Debate, Electricity Prices | Electricity prices: Norway is a large farmer in Europe, but we get banks every day from smart Europeans
“We are the farmer from the north” (Energi-Bønda). This went around the whole nation and hummed in the intoxication of joy of coming to the European Football Championship in 2000. We were to show Europe’s sophisticated football stars that simple northern farmers could “knock everything on foreign soil”. At that time, humiliation only affected self-esteem, but now it goes hard beyond the wallet of us ordinary electricity farmers from the north.
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Smart experts, politicians and visionary marketers tell us ordinary farmers a complicated story infused with “no-brainer” green arguments for energy cooperation. The stories of abundance of pleonasms make us believe and accept that we have to pay 70-80 times the production price for the energy we need.
Simple basic knowledge
But the story is not complicated at all. This is about simple basic knowledge within the brand and electrical. What makes it complicated is the agreement and the law that are needed to create a theoretical and thought-based free brand of a natural monopoly. There is basically one cable into the house wall and a generator at the other end. (In Norway, the generator is water powered).
Norway is a large farmer in Europe
Let’s use the analogy with farmers and tell a truer story:
Farmers often chop wood for their own consumption and a little more. But they do not sell everything they have in the summer market and buy by coming back to the gas stations when the cold sets in. Farmers also used to have smithies, mills and farm saws (read: industry in modern society). Chops even more timber and sets up water buckets in the stream. But they do not sell all the raw materials and energy to the market and buy it back to produce what they need themselves. They only sell the surplus production themselves. It is simply healthy peasant wisdom.
Norway is a large farmer in Europe, but we get banks every day from smart Europeans. We stand with a hat in hand and act as the stupid raw material supplier at the bottom of the value chain.
Resource-based advantage
The history ahead must deal with utilizing our resource-based advantages to the maximum, and sell highly processed goods to the EU. But then fears of market access come from the “experts” with low self-esteem. Often together with accusations of populism, protectionism and planned economy thinking. Healthy peasant wisdom does not harmonize well with dynamic and global market liberalism, it is claimed.
Let’s use the peasant wisdom!
Let it be that healthy peasant wisdom does not create more jobs in the bureaucracy and gives us more specialists to create abstract markings of concrete and natural structures. But is it not time for us farmers to take a stand on areas where we can “knock everything on this earth”? We must do this with confidence, and increase the pace of innovation to create valuable goods and services based on our natural advantages.
And for those who believe that we do not get sales on our high-quality goods and services, just ask: Name a market where the Apple iPhone has been hindered marketplace?