Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway led the world last year in per-capita wind power generation. Each produced more than twice as much wind power per capita as the United States. For consumers, that buildout has translated into a simple, tangible benefit: cheaper power.

“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,” said Sigbjørn Seland, the Norway-based chief analyst at StormGeo, a technology provider to the renewables industry. “The growth in wind power production has been larger than electricity consumption, so we’ve seen several places become oversupplied, with the result being very low electricity prices.”

Electricity prices still fluctuate from day to day. But in the long term, the trend is unmistakably good news for Scandi residents. 

As Nordic countries dotted landscapes with wind turbines and expanded hydro facilities, the gap between their electricity prices and those in the rest of Europe widened. Over the past seven years, Nordic countries have paid, on average, 40 euros (about $47) less per megawatt-hour than Germany, Seland said. “That is the wind power effect,” he said. “It is enormous.”

The green credentials of Nordic countries—built largely on legislation, government targets, and subsidies that have helped bring more renewables to market—are not spotless. Norway remains one of the world’s largest oil and gas producers, exporting fossil fuels overseas—alongside the emissions they generate—while increasingly powering itself with clean electricity.

But when it comes to shifting domestic energy systems away from the fossil fuels driving the climate crisis, the Scandinavian countries offer a striking success story. In Sweden, 99% of electricity was generated from low-carbon sources last year, the highest share of any European Union country. Norway has been tracking just behind this. Finland, meanwhile, is on the brink of phasing out coal well ahead of its 2029 deadline, generating more wind power than ever before.

This transition is happening faster in Nordic countries than in much of the rest of Europe, though the EU as a whole reached a major milestone in 2025 by generating more electricity from renewables than fossil fuels for the first time. This comes on the back of wars in Ukraine and now Iran, alongside mounting climate concerns, which have intensified pressure on Europe to escape the volatility and inflationary pressures of global oil and gas markets.

“If you talked about renewables a couple of years ago, you talked very much about the environment, you talked about climate change,” said Britta Ersman, commercial director for the Nordics at Renewable Energy Systems, a major clean energy company. “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.”

“Wind, solar, storage, hydrogen: The Nordics have every opportunity in the world to be leading in this, and we have a very good climate to be able to build out and produce,” she said. “So I think we are in a really good position and it’s really up to us, the country, the politics, the industry, to take this opportunity.”

Could the U.S. seize a similar opportunity? 

For now, President Donald Trump’s administration has taken extraordinary measures to impede or altogether end renewable energy projects, with the president himself dismissing wind and solar power as “the scam of the century.” Electricity prices in the U.S., meanwhile, increased over the past year despite Trump’s promise to cut them in half, driven in part by surging demand from artificial intelligence data centers. A combination of ChatGPT and “drill, baby, drill” is not helping to deliver an American version of the clean, low-cost Nordic experience.

Nevertheless, signs of change are already visible. California and Texas, two of the country’s most economically powerful states, are leading the way in solar and wind installations and, more recently, battery storage. Both are also beginning to see the benefits. Electricity prices in California sometimes dip below $0 in the middle of the day because so much solar power is flooding the grid. And with recent, record growth in grid-scale battery storage—California now has around 17 gigawatts’ worth—much of that cheap daytime solar power can now be stored and then deployed during evening peak times, challenging the dominance of gas plants. 

“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,” said Dennis Wamsted, energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a U.S. think tank. “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.” 

Texas is now starting to follow the same pattern. “It’s possible that renewables can now reach 50% of electricity in Texas, which would’ve been unthinkable 10 years ago,” Wamsted said. “People would’ve looked at you like you were crazy for saying that because there was hardly any solar in Texas then.”

The Nordic model is no copy-and-paste solution for the U.S., but it does offer a version of what a cheaper, cleaner grid can look like. 

The American version would look quite different, considering vast differences in size and populations compared to Nordic countries. The American patchwork of electricity grids, which lacks a single consistent national framework, also complicates things. Texas, for example, operates its own, largely self-contained, grid known as ERCOT. ERCOT is separate from other systems in the U.S., some of which have embraced renewables more enthusiastically than others.

Still, the two regions face similar challenges. The U.S. has a huge backlog of clean energy projects waiting to connect to the grid, representing 2,600 gigawatts of generation and storage capacity—more than twice the total installed capacity of the existing U.S. power plant fleet. And even once they come online, transmission infrastructure is often too limited to move cheap, clean power over long distances to where it’s needed. “We’ve done poorly in our transmission; we’ve fallen down in that regard,” said Wamsted. “If we had better transmission, you could get clean energy from, say, Illinois to New York City. There’s always spare capacity somewhere.”

Transmission, permitting, and NIMBYism can also pose problems in Scandinavia. “You have a huge challenge in getting new permits approved, and the majority of them are being turned down due to municipalities having vetoes,” said Ersman about Sweden, where surplus electricity generated in the sparsely populated north can struggle to reach the more heavily populated south. “Depending on where you live in Sweden today, you have very different energy bills for households and also for industry.”

Another challenge stems from the very success of renewables in pushing down electricity prices. Negative electricity costs are good news for households, but can put major strain on providers: They’re required by law in Nordic countries to supply a certain level of clean energy regardless of the financial return. 

“Every time you put a new wind turbine into the market, you cannibalize the value of the wind power,” said Seland. “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.”

This poses a looming challenge for renewables companies in the U.S., too. But it can be managed through power purchase agreements and partnerships among providers, according to Wamsted. “If you’re a wind developer, now is the time to pair up with a battery storage provider so everyone makes money,” he said. “We are figuring out how to run a grid differently, and as we move forward, we have to make sure everyone makes some money. This isn’t insurmountable.”

But beyond pricing agreements and government subsidies, the main lesson to be gleaned may be that broad public and political support makes the green transition far smoother. In the Nordic countries, clean energy and the climate crisis are not toxic issues that define political identity. They are broadly accepted realities that must be addressed pragmatically and efficiently. For clean energy developers, that means profits may not always be enormous, but they can at least operate without fearing that the government will turn against them every few years.

“The majority of people are pro-buildout of renewables,” said Ersman. “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.”

The U.S. has also seen meaningful public support for clean energy, even if that support has not yet fully translated into politics. Even so, the economics of renewables continue to drive change beyond the political cycle. Despite fierce opposition from the Trump administration last year, around 90% of new electricity supply added in the U.S. came from clean sources.

“Trump is a clear factor in slowing down the transition; there’s no way to put a pretty face on that,” said Wamsted. “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.”