity pricing. About 25 percent of Finnish households currently use dynamic tariffs. This means it’s much cheaper for households to turn on their washing machines when the wind blows and power is cheap. This system basically trains consumers to absorb excess supply and makes both the grid and market more efficient.
This shows that the energy transition is no longer just about building wind turbines. It is about building an intelligent grid that can handle the sheer volatility of zero-marginal-cost energy.
A Preview for the American Grid
This exact dynamic is sometimes seen in other places, including the United States.
Texas and California already feel the effects of massive renewable buildouts. Both states frequently see negative power prices in the middle of the day when solar power floods the grid.
California built around 17 gigawatts of battery storage to soak up that cheap midday sun and sell it back during the evening peak.
Dennis Wamsted, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told Atmos exactly how this trade works. “If you can get cheap, clean power during the day and then sell it at a higher price later in the day, that’s a perfect situation for battery storage,” he said.
Wamsted also highlighted the subsequent impact on traditional fossil fuels. “We are seeing in California a reduced need for gas plants to ramp up, and they may be pushed off the market if they can’t cover their operation costs,” he said.
However, the U.S. faces unique hurdles. The American grid is a fragmented patchwork, and moving cheap wind power from the Midwest to the coasts is incredibly difficult.
Clean Power vs Politics
Illustration: Lazaro Gamio/Axios
But the Nordic countries have an advantage the U.S. currently lacks: broad political consensus.
In Scandinavia, clean energy functions as an economic and security bedrock on which all local political forces agree. In the U.S., it’s turned into a weird culture war. It’s no secret that the Trump administration has actively sought to curb the expansion of wind energy. On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued a memorandum that entirely removed the Outer Continental Shelf from future offshore wind leasing. Furthermore, the directive instructed federal agencies to immediately halt the approval or renewal of any permits, leases, loans, and rights-of-way for both onshore and offshore wind projects.
The most ridiculous thing about this order is that the Administration paid companies to abandon offshore wind development.
“The Trump administration’s $1 billion payout to a French energy company to walk away from U.S. offshore wind development is a novel tactic against the industry that supporters see as creative — but opponents see as foolish and extreme. The Interior Department announced Monday that TotalEnergies agreed to what is essentially a refund of its leases for projects off the coasts of North Carolina and New York, and will invest the money in a liquefied natural gas export terminal in Texas and other fossil fuel projects instead. The department hailed it as an “innovative agreement” with the French energy giant so that the “American people will no longer pay for ideological subsidies that benefited only the unreliable and costly offshore wind industry,” wrote Jennifer McDermott in the Associated Press.
This deliberate dismantling of wind infrastructure in the U.S. stands in stark contrast to the shifting mindset in Northern Europe, where clean energy is no longer just an environmental goal, but a hard-nosed national security strategy.
Economics and Shifting Perspectives
“If you talked about renewables a couple of years ago, you talked very much about the environment, you talked about climate change,” she said. “And you still do, but today you also talk about it from a self-sufficient and security perspective that you can’t rely on other countries for your energy,” Britta Ersman, commercial director for the Nordics at Renewable Energy Systems, told Atmos.
“The majority of people are pro-buildout of renewables. And also from the politicians’ side, I think we sometimes give them negative feedback, but they are trying to ease the process for us to get a quicker permit process to build out the grid and to promote new production”.
But the raw economics of the grid are incredibly stubborn. Free energy is a compelling business proposition, regardless of the political theater.
“Trump is a clear factor in slowing down the transition; there’s no way to put a pretty face on that. We might not get there as quickly as we need to, but we will get there — because it’s now clear you can’t expect low-cost electricity by burning things. There’s a lot of political theater in Washington, D.C., but that doesn’t change the fundamentals of the transition. They can slow the transition, but they cannot stop it,” said Wamsted.
The Nordic market proved that a free market can handle extreme scarcity. Now, it is trying to prove it can survive extreme abundance.