Let me try to invert your point in the other direction. Imagine that, rather than having walkable cities, every Norwegian commuted alone by car for one hour every day. Imagine - and having lived in Scandinavia for many years, I know this is hard - that there is no grocery store within any reasonable biking or walking distance. Imagine an 8-hour drive is a normal weekend thing to do, because there is no working train infrastructure.

In this version of Norway, every single Norwegian would own at least one car. Generally you own multiple cars, because if your one car goes to the shop, you cannot leave your house - it would take hours to walk or bike to work!

This version of Norway, as you can imagine, has way, way way more cars. Specifically, roughly twice as many (~400 cars per 1000 Norwegians vs ~800 cars per 1000 Americans). And they drive, way, way way more miles per year.

When you combine the much higher number of vehicles in America with the much higher number of annual miles driven, the American challenge, in kWh added to the grid, is perhaps 4-5 times the size of the Norwegian one.

Not to mention that, in Norway there is a single grid maintained by a single operator working in lock-step with the national governments climate priorities. In America there are three grids managed by nine regional operators that all hate each other in various fascinating ways.

All to say. There are definitely lessons, but Americas relationship to cars makes the "Norway can ramp car sales to 50% BEV why can't you" argument misplaced. It's like arguing that since the US grid adds, per quarter, twice as many BEVs as the Norwegian grid adds per year, why can't Norway take some pointers from the US? Well, because that's a silly comparison.

I think you really misread my intention there. I was not trying to say Norway is better than America, or that your experience would be the same. I think you are reading a ton of stuff between the lines which is not there.

All I am saying is that it is useful to look at a country that is farther ahead in the transition process to get an idea of how your own reality will look in the future.

Don't build this up to something it isn't. I was not trying to make a pissing contest between the US an Norway ;-)

I think PP's point is America is oh-so-worse than Norway :).

I do wish EVs in the United States weren't such an excuse to not think about rail.

The comment you responded to is simply informing that you cannot compare Norway's with USA's EV experience because that's like comparing apples to oranges.

Or, if you will, that the Norwegian lessons aren't that useful to the USA. The differences are bigger than any similarity.

Norway has extraordinary levels of renewable energy.

Yeah, but that is kind of irrelevant with respect to how the grid operates. Norway doesn't have 25% energy sitting there unused, ready for EVs. Quite the contrary, Norway uses pretty much all of its power. Norway's economy is built around it. We have a lot of really power hungry industry developed here over many years due to access to large amounts of cheap electric power.

In fact there is a battle over building wind turbines in Norway now, because we need them to cover higher future electricity demand from EVs. And of course nobody wants them in their backyard.