Norway has no significant coal deposits of its own and, until the discovery of North Sea oil in the late twentieth century, no domestic fossil fuel resources of consequence. What it has always had, in striking abundance, is falling water. The combination of a mountainous landscape, high annual precipitation and a dense network of rivers and lakes draining toward the sea gave Norway one of the richest concentrations of hydropower potential in the world — a resource that, once the technology to exploit it at scale arrived in the late nineteenth century, drove an industrial transformation as significant in its way as the coal-fired industrial revolution that had reshaped Britain a century earlier.
From Waterwheel to Turbine
The use of falling water for mechanical power in Norway long predates electricity. The sawmills along the Akerselva, discussed elsewhere on this blog, operated for centuries on the direct mechanical power of waterwheels, converting the energy of the river's descent through the city directly into the reciprocating motion needed to drive saw blades. This was hydropower in its earliest and most direct form — water turning a wheel turning a mechanism, with no conversion to any other form of energy in between.
The development of the water turbine in the nineteenth century, and subsequently of the electrical generator, transformed this picture. A turbine could extract mechanical energy from falling water far more efficiently than a traditional waterwheel, and when coupled to a generator, that mechanical energy could be converted into electricity — a form of energy that, unlike direct mechanical power, could be transmitted over distance and used for purposes far removed from the location of the waterfall itself.
"White Coal" and Industrial Nitrogen
Norwegians of the early twentieth century described hydropower using a phrase that captured its significance directly: hvitt kull, white coal — a domestically abundant alternative to the black coal that powered industrial Britain, Germany and the rest of continental Europe but that Norway lacked. The most dramatic early demonstration of what white coal could achieve was the founding of Norsk Hydro in 1905 by the engineer Sam Eyde, in partnership with the scientist Kristian Birkeland.
Birkeland and a Norwegian engineer, working together, had developed a process for fixing atmospheric nitrogen — extracting nitrogen from the air and converting it into a form usable as agricultural fertiliser — using an electric arc that required enormous quantities of electricity. The process was not economically viable in countries that had to generate that electricity from coal, but in Norway, where hydropower could provide electricity in vast quantities at low cost, it became the basis of an entirely new industry. Norsk Hydro built its first plants at Notodden and Rjukan, in mountainous areas with major waterfalls, harnessing hydropower at a scale that had not previously been attempted to produce a chemical product for which there was strong international demand.
Regulating a National Resource
The scale of investment required to develop major hydropower sites, and the strategic importance of the resource, prompted the Norwegian state to introduce concession laws in 1906 and 1909 that placed strict conditions on the development of waterfalls and rivers, particularly by foreign companies. These laws required that hydropower developments using Norwegian watercourses would, after a specified concession period, revert to Norwegian state ownership — a provision designed to ensure that the long-term value of the country's water resources remained under national control even where the initial capital investment came from abroad.
This regulatory framework established a pattern that has persisted, in modified form, through the subsequent development of Norway's hydropower system and, later, its petroleum sector: substantial private and foreign investment in the development of natural resources, combined with state mechanisms designed to ensure that the long-term benefits of those resources accrue to Norway as a nation rather than solely to the companies that develop them.
The Hydropower Legacy Today
Today, hydropower supplies the overwhelming majority of Norway's domestic electricity — a position virtually unmatched among industrialised nations, most of which rely on a mix of fossil fuels, nuclear power and renewables. This abundance of low-carbon electricity is one of the foundational facts underlying many of the other subjects covered on this blog: it is what makes Oslo's electric vehicle infrastructure environmentally meaningful rather than merely a shift in where emissions occur, and it is part of the broader context in which Norway's approach to energy, industry and environmental policy has developed. The waterfalls that powered the first sawmills along the Akerselva centuries ago and the hydropower stations that today supply electricity to Oslo's homes, trams and charging points are part of the same continuous story of a country built, quite literally, on the energy of falling water.
About Sofia Berg
Sofia Berg is a lifelong Oslo resident and travel writer with a passion for uncovering the city's hidden gems. She has been exploring and writing about Oslo for over ten years.