This picture is actually from the computer game Skyrim, which is based on Norwegian nature. There’s a lot of water here in real life too, I assure you, but if I were to try to photograph it, my camera would become wet.

It’s been raining… well, I am not sure it is two days out of three, this fall, but I would be very surprised if it was less than one out of two. That is quite rare, even in fall, here on the south coast of Norway. It also rained copiously during summer, more so than in a long time. Nor is this the only part of the country that has received plenty of rainfall this year.

The last couple winters, the hydropower magazines have been near empty, and the price of electricity has been abnormally high here in Norway. Well, abnormal for Norway. Other European countries are used to paying more for their electricity than we are. Hydropower is a quite affordable energy source, once the dams and turbines are in place. And usually rain is plentiful here in Norway. So we have gotten used to even heating with electricity – some modern houses were literally built without chimneys. And then we had several years with very little rainfall, and at the same time Swedish nuclear reactors were down for repairs much longer than expected, so we could not import electricity from there during the winter either.

Now it has rained and rained for months. It hadn’t rained many weeks when people started getting suspicious: Norwegian power companies were exporting large amounts of hydropower to Europe. The prevailing theory on this was that they were worried the dams might not be empty this winter, and then they would not be able to charge extremely high prices as they had done the last couple years. So they had to hurry to get rid of that water during the summer.

The power companies tried to explain that this was not how it worked: The empty lakes were the huge reservoirs up in the mountains, which took many years to refill and many years to empty. The power they now generated were from smaller dams in the lower valleys, which would otherwise overflow and the energy be wasted. This is generally consistent with the structure of Norwegian water reservoirs. But a lot of people still hold on to the conspiracy theory.

This just goes to show that Norwegian too are stupid and ridden by mind parasites, much like our cousins around the world. Well, not quite as badly as some places, where your life is in danger if you are not insane. But still pretty bad.

Of course, power companies are not saints; they seek to maximize their profit. But the best way to do that in northern Europe is to produce as much as possible of your power in winter. Remember, Norway is about as far north as Alaska. That means the neighboring countries we may export to are roughly comparable to Canada. Air conditioning in summer is a luxury, but heating in winter is a matter of life or death in all these countries. There are several countries between here and Spain or Italy, the “south states” of Europe.

Over the last couple decades, new large-capacity power cables have been laid from Norway to neighboring countries, not just Sweden which we border on directly, but also under the sea to the south: the Netherlands, and at least indirectly, Denmark and Germany. But all of these countries also have icy cold winters, so there is a lot more money to gain from producing all of your power in winter, if possible.

But yeah, the ability to export large quantities of hydropower means we will never again have the comfortably low prices on electricity that we had when I was young. We don’t live in that kind of world anymore. Luckily we also have a lot more money than we did back then. And generally better insulated houses.

It will still take many years of rain before the large hydropower reservoirs are filled, if it ever happens. But nature is certainly doing its best on our behalf. And I, for one, am not complaining.