Estonia is a small European country with a population of 1.4 million and an area of circa 45,000 square kilometers. It is one of the three Baltic countries located beside the Baltic Sea. It has a land border connecting with Russia and Latvia and it is only 80 kilometers by sea from the capital of Finland, Helsinki. Only some thirty years have passed since Estonia regained independence in 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved. It had already declared independence much earlier, in 1918, after World War I, but was occupied by the Soviet Union from 1940 until 1991. In 2004, Estonia became a member of the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Estonia’s energy policy has been heavily oriented toward national security concerns and attempts to break connections with the Russian energy system. The general orientation has been to reduce the geopolitical threat of Russia, that is, negative security. The development of oil shale has been important to Estonia in its disconnection pursuits from the Russian energy supply and, hence, this has slowed down Estonia’s zero-carbon energy transition. Yet the location of the oil shale production has been close to the Russian border, reducing the security of this energy type due to potential Russian intervention. Gradually, Estonia has stopped commercial electricity trade with Russia, despite still-existing infrastructural connections, and has aimed to cover consumption by using domestic sources while also expanding energy interconnections with the EU (Kama, Reference Kama2016). This decision made Estonia the EU member state with the lowest energy import dependence. Estonia’s reliance on energy imports reduced from 34 percent in 2000 to less than 5 percent in 2019.Footnote 1 From 2010, Estonia became a net exporter of electricity generated from oil shale. However, by 2020, the country’s energy import dependence had increased again to 11 percent (Statistics Estonia, 2023), partly due to the emission reduction requirements of EU climate and environmental policy.
Since the early 1990s, this country has experienced a relatively rapid development, from being part of the “laggard” Eastern European Bloc to a nation with advanced digital technologies. Despite the general innovativeness of Estonia, its energy system has been largely tied to an old fossil fuel-based regime, in particular oil shale, and dependence on Russian electricity and gas networks. Oil shale is “an energy-rich sedimentary rock that can either be burned for heat and power generation or used for producing liquid fuels” (IEA, 2019, p. 11); it has a carbon intensity similar to coal but is less efficient as a fuel due to a lower share of organic matter. The mining of oil shale began officially in 1918 when a government decree made open pits the responsibility of a particular department in the Ministry of Trade and Industry (Holmberg, Reference Holmberg2008). Estonia’s energy supply has relied almost entirely on domestic oil shale since 1991.
Oil shale consumption dropped dramatically, over 40 percent, during the 1990–1995 period, in connection with Estonia gaining independence.Footnote 2 However, after 2000 there was a gradual increase in total oil shale consumption, peaking at 15 million tons in 2013, a 42 percent increase on 2000 (Statistics Estonia, 2023). This was followed by a gradual decline, and then sudden drops to 5.9 million tons in 2019 and 3.1 million tons in 2020 (see Figure 5.1). This decline in the share of oil shale was caused by rising CO2 emission quota prices, making this type of energy less competitive in the European electricity markets (Vasser, Reference Vasser2021). In addition, some large oil shale plants had reached their full operational age. However, the data also shows a rather rapid increase of oil shale consumption more recently, in 2022, when the energy crisis hit Europe following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Figure 5.1 Total consumption of oil shale (thousand tons), 2000–2022.
The overall share of natural gas has been low within Estonia’s total energy consumption, while the gas used in Estonia was mostly supplied from Russia until 2015. A Russian company, Gazprom, was the main supplier to all the Baltic countries and the only gas supplier to Estonia, meaning these countries were all vulnerable to sudden disruptions (Pakalkaitė and Posaner, Reference Pakalkaitė, Posaner and Godzimirski2019). This is illustrated by the gas dispute in 2009 between Russia and Ukraine that left many EU countries that relied on Gazprom with severe shortages (Štreimikiene et al., Reference Štreimikiene, Strielkowski, Bilan and Mikalauskas2016). Estonia’s concerns about Russia’s tactics to maintain a monopoly of gas transit to Europe has resulted in it denying the Nord Stream pipeline access to its territorial waters (Crandall, Reference Crandall2014). In December 2014, a new terminal for liquefied natural gas (LNG) was opened in Lithuania, which allowed Estonia to diversify its supply from Gazprom (Pakalkaitė and Posaner, Reference Pakalkaitė, Posaner and Godzimirski2019). A new gas pipeline, Balticconnector, was opened between Finland and Estonia in 2020, connecting gas markets in the two countries, with the aim to create a regional Baltic–Finnish gas market. The pipeline was massively damaged in fall 2023 halting supply. Investigation to this incident was inconclusive regarding intentionality of this damage, with the likely cause being damage by a ship anchor. Almost 40 percent of natural gas is used in district heating, but, due to increasing natural gas prices, district heat producers are increasingly considering local renewable fuels (MEAC, 2022).
Estonia met the EU target for renewable energy, 25 percent, in 2011, primarily through biomass and wind power, although the former caused degradation of biodiversity. The shares of renewable energy and combined heat and power (CHP) in the country’s electricity production have rapidly expanded. In 2021, renewable energy amounted to 38 percent of total energy and 29 percent of electricity production, while oil shale still made up over a half. Of renewable electricity production in 2022, about half was from wood chips and waste, a quarter from wind power, and 20 percent from solar power (Statistics Estonia, 2023). The expansion of the wind power niche has been limited owing to concerns related to the effects of wind turbines on the defence sector’s air surveillance radars. This issue is explored later in this chapter.
This chapter analyzes the first country case study of this book. It creates the context of energy and security regimes in which the interplay of energy and security policies occurs. It then follows the analytical foci presented in Chapter 3: the perceptions of Russia as exerting landscape pressure on energy transitions, policy coherence and integration between energy and security, and positive and negative security aspects related to niche development and regime destabilization via three cases. These are: the phaseout of oil shale, the effects of wind turbines on defence air surveillance radars, and desynchronization from the Russian electricity system. The empirical data analyzed include government energy and security strategies published during 2006–2021 and two rounds of interviews with energy and security experts, between October 2020 and May 2021 and between January and March 2023. These primary sources have been complemented with the literature.
5.1 Energy Regime
As outlined, the key sources of the Estonian energy system have been oil shale, imported natural gas, and a range of renewable energies, especially wood chips and waste streams. Unlike in Finland (Chapter 6) and the UK (Chapter 8), Estonia does not have any nuclear power. A government-level working group was established in 2021 to investigate the possibilities of establishing small modular reactors. One complication is that Estonia has no experience of regulating nuclear power so proceeding with this would require drafting new legislation and increasing nuclear expertise.
A developing renewable energy niche is that of offshore wind power, for which there are significant plans. The planned developments include two sites in the Gulf of Riga and near the western island of Saaremaa that would cover 1,700 square kilometers and provide circa 7 gigawatts (Vanttinen, Reference Vanttinen2022). By 2030, the Estonian government aims that 65 percent of total consumption will be provided by wind power (CPTRA, 2023). Maritime planning was advanced in early 2022 to investigate the effects of offshore wind on defence, shipping routes, and the environment.
Besides renewable energy development and in direct opposition to the aim to decarbonize the energy system, new applications to exploit oil shale and gas are still being made. For instance, the Estonian Ministry for Economic Affairs and Communications has been interested in the shale gas developments in North America, which are a result of substantial shale gas deposits found in the US (MEAC, 2022). In addition, connected to the need to diversify gas supplies, biomethane from local bio-based raw materials has garnered increasing interest. In 2021, Estonia had two biomethane production plants, producing up to 40 percent of the gas used in transport.
As Estonia is a small country, its administrative structure concerning energy and climate governance is relatively simple. The Ministry of the Economic Affairs and Communications (as of July 2023 the newly established Ministry of Climate) oversees Estonia’s energy policy. The Ministry of Finance has some responsibilities regarding budget preparation for the national “Energy and Climate Plan.” The Ministry of the Environment (from July 2023 onward the Ministry of Climate) coordinates environmental policy and the management of natural resources. A state-owned company for oil security of supply was established in 2005, which was reorganized as a broader security-of-supply organization akin to the Finnish National Emergency Supply Agency (NESA) (see Chapter 6) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. A governmental Climate and Energy Committee was established to operate during 2019–2021, with the prime minister chairing this committee, which also had the Minister for the Environment, the Minister for Defence, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs among its members. In 2021, the government established a Green Policy Steering Committee, chaired by the prime minister, to coordinate the implementation of “green policy” across sectors. The ministerial committee is supported by an expert group and makes proposals to the government. In 2023, an expert-based Climate Council was established.
A rather unique feature of Estonian energy policymaking is that there is no agency level. Energy agencies typically regulate and monitor operation of electricity and gas markets as well as emission reductions, or advance energy efficiency. In Estonia, instead, the electricity and gas transmission network operator Elering effectively plays the role of an agency in security of supply. According to an expert interviewee, it is “a quasi-security police or authority.” This role is at least partly due to the large role of electricity in Estonia’s energy transition, namely desynchronization and offshore wind efforts. In addition, before the 2020s, the security-of-supply organization only addressed oil and not electricity. Some regard Elering’s position as a conflict of interest, resulting in little expertise in the public sector:
Sometimes you get the impression that Elering plays the energy agency’s role, rather than some big kind of a state agency or energy and climate agency or energy agency or you know whatever you call it, so it’s certainly a structural weakness.
Eesti Energia, a fully state-owned company, is the main producer of electricity. Ninety percent of oil shale-based electricity was produced by Eesti Energia in 2020 (Sillak and Kanger, Reference Sillak and Kanger2020), but it aims to stop production of electricity from oil shale by 2030 and increase renewable energy production. The company is among the largest employers in Estonia and it is free to make its own investment decisions irrespective of its state ownership (Tõnurist, Reference Tõnurist2015). The dominance of this state-owned monopoly meant that, until 2014, there was little distinction between the management of the oil shale industry and government energy policy; an attempt to reduce the influence of the industry on energy policymaking was made by transferring the company’s ownership from the Ministry of Economic Affairs to the Ministry of Finance in 2014 (Kama, Reference Kama2016). Nonetheless, it still appears that the company has more influence on Estonian energy policy than policymaking has had on the company.
Several political figures and civil servants in Estonia have held both ministry positions and positions in the energy industry. For example, Taavi Veskimägi has been the Minister of Finance (2003–2005) and the director of the transmission system operator Elering (2009–2023). In addition, at least four individuals interviewed have worked for the energy sector (Elering or Eesti Energia) and the Ministry for Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or the Ministry of the Interior. This is partly explained by the small population of the country, that is, there is a limited number of experts, but also by the nature of informal energy relations and the tightknit relations of the “energy elite.”
Another important feature is the relatively late growth of the formalized environmental movement in Estonia. The Estonian Green Party was only established in 2007, despite the fact environmentalism has played an important role in Estonia’s independence pursuits since the 1980s (Auer, Reference Auer1998). The Renewable Energy Council was formed in 2011 by renewable energy entrepreneurs and associations, becoming a vocal advocacy group and proposing a plan for transitioning the country’s energy system into a 100 percent renewable energy system (Sillak and Kanger, Reference Sillak and Kanger2020).
Since 2004, when Estonia became an EU member state, its energy and climate policy has been shaped by the EU. Estonia had already applied for membership in 1995 but, according to an interviewed expert, was unable to join then because its oil shale industry conflicted with EU environmental objectives. Eventually, the EU agreed to give oil shale a temporary status, prolonging the deadline for renovating old power plants to meet EU air-quality standards until 2016, allowing Estonia until 2013 to fully open up its electricity market, and allocating research and development (R&D) support for reducing the environmental impacts of oil shale (Sillak and Kanger, Reference Sillak and Kanger2020).
Despite these early concessions, Estonia has taken some time to liberalize and decarbonize its energy regime. When the electricity market was fully opened up in 2013, Eesti Energia maintained a significant role in the market. Throughout the years, Estonia has managed to keep large part of the energy production under state ownership, even though this is at least partly contradictory to EU energy market rules. Kama (Reference Kama2016) has noted that “[t]his state-regulated and extremely carbon-intensive sector has shown remarkable resistance to liberalisation, unbundling and privatisation; the three neoliberal modes of energy governance that underpin the policies of the EU, the OECD, and international donor agencies” (p. 836). She continues:
The government’s recurrent flirtations with privatisation further demonstrate how energy security arguments blur the distinction between market and non-market practices in state policy, for conservative and liberal parties alike. Despite two serious attempts to induce private investment capital for replacing the Soviet-era thermal units commissioned over forty years ago, the energy monopoly remains fully owned by the state.
Likewise, oil shale has not been addressed to the degree it should have according to EU requirements. When oil prices declined and the price of EU emissions-trading permits rose, the oil shale market became less lucrative. In response to this, the Estonian government lowered environmental taxes to support the industry, justifying this action by claiming the fuel was important for national interests, such as security and employment (Holmgren et al., Reference Holmgren, Pever and Fischer2019). In 2019, the International Energy Agency (IEA) noted in its country review of Estonia that “the negative externalities of fossil fuels are currently not sufficiently reflected in the existing tax rates and there is a significant number of tax exemptions and reduced tax rates which are counterproductive for meeting the climate targets” (IEA, 2019, p. 28). An interviewee noted that:
We still thought that shale oil is going strong and oil shale burning is fine, so, [you saw] even some misguided investments like Eesti Energia putting up a new unit, spending over half a billion euros to continue burning oil shale and so on because the focus was on reducing the SO2 emissions rather than CO2 emissions.
During 2017–2018, Estonia prepared some key documents for its medium-term energy and climate policy, including the “National Development Plan for the Energy Sector until 2030” and the “Estonian National Energy and Climate Plan 2030,” submitted to the EU. Estonia aimed to reduce greenhouse gases 70 percent by 2023 and 80 percent by 2025 by increasing renewable energy (above 25 percent of total energy use), while simultaneously maintaining a high level of energy security by limiting fuel imports, diversifying energy sources and supplies, and connecting with the European electricity market. In the baseline year for emission reductions, 1990, the greenhouse gas emissions were so high, 40,233.79 tons of CO2 equivalent, that it was relatively easy to reduce these by 20 percent by 2020 as required by the EU. The greenhouse gas emissions had dropped almost by half already by 1993 and were on the same level until 2018. Further, Estonia aimed to produce 50 percent of domestic final electricity consumption via renewables by 2030. Wind energy and solar energy for electricity production were planned to be further developed, and biomass use increased for heating. Biofuels and hydrogen fuels were also to be developed, the latter being on the agenda of the Green Policy Steering Committee. The plans were updated in fall 2023. The revised plans show an aim to achieve 24 percent reduction in emissions by 2023 compared to 2005, and net-zero emissions by 2050.
Energy independence from Russia has been the cornerstone of Estonian energy policy since its independence. Its EU membership has, however, forced Estonia to change its traditional energy policy and pay attention to the decarbonization of its energy system, which has impacted its energy independence to some extent. This decarbonization process has been slow on both security and economic grounds. Despite the ambitious plans for renewable energy and energy efficiency, oil shale has continued to play an important role in energy policy. The “National Development Plan for the Use of Oil Shale 2016–2030” stated that oil shale will remain an important fuel. The “National Development Plan for the Energy Sector” also mentioned the possibility of new investments in the oil shale sector to increase energy exports. If this continues, it will be hard to lower Estonia’s ecological footprint. Figure 5.2 summarizes the key aspects of the Estonian energy regime.
Figure 5.2 Key aspects of Estonian energy policy.
5.2 Security Regime
In Estonia, security policy is the responsibility of the Ministry of Defence. The Ministry of the Interior and its agencies play a supportive role, with responsibility for policing, border control, rescue, migration, and immigration management. For information security, different ministries have their own responsibilities, coordinated by the Ministry for Economic Affairs and Communications. The ministries of defence, of the interior, and of foreign affairs also have important tasks with regard to cybersecurity. At the agency level, the Foreign Intelligence Service and Estonian Security Policy Board are important.
Estonia joined NATO in 2004, and this move has had a large impact on its security policy and defence spending. The latter has gradually increased from 1.39 percent of GDP in 2006 to 2.35 percent in 2022. After Russia’s actions in 2014 in Crimea, Estonia has become “a meaningful player in NATO’s management of renewed Russian security threats” (Studemeyer, Reference Studemeyer2019, p. 789). The capital city Tallinn hosts the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. Estonia has developed leading expertise in cybersecurity for NATO, alongside with prioritizing its membership fees to it, even during times of economic austerity (Studemeyer, Reference Studemeyer2019).
Estonian Defence Forces were reestablished immediately after independence (Piirimäe, Reference Piirimäe2020). They consist of 4,000 people in permanent readiness and another 4,000 in supplementary reserve. Thirty thousand reservists have also been trained by the Defence Forces (Estonian Defence Forces, 2023).
Security and defence governance are strongly based on the country’s history with Russia. Alongside the other Baltic countries, after its independence Estonia sought security by integrating with Western structures: the EU and NATO. The latter led to a revision of security and defence strategies that are reactive to changes in the surrounding geopolitical environment (Piotrowski, Reference Piotrowski2018). Despite becoming an EU member state, Estonia’s foreign policymakers have maintained a traditional realist approach to the East, their security policy “driven by an existential concern about national security,” with the hard security guarantees of NATO being a cornerstone of the country’s security policy (Raik and Rikmann, Reference Raik and Rikmann2021, p. 606). These reflect thinking along the lines of “negative security” (cf. Hoogensen Gjørv, Reference Hoogensen Gjørv2012). Eurosceptic views have been present all the time but were marginalized until 2015, when the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE) won 8 percent of the parliamentary seats and later expanded its populist presence in government politics (Raik and Rikmann, Reference Raik and Rikmann2021).
The security risk from Russian interference is perceived as tangible even after three decades of independence and before Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022. The elevated perception of risk is not only due to historical factors. It has been influenced by the very slow withdrawal of Russian troops after independence, with some thousand soldiers remaining until August 1994 and an “increasingly aggressive Kremlin policy towards its neighbouring countries” (Piotrowski, Reference Piotrowski2018, p. 47).
Security policy in Estonia is based on a broad security concept. This means the capability of the state to defend its values and objectives from military and nonmilitary risks. Security policy aims to guarantee independence, sovereignty, survival, and the constitutional order. The key policy documents for security and defence policy are the “National Security Concept of Estonia” (2017) and the “National Defence Development Plan 2017–2026.”
There is a specific focus on cybersecurity because Estonia is one of the most digitalized societies in the world. Besides Estonians being among the highest internet and mobile broadband users, the country had already installed 100 percent smart electricity metering by 2016, improving network management (IEA, 2019). Cyberattacks from Russia are some of the most concrete threats that Estonia has more recently experienced. Russia considers Estonia as “ideologically unfriendly” and has tried to cause economic disruption by putting pressure on and maintaining tensions between the Russian nationals in Estonia and the Estonian population via cyberattacks (Studemeyer, Reference Studemeyer2019). Following a sequence of nationwide cyberattacks in 2007, Estonia decided to develop its cyber expertise, including the first governmental cybersecurity strategy in 2008, by providing university-level education in this field, and establishing a “cyber defence league” to act under its own military command in case of war (Crandall, Reference Crandall2014).
The trend is, and this is not surprising, that the cyberattacks are increasing every day. And they are just not joking, but we see they’re professional. We see the professionally designed cyberattacks more and more … We could imagine a very dark scenario when the major power plants in this north-east region would be cyber-attacked, and the damage could be really huge. But I can confirm that our public authorities are dealing with that.
Two government strategy documents relate to cybersecurity: the “Digital Agenda 2020 for Estonia” (2018) and the “Cybersecurity Strategy” (2019). This preparedness is valid, as the risk of cyberattacks appear to be rising. Figure 5.3 summarizes the key aspects of Estonian security and defence policy.
Figure 5.3 Key aspects of Estonian security and defence policy.
5.3 Perceptions of Russia as a Landscape Pressure at the Intersection of Energy and Security
This section examines landscape pressure for the energy transition in Estonia, focusing on the ways in which perceptions of Russia as a landscape pressure for Estonian energy policy have formed. Policy documents from the period 2006–2020 mentioned a range of factors that can be interpreted as landscape pressures (Kivimaa and Sivonen, Reference Kivimaa and Sivonen2021). In 2006–2010, these included globally growing competition over energy, risks of cyberattacks, and land-use-related conflicts. At that time, the documents pictured Russia as a substantial landscape pressure and a global superpower ready to utilize military force as well as energy as political tools in international relations. Policy document material was limited during 2011–2015, so landscape pressures were more difficult to detect. Uncertainties in global energy markets and risk of attacks against energy and digital systems were mentioned. During 2016–2020, similar pressures as in the first period of analysis were mentioned. However, Russia was mentioned less, and instead the instability of the global economy and international finance were emphasized. Nevertheless, Estonia has quite consistently perceived Russia as a significant landscape factor, shaping the Estonian state’s actions in energy and security policies.
Perhaps due to deep historical and cultural issues, alongside the rather short period of independence from Russia, perceptions of Russia as exerting a substantial landscape pressure on the Estonian energy regime are prevalent in the expert interviews. Thirteen out of sixteen interviewees considered Russia to be a considerable security risk in the energy–security nexus both prior to and post 2022.
We see a very determined and aggressive Russia, rising from the ashes threatening Europe, Finland and the Baltic States.
There has always been a strong distrust toward Russia, and Russia has demonstrated several times how they might use energy to influence policy.
The impact of this risk is evident in the plan of the Estonian state to desynchronize its electricity system from Russia and in complicating the oil shale phaseout in Ida-Viru County (see details in Section 5.5). The direct impact of this landscape pressure has been the slowed-down destabilization of the domestic (oil shale-based) part of the fossil fuel regime, as such pressure was largely not supportive of renewable energy niche development before 2022 (see also Sillak and Kanger, Reference Sillak and Kanger2020).
Although most of the interviewed experts were in consensus, the perceptions of three interviewees differed. Two experts were somewhat more positive about the influence of Russia, although they still recognized certain risks.
A real conflict between Estonia and Russia, or Russia and Ida-Viru County is very unlikely.
One interviewed politician mentioned that Russia has been a stable energy partner to Estonia and, contrary to others, believed that desynchronizing from the Russian grid might increase instability:
Well on energy side Russia has been a very good neighbor … electricity has been flowing freely all that time and given us this security of the grid.
The perceptions of Russia as a landscape pressure were largely unchanged as a result of the 2022 attack on Ukraine, due to the preexisting negative perceptions. One interviewee mentioned that, after, things were even more openly discussed as a result. Another interviewee noted:
Well, they have lost every bit of trust that we still used to have. I mean we were never really very optimistic, but now we just regard Russia as an aggressor country.
The analysis shows that Russia has been perceived as a dominant landscape pressure for Estonian energy policy from the security perspective. This pressure has remained throughout the studied period, from 2006 until 2023.
5.4 Policy Coherence and Interplay
Policy coherence and integration were studied by focusing on synergies, conflicts, and administrative integration between the policy domains of energy and security/defence. To do this, analyses were conducted on Estonia’s key energy and security policy strategies, published during 2006–2020, and interviews conducted in 2020–2021 and 2022–2023. The results of these analyses have been published in journal articles (Kivimaa, Reference Kivimaa2022; Kivimaa and Sivonen, Reference Kivimaa and Sivonen2021) and some of the key findings are summarized in this section.
It is very clear that security from the Russian threat has played a significant role in Estonia’s energy policymaking – resulting in a rather unique approach among EU countries prior to 2022, when the focus in the EU was mostly directed toward open and competitive energy markets. A moderate-to-high integration of security was already visible in Estonia’s energy policy documents during 2006–2010 – market collaboration with Europe, oil shale, and diversification of supply being the key means to achieve this (Kivimaa and Sivonen, Reference Kivimaa and Sivonen2021). This integration has become even more visible since 2016.
Kivimaa and Sivonen (Reference Kivimaa and Sivonen2021) noted that energy–security integration has been observable in policy objectives, policy measures, and policy processes alike. However, the objectives have been conflicting from the perspective of decarbonization, emphasizing both oil shale extraction and wind power development. In the policy documents of 2016–2020, security was visible in the objective to redefine security of supply for operational continuity even when transmission capacity between EU member states is lost. Among measures, the energy (de)synchronization project has been vital; the institutional change has been easier to achieve, while technologically the project has not yet been completed. Policy strategy documents have also focused on cybersecurity readiness measures and investments in additional prewarning systems for defence to enable offshore wind development. This kind of integration is better achieved by involving Ministers of Defence and of Foreign Affairs in the government Climate and Energy Committee, which Estonia has done. The strong security aspect was also very visible in the use of the term “readiness of war” as an important principle for the development of energy systems. Such language was rarely used in other European countries prior to the events of 2022.
Although security from Russia has played a substantial role in Estonia’s energy policy, the document analysis showed energy issues were not substantially addressed in the country’s defence and security strategy documents; less so than in Finland’s, for example (Kivimaa and Sivonen, Reference Kivimaa and Sivonen2021). This lack of integration may also explain the difficulties and slow progress with offshore wind power expansion.
An analysis of expert interviews from 2020 to 2021 also shows evidence of insufficient formal integration of energy and security policies. Justified on the basis of small country size, it was seen that in areas where policy coherence has been achieved this has been the result of informal connections and bottom-up problem-solving exercises. Strategies, objectives, or shared visions in bringing together energy and security policies have been missing (Kivimaa, Reference Kivimaa2022). Yet some concrete policy decisions have supported improved coherence between energy and security considerations despite the absence of supportive processes. Importantly, these include the desynchronization process and the decision to invest in new radar technology to allow for the expansion of wind power.
As in many countries, the “National Security Strategy” has framed energy as critical infrastructure and a vital element of national defence. This pursuit is mainly visible in the strategy as ambitions to intensify collaboration with the EU, the Baltic States, and the US, and to keep using oil shale in a “rational” manner – instead of more concrete action proposals. The continued use of oil shale has created a substantial conflict with the progress of the zero-carbon energy transition. Another observed potential conflict was the impact of oil shale phaseout on internal stability in Ida-Viru County. This is explained in more detail in Section 5.5.
Despite the existence and acknowledgment of these conflicts, formal mechanisms and strategies for advancing coherence between the policy domains of energy and of defence and security have been lacking. Policymaking has been reliant on informal communications between the actors in charge. There was a lot of divergence in how actors with expertise on energy and security observed this interaction between the two administrative sectors during 2020–2021. Some agreement that the interaction between key ministries has improved did, however, did exist.
On the positive side,
The Estonian public sector is quite small … which means that there is no need to create large and heavy administrative systems. We just meet up with the relevant people and have the discussions and try to find a solution which is workable, and which is win–win for everyone.
We have very little silos in the Estonian government … we’re well connected and well informed about each other’s processes … each and every year it’s getting better and better.
And, on the negative side,
Traditionally these two ministries have been held by different political parties. They are not really communicating to my understanding. Probably there are some ways of communication. I would doubt that.
The ministries still retain quite a substantial degree of latitude in their activities, and we often complain that in this whole comprehensive system of security, there’s still too little coordination and, perhaps, an awareness of each other’s activities and plans and so on between the ministries … which sometimes leads to some clashes like, for instance, there’s this episode of clash between the wind energy ambitions … and defence interests.
While this informal way of working may be a fluid means of policymaking in a country with a population of only 1.4 million people, it allows for a chance element in dealing with potentially pressing issues that tie energy to security and it has reduced the transparency of public administration, as indicated by the interview comments from external actors. As seen with the case of wind power, sustainability transitions may not advance rapidly enough when reliant on informal interactions for integration and coherence. This is also visible in the complications around the phaseout of oil shale; a phaseout that is inevitable if Estonia is to achieve decarbonization of its energy system and the EU emissions target.
A rather significant shift on this front happened following the events of 2022, given that the Estonian state administration had not given much thought to formalizing the energy–security interface before then. A concrete act was that the energy trade with Russia ceased. Another measure departing from previous practice was acquiring the joint LNG terminal with Finland:
This LNG project has been very out-of-the-box thinking, Elering taking an active part in the project due to a government decision. Usually, such projects are left for the private sector.
Several interviewees remarked that energy issues became politicized after the 2022 crisis, but not securitized in their eyes. It appears that some change in narratives occurred although the risks had already been recognized. Perhaps the most obvious change is cross-political party support for continuing oil shale production, which was a more contentious issue before, while some also reported improved understanding of how energy transition can improve security:
I think that political communication is definitely impacted, because everybody understands that we need them [green energy investments] more.
Many narratives have changed, what relates to energy security, what relates to the security of supplies, how the country should guarantee its power supplies and gas supplies … if you think, a year ago, or maybe a bit more, these were not topics at all.
All the parties support the use of oil shale as a strategic reserve in the future, and [the] majority say that we would need also renewables to come to play, more renewables investments, and we have to remove all the obstacles there.
More broadly, some experts saw that the shock from the war created positive synergies between energy and security by mobilizing society and increasing communication and interaction between the ministries. The effect, however, seems to have been an increase in volume rather than formalization of previously informal relations:
We are kind of trying to build up the system which is more reliable … in war situations for example … These are more on the table and thought over how we can handle them.
For the past year, it’s basically everyday communication and maybe it has come down a bit, but at the beginning all this coordination was just massive.
I would say the cooperation is closer, there’s more coordination. We kind of try to be proactive, we try to also have better, let’s say, communication with potential investors who are interested in having some kind of windmill parks or solar energy parks, so we consult them in early stages.
As a result, the administration conducted activities to stimulate the acceleration of renewable energy, such as setting up new, more ambitious goals for renewable energy, speeding up permissions to erect wind turbines, and identifying gaps in legislation potentially hindering renewable energy deployment – contributing to the process of expectation-building in niche development. These measures were influenced by the RePowerEU policy launched in May 2022 by the European Commission in response to the energy crisis:
Everything which is coming from the European side, meaning building the new wind farms or solar parks, must be quicker and must be easier, that we are currently working on, and trying to make everything faster.
There are cases where one wind farm, due to the complexity of the permitting, needed two, sometimes even three, environmental impact assessments, so we are trying to make the processes leaner, quicker, and easier in order to get more renewables in.
The political pressure has made some quite remarkable steps when it comes to, let’s say spatial planning. It used to take a quite a long time from the idea to full windmill for example, … now the process is much … quicker in a way.
At the same time, activities to support the existing fossil fuel regime have continued due to the energy crisis. These include the LNG project, establishing a new natural gas reserve (stockpiling), and slower decommissioning of combustion plants, and these have partially restabilized the regime despite decreasing gas consumption during the energy crisis. The stockpiling was perceived by one interviewee as a shift from market-based thinking to a more security-oriented one.
More broadly, the last few years have seen increased focus on critical infrastructure; in other words, the vulnerability of cross-country underwater energy interconnections on which Estonia is dependent, as well as Russian control over the cooling water used by Estonia’s Narva power plant. One expert noted that this risk had been acknowledged previously but the likelihood assessed as negligible – now all risks are reviewed from a different perspective. Section 5.5 illustrates three different cases that highlight how energy and security have interacted within Estonian policymaking.
5.5 Niche Development, Regime (De)stabilization, and Positive and Negative Security
In the analysis of expert interviews, three specific cases that relate to niche development and regime destabilization clearly emerged in the energy–security interface in Estonia. The first one deals with the importance of oil shale and the potential economic and geopolitical security concerns that are arising from the phaseout of oil shale in one of Estonia’s poorest regions, which also has a significant Russian-speaking population. The second issue connects to the arduous expansion of wind power and how it has been impacted by the operation of the defence regime’s air surveillance radars. The third interesting issue is the desynchronization of Baltic countries from Russia’s electricity system, where the principal driver has been that of national security, but the move can also be seen to benefit the zero-carbon energy transition. Hence, the three issues relate to the destabilization of the existing energy regime, niche expansion, and regime reconfiguration via the desynchronization project.
An emerging issue related to the expansion of the renewable energy niche is the supply of critical minerals and metals needed for renewable energy technologies. However, this is not discussed here as a specific case, because during the 2020–2021 interviews this aspect was not debated as a security-related challenge in Estonia by the interviewees. The topic did receive attention during the later interviews. For instance, a decision has been made to invest in critical materials-related R&D, while expanding mining activity has its own environmental consequences. Developments have also occurred in the manufacturing side. Silmet, an Estonian subsidiary of the Canadian company Neo Performance Materials (NPM), has announced plans to build a magnet factory and an R&D center in Narva. Therefore, the critical materials question is pertinent for the future development of the energy–security nexus in Estonia. Section 5.5.1 discusses the three cases outlined.
5.5.1 Oil Shale Phaseout in Ida-Viru County
Since around 2014, oil shale has contributed up to 85 percent of Estonia’s electricity production (Kanger and Sillak, Reference Kanger, Sovacool and Noorkõiv2020). Except for 2019–2020, this has been a negative development with regard to a zero-carbon energy transition, explained by concerns of national security, economic gains, and energy independence. Estonia has also used its oil shale expertise to advance its position internationally, by developing processing plants in Jordan and the US (Crandall, Reference Crandall2014). Becoming a worldwide expert in oil shale meant that Estonia was recognized by other countries and could make energy alliances. Such alliances led to increasing support for Estonia against the Russia threat, such as the US speaking on behalf of Estonia during its negotiations with NATO in 2004 (Studemeyer, Reference Studemeyer2019).
EU environmental and climate policy has been a significant driver for oil shale regime destabilization in Estonia. For example, in 2018, Eesti Energia announced it would close four old and inefficient oil shale electricity production units in its Narva power station to comply with the air emissions directive (IEA, 2019). Further pressure for the oil shale industry has been imposed by EU decarbonization targets:
Now for the first time in history Estonia has this serious prospective of phasing out oil shale. And phasing out oil shale is a huge political issue.
Most of the Estonian oil shale industry is located in Ida-Viru County, a northeastern region of Estonia at the Russian border. It can be described as a postindustrial area dominated by Soviet industries, where a lot of oil shale industry was developed. After World War II, the region was subject to Moscow’s policy to minimize the number of Estonians in the region by forcing the relocation of Estonians elsewhere and locating Russian people to the region, while many Estonians also made their own decision to migrate to economically more attractive parts of the country (Holmberg, Reference Holmberg2008). In current times, over 80 percent of the population is estimated to be Russian-speaking and over 40 percent to hold Russian citizenship. The region has less than 10 percent of Estonia’s population, and only 58 percent of working-aged people are employed (Statistics Estonia, 2021). It has the highest unemployment rate coupled with low average income (Prause et al., Reference Prause, Tuisk and Olaniyi2019). It is, thus, the most socially deprived region in Estonia and, consequently, the oil shale industry has been an important source of income. Without this industry, the already poor social conditions could become worse (Holmgren et al., Reference Holmgren, Pever and Fischer2019):
Considering that it actually is deindustrialized or postindustrialized, social issues there are pretty extensive. [The] population is poorer than average in Estonia apart from some very rural and forgotten areas in the south of Estonia … We are talking about big cities. In terms of urban population, they are certainly the poorest.
Thus, the decisions regarding oil shale phaseout need be balanced with minimizing further unemployment and economic hardship, and may create risks of internal instability in Estonia and worsen economic insecurity in the region. The interviewees also pointed out a risk of Russian interference in issues in northeast Estonia due to the large Russian-speaking population; a worry that generated especially strong discussion after Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. This is perhaps connected to the failed attempt at independence from Estonia by the city of Narva in 1993 (cf. Sillak and Kanger, Reference Sillak and Kanger2020).
The conclusion of this discussion was very strongly that it is extremely unlikely due to several reasons. People’s well-being and livelihoods are better on the Estonian side of the border than the Russian side. The local population is well aware of that. And of course, Estonia belongs to the EU and NATO … There have been some attempts by Russia to influence and connect there to the Russian-speaking population, but their influence has been very small.
You just tell them, okay, we go away from shale oil because it’s one of the most energy intensive fuels. We close the factories. We close the mining but then the social tensions will even amplify. They will get amplified. The other side of the Narva river would also react to it and maybe add fuel to the fire. We don’t know anything.
Politicians have tried to keep tensions as low as possible with the Russian nationals who, throughout the years, have not integrated well into Estonian society (Crandall, Reference Crandall2014). Effectively, the residents of Ida-Viru County have been found to have the lowest trust of all of Estonia’s regions in the president of Estonia, the public governance, and the judicial system (Ministry of Defence, 2021). The 2023 election result showed that the Russian-friendly United Left Party had increased their popularity by receiving 15 percent of the votes in the region. This debate is also intertwined with the rise of far-right populist politics in Estonia, which has attracted an increasing number of votes from Russian speakers, despite EKRE’s negative stance toward Russia and the rights of the Russian-speaking population. EKRE is against EU climate policy and, in 2020, proposed the withdrawal of Estonia from the EU emissions-trading scheme. There is, however, consensus between EKRE and the Center Party to save the northeastern part of Estonia from collapsing, despite their differences in politics concerning the integration of the Russian-speaking population into Estonian society. EKRE has used the unemployment and self-determination of Ida-Viru County to support its anti-decarbonization rhetoric (Yazar and Haarstad, Reference Yazar and Haarstad2023). In turn, Kersti Kaljulaid, president of Estonia during 2016–2021, very openly communicated to the population of Ida-Viru County that oil shale is the past and a new plan for the region is needed.
Ida-Viru County and its oil shale phaseout is one of the issues that the EU Just Transition Mechanism is trying to alleviate, with attention paid to employment, the environment, and social inclusion:
So, this is where the just transition mechanism and program comes in. We are in Estonia with different ministries and also with the local municipalities working hard to put together a program which could really then pose as [an] alternative, and which would smoothen the transition which is inevitably happening there if the carbon neutrality goal is achieved, as I’m sure it will be.
In 2022, the EU Just Transition Fund awarded almost 19 million euros to launch a magnet factory in Ida-Viru County, which also responds to EU security-of-supply concerns and the dependence on China for magnets (Kalantzakos et al., Reference Kalantzakos, Overland and Vakulchuk2023). The magnets are vital, for instance, in electric vehicles and, therefore, the investment relates both to the economic security of Ida-Viru County and the security of European supply for technical components required in the energy transition (policy synergy).
The aftermath of 2022 saw some revived interest in the use of oil shale. It became competitive against other energy sources when energy prices increased because of the 2022 crisis, and its continuation has received political support since then – indicating a restabilization of the regime. At the same time, however, the goals for decarbonization are pursued, increasing policy incoherence within Estonian energy policy.
We saw sort of a revival of oil shale power generation in Ida-Viru. So, for years before that, the trend in Ida-Viru was that less and less electricity is produced from oil shale, less and less workforce is needed in [the] oil shale industry. Last year, it changed. Last year, those power plants or the energy sector in Ida-Viru recruited, I don’t know, more than 1,000 people back to work, because, all of a sudden, those power plants were needed in the regional energy market and also in Estonia. And, of course, from that perspective, it made people in Ida-Viru think, whether the green transition all of a sudden has stopped, and whether the situation we saw last year is a new normality.
Eesti Energia is still having the goal in its mind to be 100 percent renewable on electricity by 2030, and, by 2040, [in its] entire [energy] production. So, the plans are still there, the plans what to make from oil shale after we don’t produce electricity [from it] anymore. So, the fact that, yeah, now we had to use more, and still we don’t know how much more, we had to use oil shale to produce electricity, but the overall vision is still toward neutrality.
The restabilization of the oil shale regime has been actively supported by the far-right political party EKRE since 2018 (Yazar and Haarstad, Reference Yazar and Haarstad2023), while other political parties began backing this more for security-of-supply and economic reasons from 2022. An energy business representative stated that the old parts of oil shale power plants in Narva have now received an extension from 2023 until at least 2026, because Eesti Energia is required to guarantee a certain amount of dispatchable production capacity until 2026.
5.5.2 Wind Power and Air Surveillance for Defence
Alongside biomass, wind power is one of the key renewable energy sources used in Estonia, with significant plans to expand. It is, therefore, the most promising renewable energy niche for Estonia. The country’s geographical positioning is favorable to wind power production (Crandall, Reference Crandall2014). However, offshore wind-power development has had a complicated beginning, with a lack of marine spatial planning regulation prior to 2015 and strong opposition from residents (Tafon et al., Reference Tafon, Howarth and Griggs2019). Perhaps a bigger problem – and one that concerns national security more closely – has been the conflicting views of the Ministry for the Economic Affairs and the Ministry of Defence regarding the expansion of wind power. This conflict has been openly acknowledged by those working in the domains of energy and security. During the 2020–2021 expert interviews there were differing perceptions of this conflict between the zero-carbon energy transition and national security. In contrast, by the 2022–2023 interviews a more consensus-based view had formed and solutions had been found via investment into new defence air-surveillance radars.
The conflict was substantially drawn out. In 2006, an offshore wind project off the coast of Hiiumaa, with plans to construct 100–200 turbines with output capacity from 700 MW to 1,100 MW, was halted when the Ministry of Defence suspended the permitting processes for all offshore wind proposals (Tafon et al., Reference Tafon, Howarth and Griggs2019). The reasoning at that time related to the need to establish a legal framework for regulating and planning such developments. Another case involved two wind turbines in Ida-Viru County, which had received permission from the Ministry of Defence in 2012 but, when constructed, were higher than initially permitted, so were found to interfere with air surveillance radars and signal intelligence (Koppel, Reference Koppel2022).
The Ministry of Defence faces a technical problem, whereby the increasing height of wind power turbines interferes with the operation of their air surveillance system – vitally important for Estonia: “Wind turbines can affect the ability of radar to detect and track airplanes, resulting in negative impacts on national security capabilities” (IEA, 2019, p. 124). While better siting of wind turbines and upgrading radar technology can offer some solutions, the small land area and the geopolitical location of Estonia have created obstacles – with the result being that planned wind-power projects of over 500 MW have been objected to by the Ministry of Defence (IEA, 2019).
Wind-park dimensions have grown three times since … the beginning of the 2000s … and they are starting to impact some of our defence systems.
There is the issue with radars. Defence radars which cannot function if some sort of wind farm is built right in front of them. So, this is a real serious issue but by now we have overcome it … there has been a decision to build a new radar.
This debate has created quite a lot of conflict between different parties. Some have argued that the Ministry of Defence has prevented the development to an unreasonable extent, while others have been more understanding:
The Ministry of Defence for a long time didn’t want to talk about it. It was like a public secret that we have a radar and we are monitoring what’s going on over borders. But now they said it publicly and it’s not secret anymore.
The Ministry of Defence has been, let’s say, too offensive and not willing to cooperate. Because I think there are solutions that are able to give that clear view back especially to the east side and have also these wind turbines. On the governmental level, we have agreed to build another radar … But I think still it needs a bit [more] cooperation between this Ministry of Defence or security or military side and the enterprise side to meet both objectives.
The processes resolving these conflicts have taken a long time, with some even resorting to court dealings, but some solutions have been found. In 2018, the government established a working group between the Ministry of Defence and wind power developers to clarify national security restrictions on wind power projects – yet, the IEA noted in 2019 that the government had not offered “a clearly defined planning and permitting process that will allow developers to … open a pathway to projects to proceed in a manner that does not excessively impact radar and other national security assets” (IEA, 2019, p. 124). A decision to invest in a new radar, opening up quite a large territory for onshore wind energy in northeast Estonia, was made by the government in 2019.
The process of wind power development has, nevertheless, been extremely slow and reveals a significant conflict between national security and zero-carbon transition policy objectives. Between 2017 and 2021 no new wind turbines were made operational as suitable locations approved by the Ministry of Defence had not been found (Resmonitor EU, 2021). The new radar should become operational in 2024, finally allowing the planned expansion of wind power and removing all height restrictions. The court dealings were also noted by several interviewees in 2023 to have ultimately led to much-improved collaboration and coherence between the ministries:
I would say that for all our offshore or onshore developments, there is quite good cooperation between ministries, starting from the environmental ministry, in terms of our [environmental impact assessments] EIAs, then the planning in our finance ministry, and also from our defense ministry.
The 2022 energy crisis created a new legislative process that aimed to shorten the planning process by allowing some steps to happen in parallel and resulted in extra funds to acquire new air surveillance radars too; the latter found “extraordinary” by an interviewee from the Ministry of Defence. Several new projects in Ida-Viru County have been planned to increase wind power capacity.
5.5.3 Desynchronization from the Russian Grid
Developments in the reduction of oil shale supply, combined with Estonia being a full member of the Nordic electricity exchange Nord Pool, have focused attention on desynchronizing Estonia’s electricity network from Russia. Initially, after regaining independence, the Baltic States were not connected to the Central European grid and had to sign what is called the BRELL (Belarus, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) agreement in 2001, which formalized the countries’ synchronous operation with the Russian electricity system (Juozaitis, Reference Juozaitis2020). A complete synchronization with the Central European electricity network and desynchronization from the Russian power system were announced as mutual strategic priorities by the Baltic States in 2007 (Juozaitis, Reference Juozaitis2020) and have been in preparation since 2009 (IEA, 2019). A principal reasoning for this has been national security, via breaking ties with Russia. Not everyone in the Baltic States was united on this at first. A common perspective was, however, reached from around 2010:
Fifteen years ago, there was a lot of lack of consensus about synchronization with continental Europe or desynchronizing from Russia, so our thinking was not synchronized between the Baltic States at all. So, there’s a very different picture from where we are now.
The last ten years I would say, all the three Baltic States are in cooperation with Finland, Sweden, and Poland to build a network which could be sustainable and could be autonomous also from Russia’s electricity … Up to 2025, all the three Baltic States, according to the plans, should be ready to desynchronize from Russia’s electricity networks.
In 2014, after Russia stopped the flow of gas to Ukraine, causing an energy crisis, the EU also began to pay more attention to synchronization. Two political roadmaps to advance synchronization were signed by the Baltic States, Poland, and the European Commission in 2018 and 2019 (IEA, 2019). The Baltic Synchronization Project, to improve the security of supply of the Baltics, has been supported by the EU to the tune of over one billion euros and is expected to be completed by 2025. The Baltics had planned to stop all electricity trade with Russia once the synchronization was fully complete, but the 2022 events led to the electricity trade being halted early, in May 2022. Until desynchronization is completed, however, the Kremlin is argued to have “a very detailed and up-to-date picture on the situation of Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian power systems” (Juozaitis, Reference Juozaitis2020, p. 5). In the meantime, potentially strategic information is being passed on to Russia, while the Baltic States have agreed to speed up desynchronization from the timeline initially planned.
Estlink 1, a submarine electricity cable between Finland and Estonia, was opened in late 2006, with national transmission-network operators Fingrid and Elering becoming its owners in 2013; it was followed by Estlink 2 in 2014. Other new connections that have also benefited the Estonian energy system are the LitPol Link between Lithuania and Poland, in 2015, and NordBalt, which began to operate between Sweden and Lithuania in 2016.
Simultaneously, Russia advanced its own desynchronization from the Baltic States. It did so in order to have “a chronological advantage over the Baltic States” and the possibility of unexpectedly withdrawing from the BRELL agreement (Juozaitis, Reference Juozaitis2020, p. 6). An interviewee noted that Russia had already shown its power position by not supplying emergency electricity to the Baltic States in June 2020, when substantial blackouts occurred following disruptions in the electricity network. This caused a tenfold increase in electricity prices, and even worse blackouts would have occurred if Poland had not supported the Baltic countries with an emergency supply of power.
In 2022, Estonia’s electricity market was heavily import-dependent, especially during peak consumption periods (ERR, 2021). For some, this has raised concerns about peak consumption (e.g., cold weather) coinciding with those of the neighboring countries, such as Finland. Thus, diversifying and developing renewable energy is increasingly becoming a priority to reduce energy supply risks (but coexists with demands to continue the oil shale industry). According to the expert interviews, the energy crisis also led to a search for ways to speed up desynchronization, improving the readiness to desynchronize to within twenty hours if necessary (for instance, if Russia interfered with Estonia’s electricity supply):
Now the war has really made all of us understand that it needs to be quicker. Russia cannot be relied upon in any aspects of life. So, we would like to speed it up, but it’s a completely technical issue. It really, it’s mostly about hardware. Meaning that we have to build those, I think in the Baltic countries altogether, nine huge machines which will guarantee this synchronization, frequency synchronization.
The desynchronization project provides synergistic developments for improving Estonia security vis-à-vis Russia and advancing the zero-carbon energy transition. Electricity supplied via the Estlinks and the NordBalt is more likely to be produced fossil-free than that supplied from Russia or produced with oil shale. Further, the desynchronization is connected to policies advancing the use of fossil-free energy sources, with some risks for the security of the energy supply, especially if the expansion of wind energy infrastructure keeps being delayed.
5.6 Concluding Remarks
Estonia is an interesting case of how “negative security” interests, that is, threats to national security and geopolitics, tie into energy policy and how this, on the one hand, complicates and slows down the zero-carbon energy transition while, on the other, has also advanced it to a degree by the country disconnecting from Russian fossil fuel supplies. Energy has been, to a degree, securitized since Estonia’s independence, and is mainly thought of from the perspective of negative security (security against threats; see Gjørv, Reference Gjørv2012). The substantial threat of Russia has been the prevalent landscape pressure on the energy regime, although other landscape pressures have also been noted – such as climate change, cyber risks, and globally increasing energy demand.
Due to the perceived high Russian landscape threat, first, the impact of wind turbine niche expansion on defence radars made the Ministry of Defence cautious about wind power until recently and, second, there has been caution regarding how Russia would react to the phaseout of oil shale located in the bordering Ida-Viru County, which has a large Russian-speaking population. EU just transition efforts in connection to supporting the oil shale phaseout, that is, regime destabilization, and to new industrial activity in Ida-Viru County, have introduced an element of “positive security” into the Estonian energy–security nexus. These efforts have addressed the well-being effects of the energy transition in this relatively poor region. Yet this is contrasted with diverging political interests related to resistance to EU energy policies.
Progress around electricity network integration with Central Europe, which reduces the energy independence of Estonia, resonates with ideas around redefining energy security by accessing cross-border grid communities (cf. Blondeel et al., Reference Blondeel, Bradshaw, Bridge and Kuzemko2021). Yet this aim coexists with the old security narrative constructed around oil shale and energy independence. Relatively little attention has been paid by policy actors to the security implications of the expansion of the energy “niches,” such as solar and wind power, while these implications have clearly increased via newly emerging attention paid to critical materials. More broadly, the extensive efforts already made by Estonia in cybersecurity will also help address the security implications of a new energy system based on renewable energy and the expanding interconnected electricity system. Figure 5.4 summarizes key energy security aspects and their impact on energy transition in Estonia.
Figure 5.4 Key energy security aspects and their transition impacts in Estonia, 2006–2023.
The events of 2022 changed the energy–security nexus. Although security was already present in energy policymaking (more so than the presence of energy in security policymaking), the dialogue became more open after 2022. New solutions for wind power were sought even more actively, with additional radars enabling wind power niche expansion as a measure to improve the security of energy supply. At the same time, however, fossil fuels were restabilized by a new gas reserve, a joint LNG terminal with Finland, and improved political consensus about continuing oil shale production at least for some time. It remains to be seen how these two aims will be balanced in the years to come.
The conflicts situated on the energy–security interface involving oil shale phaseout and the expansion of wind power have had a significant hindering effect on the zero-carbon energy transition in Estonia. These conflicts are unlikely to be resolved immediately due to heightened attention on geopolitical security since Russia’s attack on Ukraine in the winter of 2022. However, recent institutional changes have supported the zero-carbon energy transition, most importantly the goal for 100 percent renewable electricity by 2030, set in 2022. Nevertheless, the EU decarbonization targets and Estonian renewable energy niche actors face a counterforce of strong and established energy regime actors and entrenched party politics. The perceptions and established networks of these regime actors may be hard to overcome. Informal governance structures could be employed for flexibility but may also cause a barrier for new entrants and result in a lack of transparency regarding the energy–security nexus.
Finland is a small Northern European country in population terms, with only 5.5 million residents. Yet it covers a rather large geographical area – 338,440 square kilometers. The country is situated between Russia in the east, Sweden in the west, and Norway in the north. Estonia is only around 50 kilometers away, across the Gulf of Finland. In the past, Finland has been both a part of Sweden and of Russia, with independence gained in 1917. Both historical connections have partly influenced energy policymaking in Finland, and the country has had active energy trade across eastern and western borders, with the former halted after Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022.
Since World War II, Finland has gradually transformed from an agricultural society to a technological one, where the development of the forest and telecommunications industries was particularly significant. The forest industry has had a profound influence on both the demand for energy and the use of forests. Early on, the industry became an energy producer because postwar industrialization raised energy consumption. Hence, forest industry companies invested in electricity production from hydropower and established their own energy company, Pohjolan Voima (PVO), in 1943. In the 1970s, PVO expanded with condensation and nuclear power plant investments. Innovation in pulp and paper production processes enabled forest industry companies to produce bioenergy via their byproducts from the 1980s and 1990s onward, improving the energy economy of the forest industry. After recession in the early 1990s, the telecommunications industry acted as a spearhead for innovation policy. This industry experienced somewhat of a decline after Microsoft purchased global telecoms leader Nokia in 2014 and, later, ended most of its operations in Finland.
Finland is a rather interesting case to study energy–security relations for multiple reasons. First, its domestically available fuels are limited. Besides wood fuels, Finland uses peat in energy production. Peat provided 7 percent of total energy consumption in its peak year in 2007 but, in 2021, was reduced to 2.7 percent of total energy consumption (Statistics Finland, 2023), with a policy goal to halve the use of peat from the 2020 level by 2030 (Figure 6.1). During the 1993–2012 period, peat provided a minimum of 5 percent of Finland’s energy consumption. A strong peat lobby has existed since the 2000s, utilizing security as an argument when favorable. One campaign occurred after the 2006 gas disruptions between Russia and Ukraine, resonating with fears and concerns about energy availability and price (Lempinen, Reference Lempinen2019). Following the events of 2022, policies for the peat phaseout were temporarily relaxed and an emergency stockpile of peat created. This case is explored further later in this chapter.
Figure 6.1 Percentage shares of peat in Finland’s total energy consumption, 2000–2022.
Second, Finland is a neighboring country to Russia, with a 1,340-kilometer shared border, which has meant defence preparedness since Finland’s independence in 1917. However, the country also experienced a culture of “Finlandization” after World War II, described as the “adaptive acquiescence to the will of the Kremlin during the Cold War” (Arter, Reference Arter2000, p. 688). This was followed by the search for positive business relations with Russia and with the avoidance of negative remarks toward Russia in energy policy, and more generally in public discussion. Even after the EU imposed sanctions on Russia after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Finland kept shoring up its relations to Russian energy value chains and maintained the framing of Russian energy (merely) as an economic topic (Höysniemi, Reference Höysniemi2022). At the same time, Finland has maintained strong territorial defences in the post-Cold War era due to its historical experiences with Russia (Pesu and Iso-Markku, Reference Pesu and Iso-Markku2020).
Third, in 2019, the coalition government led by the Social Democrats set an ambitious climate policy goal of a carbon-neutral society by 2035, while the previous government had decided to ban the use of coal in energy generation by 2029. These moves have been supported by the already declining trend of the share of fossil fuels in Finland’s energy production from about 2010 and an acceleration of new renewable energy sources, especially wind power, from about 2014. During the initial study period 2006–2021, prior to the European energy crisis, the share of oil decreased from 25 percent to 19 percent, coal from 14 percent to 6 percent, and natural gas from 11 percent to 5 percent (Statistics Finland, 2023). While the overall share of natural gas was low in 2022, this was still problematic for Finland because all the natural gas had been imported from Russia. Finland managed to secure a liquefied natural gas (LNG) vessel to compensate for some gas supplies. This is the setting in which the analysis of security and energy transitions takes place.
This chapter presents the country case study of Finland. It first describes Finland’s energy and security regimes. It then continues with the analytical sections, drawing on Chapter 4: namely, the perceptions of Russia as a landscape for energy transitions; policy coherence and interplay between energy and security regimes including the level of securitization; and, finally, positive and negative security related to niche development and regime (de)stabilization. The project this book is based on studied Finland’s energy and security-related government strategies published since 2006 and conducted two rounds of interviews with energy and security experts, the first between September 2020 and April 2021, and then the second between December 2022 and January 2023. This chapter draws on these materials and on related literature and selected policy reports.
6.1 Energy Regime
The energy sources of the Finnish energy regime are based on a mix: (relatively limited) domestic fuels (wood-based fuels and peat) and imports of coal, oil, and natural gas (which have been significant since World War II). Therefore, wood has been an important energy source directly and via forest industry byproducts. The decarbonization of the electricity sector has already reduced dependence on these energy forms but transport – and to a lesser degree heating – still rely on imported oil and natural gas. Overall, the energy profile has been variable with no single source dominating.
Finland has a relatively fixed amount of hydropower as an important balancing capacity, with its further construction restricted since the 1980s for nature protection reasons and because the largest rivers were already utilized for hydropower in the 1960s. While, in the 1950s, over 90 percent of Finland’s electricity was produced by hydropower (Kivimaa, Reference Kivimaa, Lafferty and Ruud2008), hydroelectric plants began to face opposition from local communities due to disrupted fishing and farming activities, leading to increased support for nuclear power in the 1960s and 1970s (Myllyntaus, Reference Myllyntaus1991). Finland, therefore, heavily relies on hydropower-based electricity imports from Sweden and Norway.
Nuclear power has been part of the mix since the late 1970s, spurred by the worldwide oil crises of that time. In the 1970s and 1980s, four nuclear reactors were constructed. Half a century later, in 2022, the fifth nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto 3, began operating, but suffered from technical difficulties, limiting production, so only began full operation in 2023, about fifteen years behind the initial schedule. Attitudes to nuclear power have varied over time. The pronuclear group has aimed to depoliticize nuclear power with argumentation about technical safety, while the antinuclear camp has aimed to make the issue more political (Ylönen et al., Reference Ylönen, Litmanen, Kojo and Lindell2017), raising nontechnical questions related to nuclear power.
Biofuels were important in the early 2000s, especially in the form of black liquor, a byproduct of the forest industry, and later also via the direct use of wood for energy. Besides this, various forms of biofuels and technologies have characterized the development of bioenergy (Kivimaa, Reference Kivimaa, Lafferty and Ruud2008), alongside a battle for the use of wood for different purposes. Bioenergy was initially perceived as “the fossil-free source” for Finland, but it became more contentious when wood energy’s real impacts on greenhouse gas emissions and on carbon sinks became more widely considered in the EU. Increasing concern has been placed on the reducing carbon sink of the forests when the use of wood has increased.
The year 2013 was described as the time when the wind power niche began taking off in Finland (Haukkala, Reference Haukkala2018). Wind power has developed rapidly since 2014, contributing almost 12,000 gigawatt hours and 14 percent of electricity consumption in 2022 (Finland’s Wind Power Association, 2023). The capacity in 2022 was circa 5,677 megawatts (MW), with further 44,000 MW land-based and 10,000 MW offshore wind power structures planned (Finland’s Wind Power Association, 2022).
Another dominant feature of the Finnish energy regime is the district heating system initiated in the 1950s that covers about a half of Finland’s residential and service buildings, and is closer to 90 percent in cities (Schönach, Reference Schönach2021). However, this is partly being replaced by an expansion of ground-source and air-source heat pumps as more sustainable heating sources than hydrocarbon and biomass-powered district heating. The expansion is taking place especially in detached housing stock, while for larger buildings district heating still dominates. The district heating system is seen as an important means of energy storage, especially considering the shifts currently taking place toward the advancement of electrification.
Fortum, a partially government-owned company, is the largest provider of heat and power. It had heavily expanded into Russia prior to 2022 and it owned part of the German Uniper corporation before Uniper’s economic difficulties in the same year and until the German government bought Fortum’s share of Uniper. The second-largest energy company is Helsinki Energy, operating in the capital region and owned by the city of Helsinki. The manufacturing industry-owned PVO and the Swedish energy company Vattenfall are the third- and fourth-largest energy sellers.
The governance of the Finnish energy regime has been perceived as rather consensus-seeking and stable, with a small number of the (largely nonparty political) energy elite in power (Kainiemi et al., Reference Kainiemi, Karhunmaa and Eloneva2020; Ruostetsaari, Reference Ruostetsaari2010). There are close connections between certain economic interest groups and public authorities, where these groups can influence policymaking, for instance, regarding energy and the natural environment (from here onward “the environment”) (Vesa et al., Reference Vesa, Gronow and Ylä-Anttila2020). Interestingly, citizens have high trust in experts as decision-makers and are less keen for politicians to be in charge (Ruostetsaari, Reference Ruostetsaari2017). This has made it easier to depoliticize energy-related issues. The energy elite that consists of influential actors has, in turn, given more weight to economic competitiveness than climate change, the environment, or security (Ruostetsaari, Reference Ruostetsaari2017; Vesa et al., Reference Vesa, Gronow and Ylä-Anttila2020). Nonetheless, in 2009, strategic policymaking assumed that fossil fuels will remain the most important energy sources in the coming decades (PMO, 2009), while, in the same year, the Energy Industries Federation published a vision for carbon-neutral energy. Many incumbent energy actors neither pursued the energy transition actively nor perceived Russia as a security threat (Höysniemi, Reference Höysniemi2022; Kainiemi et al., Reference Kainiemi, Karhunmaa and Eloneva2020). Therefore, the events of 2022 functioned as a major “landscape shock” to the established energy governance system, requiring a new kind of perspective that also accounted for geopolitical security.
As a result of the established energy governance system in Finland, Russia maintained its position as a major energy exporter to the country until 2022. During the 2006–2011 period, 12–14 percent of electricity was imported from Russia, but experienced a major decline in 2012, when capacity payments introduced in Russia made export less profitable. Nevertheless, the share of electricity imports experienced a gradual increase subsequently, apart from 2020, when electricity was very inexpensive in the Nordic countries (see Figure 6.2). For other energy sources, the import dependence has been higher – in total 34 percent in 2021 – the largest imported source being oil, followed by nuclear power, natural gas, wood fuels, and coal (Statistics Finland, 2022). A gas pipeline was built from Russia to Finland in the 1970s and 100 percent of natural gas used in Finland came from Russia before 2022. In addition, the oil refinery of Neste Oil specialized in refining Russian oil. Replacing the imports following 2022 was possible, but the prices of energy commodities rose very sharply (Oesch, Reference Oesch2022), experiencing up to tenfold increases in consumer prices.
Figure 6.2 The amount of electricity import from Russia to Finland and its share of total electricity consumption, 2006–2023.
Energy governance is diffused between different ministries. The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment (MEE) has an energy department that coordinates Finnish climate and energy policy and is responsible for energy production and fuel-related issues – the latter together with the ministries of transport and communications (MTC) and of agriculture and forestry (MAF). The Ministry of the Environment oversees building energy efficiency and use, and international climate change negotiations, while the MTC is in charge of transport energy efficiency and use. This can be described as a fragmented energy governance setting.
The National Emergency Supply Authority (NESA) is an essential actor for energy security and other sectors’ security of supply, its budget being based on security of supply payments from companies. Its tasks include the coordination of preparedness cooperation between public and private sectors, overseeing arrangements related to national emergency stockpiles, ensuring the functionality of essential technical systems, safeguarding critical goods and service production, and monitoring international developments (NESA, 2023).
NESA reports that the Energy Sector Pools, consisting of public and private actors who prepare for emergencies and exceptional circumstances, have recently been reorganized to match with the changes created by the energy transition. For example, the new Heating Pool is building preparedness skills for nonfossil-based heating and the role of the Power Pool is growing as electricity is increasingly used to replace other energy forms (NESA, 2022). The pools are one example of the collaborative public–private governance culture adopted in Finland for many issues. Another example of this culture is the cooperation between public and private actors from different sectors in drafting fossil-free roadmaps during 2021 and again in 2024.
Since about 2013, new actors, such as the Clean Energy Association and the Climate Leadership Coalition, have challenged the established energy governance system, alongside the Green Party and environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (Haukkala, Reference Haukkala2018; Kainiemi et al., Reference Kainiemi, Karhunmaa and Eloneva2020). Attempts to make the energy transition more visible in party political and government program agendas included, during the 2014–2015 preparliamentary election period, a push from temporary actors, such as the Professor Group on Energy Policy, the Energy Renovation Group (Kainiemi et al., Reference Kainiemi, Karhunmaa and Eloneva2020), and the New Energy Policy Initiative (Haukkala, Reference Haukkala2018). The pursuits of these new actors have also been supported by some governance changes. For instance, the Finnish Climate Change Panel, composed of fifteen academics selected for one four-year term at a time, has become an important body that advises the government on climate and energy matters and responds to climate change-related consultations regarding new strategies and policy proposals. These have led, importantly, to a decision to phase out coal power together with speeding up favorable policies for renewable energy. Despite the advances made, very little disruptive institutional work has taken place (Kainiemi et al., Reference Kainiemi, Karhunmaa and Eloneva2020). Despite the coal phaseout plan, the prolonged debate about the fate of peat – tying in conflicting interests and concerns about employment, energy security, and the environment – is not over (Lempinen, Reference Lempinen2019). Moreover, there were calls to establish a new science advice panel on forests and the bioeconomy to create pushback to environmentally oriented preexisting science panels the Climate Change Panel and the Nature Panel; ironically, the new science panel has given similar advice to the older ones.
One of the key obstacles to both the energy transition and the broader consideration of security in Finnish energy policy has been the energy policy department of the MEE. Multiple studies have described it being stuck in an economic mindset favoring incumbent forms of energy production. For instance, Höysniemi (Reference Höysniemi2022) describes market-driven and technocratic governance, while Kivimaa (Reference Kivimaa2022) outlines a dominant economic perspective with little attention paid to security and the environment. Further, the ministry has been unwilling to disclose the assumptions in its “Climate and Energy Strategy” scenarios to outsiders (Kainiemi et al., Reference Kainiemi, Karhunmaa and Eloneva2020). Overall, the energy department has been slow to change and has lacked an innovation-oriented approach, despite being placed in the same ministry as innovation policy. Some experts, however, argued that the key problem derives from the political level, which has resulted in the fragmented energy governance framework:
When political decision-making is “limping” so does the civil servant machinery alongside it … If we don’t have political willpower, strategy, process, and timetable constructed so that it reaches over several government terms, as in energy policy must be, the civil servant machinery cannot realize things … We have a minister who has other things in mind first.
The same issue of political decision-making influencing how the public administration is organized and coordinated has affected the policy interplay between energy and security governance. I explore this in Section 6.4. Figure 6.3 summarizes the key aspects of Finnish energy policy.
Figure 6.3 Key aspects of Finnish energy policy.
6.2 Security Regime
After the end of the Cold War, Finnish defence policy changed and the first ever “Security Policy Report” by the government was published in 1995. The traditional components of Finnish defence policy are territorial defence and the Defence Forces, which have gained strong support across different political parties, in essence keeping the possibility of war part of the strategic culture of Finland (Pesu, Reference Pesu2017). It, therefore, has been quite peculiar that this strategic culture has played hardly any role in government energy policy.
Over time, there has been variation in how security and defence policies have been addressed either in combination or separately. Pesu (Reference Pesu2017) argued that to divide the government’s security and defence policy into two separate reports during 2016–2017 was an important decision that returned the defence administration back some of its past attention given to it in political decision-making. While the key focus of Finland’s defence and security policy has been the threat of the East, before the end of the Cold War it was not acceptable to publicly talk about the threat of the Soviet Union, which hindered security discussion altogether. Even after the Cold War, Russia was the most important nation for bilateral trade relations (Nokkala, Reference Nokkala2014).
During 2003–2010, Finland gradually shifted from a total defence approach, meaning military and civil defence, to a broader conceptualization of comprehensive security (Berzina, Reference Berzina2020), tying in both negative and positive security approaches. Comprehensive security means an operational model that relies on safeguarding vital societal functions in collaboration with authorities, businesses, NGOs, and citizens, covering issues such as defence capability, internal security, security of supply, functional capacity, and psychological resilience (Finnish Security Committee, 2017). However, it has meant that it is difficult to define the exact boundaries of Finnish security policy. While threat scenarios have become broader, the role of Russia has remained the same after the Cold War (Nokkala, Reference Nokkala2014). Energy has been mentioned as part of comprehensive security, but the experts interviewed perceived considerations of energy to be on a rather general level. One expert speculated that energy was not, prior to 2022, made a specific component of security policy, perhaps because this would extend discussions to Russia as a security threat directly connected to questions of energy policy – which was avoided at the time. So, energy was kept depoliticized and desecuritized.
The security regime in Finland comprises the defence administration, foreign affairs, and internal security (e.g., the police force), with links to preparatory activities by the National Emergency Supply Organization, comprising NESA and a broader network of companies. The Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of the Interior are important governing actors for security. The Defence Forces operate under the Ministry of Defence. The Ministerial Committee on Foreign and Security Policy is one of four statutory ministerial committees and meets with the President of the Republic to prepare important parts of Finland’s foreign and security policy. Defence spending has, since 2010, ranged from 1.22 percent of GDP in 2017 and 2018 to 1.96 percent in 2022 (MoD, 2023).
Since about 2010, the defence administration has had to adopt responsibility for new areas. These include, for instance, cybersecurity and climate change. The first “Cybersecurity Strategy” was published in 2013. Cybersecurity issues are located administratively in different places but coordinated by the National Cyber Security Centre placed in the Transport and Communications Agency Traficom. From 2019, cybersecurity in Finland has relied on the national “Cyber Security Strategy” from 2019, international collaboration, and guidance given to companies and other organizations.
The first “Climate Program of the Defence Forces” was published in 2014, initially mostly addressing the energy consumption and efficiency of the defence premises. The third “Climate and Energy Program of the Defence Forces 2022–2025” broadened the focus. It highlighted that the Defence Forces must prepare for the societal transition and recognized that their operation cannot remain solely dependent on fossil fuels in the long term (Finnish Defence Forces, 2022).
Besides the formal security and defence authorities, the National Defence Courses have been running since the 1960s, inviting important members of society to participate. It is a Finnish particularity that aims to improve collaboration between different societal sectors during exceptional circumstances and advance networking between actors operating on comprehensive security.
Overall, there were relatively few changes to the security regime during the study period from 2006 onward, until Finland joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 2023. The Finnish security regime has been well prepared for the geopolitical risks from Russia too. What has been lacking is its sufficient coordination with the energy regime (see Section 6.4) and perhaps quite slow awakening to questions of climate change and climate security. Figure 6.4 shows the key aspects of defence and security policy in Finland.
Figure 6.4 Key aspects of Finnish defence and security policy.
6.3 Perceptions of Russia as a Landscape Pressure at the Intersection of Energy and Security
Here, I explore landscape pressures, especially how perceptions of Russia by energy and security actors have formed landscape pressure on Finland’s energy policy and how these perceptions have changed over time. During 2006–2010, the main landscape pressures pertaining to the energy–security nexus in government strategies were the increasing international competition for energy, climate change, and the risk of marine disasters. Russia was at that time called the EU’s most important trading partner, although this interdependence was acknowledged to be a security risk. During 2011–2015, the strategy documents began to delve more deeply into Russian issues, Arctic developments, and climate change and how they could constitute potential security risks, while cross-border threats, also including disruptions in energy supply, were envisaged to become more prominent. During 2016–2020, Russia was specifically highlighted as a country aiming for a superpower status with a willingness to use military force and challenge the EU security system (Kivimaa and Sivonen, Reference Kivimaa and Sivonen2021). This risk materialized in 2022 when Russia began a war in Ukraine.
Climate change has, of course, been depicted as one of the substantial landscape threats. Yet research has found that it has been ordinary citizens, rather than the Finnish energy elite, who have tended to perceive climate change as a bigger challenge. In 2016, circa 80 percent of both the energy elite and citizens perceived that energy imports from Russia should be reduced (Ruostetsaari, Reference Ruostetsaari2017); however, this did not effectively happen until 2022, following the European security and energy crisis.
Among the experts interviewed for this book during 2020–2021 there was a division between less and more concerned individuals, with the majority expressing both positives and security risks associated with energy trade between Finland and Russia. For example, in October 2020, an expert from the MEE noted that it was important to keep in mind that Finland had not had any political energy problems with Russia. They, however, also mentioned that a certain amount of caution is “in the genes” of civil servants. Also, a researcher at the time did not see Russia as a large problem in energy policy terms due to the replaceability of fossil fuels in the world markets, and saw geopolitical thinking as something rather narrow. Further, a politician stated:
I think energy, between Soviet Union and Finland and later Russia and Finland, the energy cooperation has in the long run been … incredibly positive for Finland.
Simultaneously, others – from academia, politics, public administration, and business alike – saw Russia as a hugely important landscape pressure in security terms on Finland’s energy sector. For instance, one interviewee questioned the feasibility of large strategic energy investments involving Russia as it is an unpredictable actor:
It is clear that the biggest problem of Finnish foreign and security policy is Russia … And one should not call it a problem but from a policy perspective it is the most central problem that a large part of preparation, preparedness and foresight aims at. … If Russia falls behind the energy transition for the next twenty years … then that [kind of] Russia, I think, is dangerous. More dangerous than today because the means to influence internationally are narrowed down to military [means].
A politician stated in November 2020 that
Everyone knows that Russia uses Rosatom very powerfully as a means of its foreign policy … but I guess there has been … a still surprisingly strong instinctive pursuit of Finland’s political and business elite to make sure that relations with Russia do not suffer.
A business actor highlighted how the 2014 events had changed perceptions about Russia:
In a certain way, this Ukraine crisis and sanctions and Russia have in the last few years hardened the role [of security].
The ways in which experts at the energy–security interface expressed their views and those of the wider Finnish society about Russia prior to 2022 demonstrated a kind of dissonance. In defence terms, it was acceptable to consider the geopolitical risk Russia posed, but, in energy terms, focus was on cooperation and trade alongside the economic benefits that Russia brought via inexpensive energy and increased employment for Finland. The few critical voices were effectively cast as extreme perceptions, especially in party political discussions.
The tendency to downplay the Russian landscape threat to Finnish policymaking was also visible in government strategy documents. For instance, the “Security Strategy” from 2017 stated:
Russia is Finland’s neighbour, and its democratic development and stability are important. Finland aims to maintain stable and well-functioning relations with Russia. In addition to economic cooperation, collaboration in [the] Arctic and climate questions, for example, remains important. Finland’s energy cooperation with Russia is broad and must be interconnected with the development of the EU’s Energy Union. Regional and cross-border cooperation with Russia in northern Europe continues at the practical level, which is in the interests of Finland. It is important to support the civil society and direct contact between citizens. In the changed environment Finland must be able to carefully evaluate Russia’s development. This calls for more versatile and in-depth knowledge of Russia.
Therefore, while there has been implicit deep-rooted caution in the Finnish worldviews, at the same time the official communication was focused on economic relations with Russia, with much less vocality about the geopolitical threats the country poses.
Since around 2010, Russia has become somewhat more distant to Finland while Finland has become closer to the EU. An interviewee described a generational shift in politics that sees Finland primarily as an EU member state that no longer thinks that Russian interests need to be considered first when making decisions. Some interviewed experts also demonstrated increasing awareness of China, the significant dependency on China in many sectors, and China’s future influence.
The exceptional events of 2022, when Russia began a war in Europe, had a clear influence on the perception and construction of landscape threats in government energy policymaking in Finland. Abandoning Russian energy was one heading in the new Finnish “Climate and Energy Strategy” from 2022, and this included references to the decisions by the Council of Europe to make Europe independent from Russian imports of gas, oil, and coal as soon as possible. This would have been unheard of prior to the war in Ukraine.
Unlike before, the expert perceptions were uniform post-2022. There was an expression of lost faith and trust in Russia and no change for the better expected in a long time. Some, however, perceived that also a look back is needed to reflect on past policies:
It is important to go through early 2000s re-Finlandization, because we had an operational culture where it was thought that energy trade and interaction with Russia increases Finnish companies’ business opportunities in Russia and keeps Putin more benign to us. This politics has suffered a real “shipwreck” and caused large costs also to companies.
The clarity about Russia post-2022 has also led to more ambitious energy transition policies in Finland and a more open recognition of the geopolitical risks associated with different energy policy decisions. Next, I explore the interplay of energy policy with security and defence policies.
6.4 Policy Coherence and Interplay
The landscape perceptions about Russia and the dissonance between experiencing Russia as a security threat and a collaborative trade partner before 2022 explain much of the policy incoherence between energy (transition) and security policies that became evident in this study. I explored policy integration, synergies, and conflicts, as well as administrative interaction between the two policy domains by analyzing key energy and security policy strategies published during 2006–2020 and interviews conducted in 2020–2021 and 2022–2023. The results of these analyses have been published in journal articles (Kivimaa, Reference Kivimaa2022; Kivimaa and Sivonen, Reference Kivimaa and Sivonen2021) and I outline some of the key findings in this section.
The analysis of the Finnish government’s energy and security policy strategies showed moderate integration of energy issues into security and defence policy strategies, whereas the integration of security into energy policy strategies ranged from moderate to low. The low level of integration was observed especially in the concrete policy instruments that the policy documents outlined, and in the way the broader security considerations of the energy transition were not addressed (Kivimaa and Sivonen, Reference Kivimaa and Sivonen2021).
During 2006–2010, the reference objects at the energy–security nexus of the policy strategies were correlated with “vital functions” of the society that required securing electricity transmission, distribution, and power supply, alongside broader energy availability and supply. However, the referent objects were not only limited to the energy system. Security strategies also mentioned people’s health and well-being being affected by disruptions in energy supply and heating networks. In addition, the environment, business activities, and the defence system were recognized as important reference objects related to energy and security. The second period, 2011–2015, was less specific about reference objects. It mostly mentioned the critical energy infrastructure to be secured. Individual mentions of vital societal functions, the environment, and nuclear safety were made. There was no substantial change during the 2016–2020 period: Energy supply in terms of power and fuels was still emphasized as the object of security. There were selected remarks on nuclear safety, data systems, the environment, and the well-being of the population.
The general finding from the interview analysis was that several coordinating elements that have potentially advanced coherence between energy and security policies existed, although instruments or actors that considered both energy and security in equal measure were lacking. Examples of elements with potential to advance coherence included the “National Security Strategy,” taking a comprehensive security approach; the National Security Council, including energy representation; NESA; the public–private network Power Pool coordinated by NESA; and the National Defence Courses. However, neither the “Security Strategy” nor the National Defence Courses have typically addressed the energy sector or energy transitions in detail. The Power Pool system, in contrast, was perceived as very effective in securing the energy system in crises – perhaps proven during the 2022 European energy crisis (Kivimaa, Reference Kivimaa2022).
NESA, in turn, has received critique from the interviewees. For instance, it was claimed to retain “old world thinking” in terms of energy security. Also, elsewhere it has been described as a rather traditional organization, slow to follow contemporary trends and with its broader network comprising incumbent companies (Höysniemi, Reference Höysniemi2022). Yet NESA has also begun to orient toward the energy transition by publishing its “Energy 2030 Program” in 2019, which rethinks security of supply. In 2022, the Finnish government announced work to update NESA’s mandate to react to the requirements of the energy transition.
That organization has got a lot of movement and forward-looking exercises. I am sure this crisis has sped it up.
NESA has been in the dark for the last fifteen years … They have little by little managed to build certain preparedness … now they use a lot of money on cybersecurity and supporting the digital worlds. A lot of good development has happened.
Commonly, the interviewees believed that interaction between the ministries and agencies responsible for energy and security has not been sufficient. Prior to 2022, the pursuits for coherence mainly incurred informally, as knowledge exchange in energy- or security-connected meetings. Criticism was also directed toward a siloed and fragmented interface where nobody had general responsibility for the energy–security nexus. More recent interviews have also highlighted the lack of high-level coordination within energy policy itself (see Section 6.1). The critique was partly connected to a political culture of not discussing geopolitical security with respect to energy policy, a “business-oriented” style in energy policy concerning Russia, and a lack of security expertise in the MEE department of energy.
A politician explained the observed incoherence in October 2020 as follows:
Maybe there has been unwillingness to mix economic interests and these kind of security interests with each other because, if one needs to build or starts to build a connection, then there is easily a need to make choices.
The historical-cultural legacy of “Finlandization” was also referred to by some as an explanation. The incoherence between energy and security policies implies that the security implications of the energy transition have not received appropriate foresight analyses. Yet, more recently for instance, the geopolitics of renewable energy has received increasing focus. Finland’s NATO membership may also increase collaboration at the energy–security nexus, as NATO is developing strategic awareness of this (Bocse, Reference Bocse2020).
The defence administration, and especially the Defence Forces, have provided rather good examples of energy policy integration – albeit on a very pragmatic level. The Defence Forces’ Climate and Energy Program has led to improvements in the energy efficiency of their operations but has also addressed climate adaptation to some degree. While little research has been conducted on alternative energy sources, there has been some follow-up activity on the technological development of this front. To better serve policy coherence, these activities need to be scaled up but are also dependent on how energy governance actors respond.
Perhaps the most visible example of synergies is realized in the context of emergency and crisis preparation of the energy sector. The above-mentioned networks, in the form of energy pools coordinated by NESA and associated practices, are likely to benefit security.
What became clear in the expert interviews was that the root cause of incoherence between energy and security governance was the lack of interest of most political parties, with explicit “hints” even given to civil servants not to explore this connection further (Kivimaa, Reference Kivimaa2022). This perhaps relates to the need that, if Russian-related risks had been better acknowledged in energy policy, Finland would have had to make some hard choices. In other words, improving the coherence between energy and security policies requires changing the objective setting and measures in one or both of the domains. The connection of the energy transition to national security was even less discussed. One business actor noted in 2020:
On the political side it [the security effects of the decarbonizing energy system] interests no one. I can immediately say that it really is not sufficiently, I mean the system-level change, it is not noted, and it may be a slightly difficult issue for political decision-makers.
During the study period, from 2006 to 2023, two clear turning points were relevant for the interplay of energy and security policies. The first one was in 2014, with the Russian annexation of Crimea, which inspired some caution in energy policymaking. Yet, at the same time, it did not create a big enough landscape shock to fix any observed incoherencies between energy and security policies.
Nevertheless, relatively important policy decisions took place in 2014; for example, the publication of the “Energy and Climate Roadmap 2020,” a report by the Parliamentary Committee on Energy and Climate Change. Interestingly, the word “Russia” appears only once in this seventy-three-page report, despite Russia’s significant role as an energy importer to Finland during that time. Moreover, (energy) security was not used as a term, but security of supply and self-sufficiency were mentioned about twenty times each. Therefore, although there was focus on security it was only in somewhat narrow terms.
The 2014 “Energy and Climate Strategy” was followed by parliamentary approval of the decision in principle to grant permission to build Fennovoima’s Hanhikivi nuclear power plant – with one third ownership by the Russian state-owned nuclear power company Rosatom – in December 2014, ten months after Crimea. The decision in principle used security mainly in relation to radiation and nuclear security, not in geopolitical terms. Crimea was mentioned once in relation to the consultation statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that detailed, for instance, that the project would create negative publicity for Finland in Europe and is counter to EU aims to reduce energy dependence on Russia as a reaction to Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea (Formin, 2016). Security of electricity supply was used as one of the key justifications for the parliamentary approval. An interviewee remarked that one explanation may be the historically rather good relations that Finland had with Russia as a supplier of raw materials; although this has also been a dependence by Finland that the Soviet Union and Russia have been able to exploit in negotiations. Parliamentary approval of this nuclear power development did not, however, mean that critical voices did not exist at the time:
In the discussion about Fennovoima, of course Rosatom’s ties to Russian nuclear weapons industry were obvious and clear. That is why critique was focused against it by actors who normally support nuclear power.
I was very critical about nuclear power but especially about this provider that is bound to Russian interests quite strongly, because Rosatom is a heavily strategic actor of the Russian government that does not operate on a commercial basis but on a political basis.
In 2014, there was also rather extensive discussion about energy independence (aiming to produce all required energy in Finland) versus security of supply (making sure that there are sufficient energy imports available to complement domestic supply). The latter was accepted in policy due to much higher costs of energy independence and the market-oriented approach of the energy department. The broader aim has, nevertheless, been to reduce import dependency on Russia:
Finland’s energy policy has been … the one long policy line [that] has all the time been, and still is, the reduction of import dependence and it has been directed to getting rid of import dependence from Russia.
A more significant turning point occurred in 2022, when Russia attacked Ukraine. The following higher energy prices and fear of energy shortages when Russian energy flows were lowered, if not completely stopped. In Finland, this created a large shift in energy policy and the political discourse:
If one thinks about a general strategic level, it has been very strong – this kind of burst of the collective bubble … while discussion was actively quietened before … now it is a completely different kind of situation.
It also led to some rather extraordinary policy decisions, although not constituting securitization as such. The energy imports from Russia were not directly halted for contractual reasons but the placement of sanctions by the EU, on the one hand, and the demands of the Russian government to pay Russian companies in Russian currency (rubles), on the other followed. The policy decisions deviating from regular energy policy made rather a long list, not all pertaining to security, but which, for instance, included alleviating the high electricity prices paid by consumers. One of the most exceptional policies brought into use, according to the interviewees, was the construction of an LNG terminal and acquiring an LNG ship from Texas to secure gas supply for the following winter: “On 20 May 2022, Gasgrid Finland Oy and Excelerate Energy, Inc., from the United States, signed a ten-year lease agreement for the floating LNG terminal vessel Exemplar” (MEE, 2022, p. 45). Another exceptional policy has been the clear strategic line taken to also discontinue Russian energy imports in the long term. The “Climate and Energy Strategy” from 2022 highlighted the importance of replacing gas as an industrial power source, the launch of an energy-saving campaign to respond to the sanctions and bans placed on Russian gas, and the establishment of an emergency stockpile of peat by NESA. It is clear that some short-term measures are counter to the zero-carbon energy transition, even though the discourse still emphasized the benefits of the transition to energy security.
In essence, the interviews conducted in 2022–2023 illustrated a significant shift in the interplay between energy and security policies in Finland:
Yes, energy has become a strong part of foreign, security, and defence policy, but it has not yet been implemented in our plans as it should.
Since early 2022, in energy policymaking there has also been more receptiveness to, or even a call for, security messages from the administration and the business sectors alike. In addition, a new security assessment of geopolitical risks was conducted on the Fennovoima Hanhikivi nuclear power plant. The explosions of the Nord Stream gas pipelines also brought into play the need to physically protect the critical energy infrastructure; something which was considered a much lower risk two years previously. While this does not amount to securitization as defined in Chapter 2, it can perhaps be described as a form of partial securitization of previously economic- and decarbonization-oriented energy policy.
6.5 Niche Development, Regime (De)stabilization, and Positive and Negative Security
In this section, I explore, via selected cases, the ways in which energy and security intertwine with niche development and regime destabilization (or the lack thereof). Niche development is principally addressed via the expansion of wind power, this being the most extensive new renewable energy source in Finland with the greatest potential. It is also directly connected to national security via tall wind turbines interfering with air surveillance radars and, less directly, via new dependencies on critical materials. While there are other emerging technologies, such as green hydrogen, they are in such an early stage of development that assessing security based on my data sources was not possible. The other cases relate to the stability of the established energy regime. They involve, first, the case of peat and its perceived importance for Finnish energy security, with security arguments playing a role in slowing down the energy transition; and, second, the lack of any security discussion by the Finnish government around the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. These cases essentially represent the path dependencies of Finnish energy policy (peat) and the history of “Finlandization” (Nord Stream 2).
Overall, the reconfiguration of the energy regime via electrification – which is neither directly niche development nor regime destabilization – has improved security in Finland. One politician noted, in 2020, that the Nordic electricity market has substantially improved the security political situation in Finland by reducing dependence on Russian energy sources compared to 2006, and that investments in cross-country electricity lines to Sweden and Estonia have also played a role. Generally, the expansion of electrification in Finland (and Estonia) can be seen as a transition that is perhaps more about reconfiguration than niche development. However, this is increasingly intertwined with the niche expansion and mainstreaming of wind power as well as continued support for established nuclear power. Both electrification and the larger share of wind power in electricity production have changed the key logic of the Finnish energy regime to become more responsive to energy availability at any given time (with development in demand and consumption response) and have reduced the role of stockpiling. The objectives behind these developments not only relate to decarbonization but also to visions of Finland as a net-electricity exporter and as attractive to new industries.
6.5.1 Wind Power and Its Conflict with the Defence System
In the beginning of the period of interest for this study, around 2006, the potential of wind power to improve energy security was hardly mentioned in Finland (Varho, Reference Varho2007). In later discussion and policy documents, the negative effect of wind turbines on Defence Forces’ prewarning systems, namely air surveillance radars, emerged as a significant issue. The operation of military air surveillance radars requires that the radio waves they send meet with no obstacles between the radar and the target, the reach of the radar being several hundreds of kilometers and 0–20 kilometers in height; wind power turbines reduce the radar range and the blades create reflections on the radars (Joensuu et al., Reference Joensuu, Väyrynen, Tolppanen, Karhu, Salmi, Hartikka, Leino, Viljanen, Smids, Hujanen, Sipilä and Huuskonen2021). As a consequence, the restrictions for wind power construction in eastern Finland has meant that wind power is concentrated mostly in one part of the country and the energy system is less able to exploit varying weather conditions in different parts of Finland.
During 2008–2009, certain wind power developments were halted due to the opposition of Defence Forces and the unclear effects on the radar systems (Joensuu et al., Reference Joensuu, Väyrynen, Tolppanen, Karhu, Salmi, Hartikka, Leino, Viljanen, Smids, Hujanen, Sipilä and Huuskonen2021). In many eastern Finland regions, close to the Russian border, wind power construction has not been allowed. The Defence Forces have employed case-by-case consideration of wind power plans. Due to highly confidential factors related to defence, those planning wind power projects and those responsible for land-use planning do not have the information on how to design these projects in order to make them more acceptable; from the perspective of the Defence Forces, the project proposals are either accepted or rejected and little to no guidance has been available for wind power developers (Joensuu et al., Reference Joensuu, Väyrynen, Tolppanen, Karhu, Salmi, Hartikka, Leino, Viljanen, Smids, Hujanen, Sipilä and Huuskonen2021). However, continued negotiations have been possible in some cases (MEE, 2014).
To better enable wind power construction, a methodology was created during 2010–2011 by the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland on assessing the wind farms’ effects on radars; this development was funded by a group of twenty wind power companies and the public administration and was coordinated by the Energy Industries Federation. As a result, by spring 2021, the Defence Forces had approved over 600 wind power developments composed of 11,000 wind turbines. Of these, 128 were in regions located in the eastern side of Finland but only 28 in the southeast border regions. One of the key problems has been that obtaining a statement from the Defence Forces has been a lengthy process and is not defined in law (Joensuu et al., Reference Joensuu, Väyrynen, Tolppanen, Karhu, Salmi, Hartikka, Leino, Viljanen, Smids, Hujanen, Sipilä and Huuskonen2021).
In 2012, the MEE established a working group with the task of advancing the shift to wind power, removing barriers to wind power construction, and coordinating the objectives of different ministries. An arrangement was also made by which obstacles to the operation of radars caused by wind power could be removed by developing the Defence Forces’ radar systems. Effectively, in 2013, a new law on wind power compensation areas removed barriers for wind power construction in the west of Finland for offshore wind on the Gulf of Bothnia, covering 2,400 square kilometers. This meant that construction was possible in previously prohibited areas. However, the Defence Forces required that compensation, effectively additional sensors, could not be funded from the defence budget and the wind power producers in these areas need to provide so-called radar compensation payments to cover the additional costs of new radar technology. In turn, a similar compensation area in the Kymenlaakso region closer to Russian border was found to be so expensive to implement that it was regarded economically unviable (MEE, 2014).
Generally, it has been perceived that the defence administration’s perspective on wind power is understandable and acceptable, the Defence Forces are not against wind power as such, and the administration has been engaged in processes that seek to enable wind power construction. The Defence Forces have, since 2009, actively collaborated with other administrative sectors and wind power developers (MEE, 2014). Common solutions have been sought, as demonstrated by the compensation scheme, yet viable technological solutions in the eastern areas have been hard to find.
Following the 2022 war in Ukraine and the energy crisis, Finland increased its support for the expansion of wind power to replace the shortage of electricity previously imported from Russia. This meant new policies speeding up wind power-permitting processes and appointing an official expert to assess potential technical and operational solutions that would allow the expansion of wind power and still enable effective air surveillance in eastern Finland. Some perceived that these new policy lines on wind power would not have been taken forward a few years ago. Nevertheless, it appears that no technical solutions exist to expand wind power substantially further east, and there needs to be a 40–80-kilometer distance between a wind park and a radar (Pöntinen, Reference Pöntinen2023). Therefore, the conflict between expanding wind power in eastern Finland and maintaining national security prevails.
In this case, state (defence) as a referent objective and negative security in the current world situation have, understandably, taken preference over improved energy security or regional viability (as elements of positive security). Although the compensation model has benefited certain regions, it has placed eastern regions in less attractive positions with regard to new industrial investment and sustained livelihoods. Learning processes and networking have taken place both administratively and technologically, but comprehensive solutions to the policy conflict have not been found despite expectations that wind power will be massively expanded in the coming years. Further, the expansion of wind power, while improving energy security, will also create new dependencies on components and critical materials – linked to geopolitics and trade with China. The events of 2022 led to greater interest in energy transitions policy for wind power, but not to a degree that would have substantially securitized the decision-making.
6.5.2 Peat Energy and Its Promotion as Traditional Energy Security
In Finland, peat and bioenergy are the only domestic energy fuels and, hence, are tied to the decline of the fossil regime. The energy use of peat began as a result of the first oil crisis of the 1970s, with peat providing a domestic energy source to replace some of the imported fossil fuels – especially oil – for heat and power production via combustion. As a new energy source at the time, it was well suited for storage, contributing to security of supply. When climate change concerns began to increase, replacing peat with bioenergy in combustion plants came into focus. As noted in the introduction to this chapter, the share of peat in total energy consumption is relatively small but makes a rather substantial contribution to Finland’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Large wetland areas have enabled the use of peat for energy production, supported by favorable long-term policies, such as subsidies in different forms, making peat more competitive in relation to other energy sources (IEA, 2018). This has slowed down Finland’s zero-carbon energy transition. Following the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, the Finnish government created a peat promotion scheme for 2007–2010 that allowed an additional premium tariff (paid as a subsidy on top of the market price) for electricity produced with peat and extended a tax exemption for peat used in heating (IEA, 2018). In 2017, the government’s “Climate and Energy Strategy” noted that taxation will still be used to ensure that peat remains more cost-effective than imported fossil fuels (MEE, 2017).
Peat is regarded important for the local economies and employment in certain regions of Finland, hence contributing to internal socioeconomic security. It has also played a role in energy security via stockpiles equaling six months’ use. VAPO, a government company established in the 1940s, initially as “the state’s fuel office,” has been a significant producer of peat from lands owned by the government, with private sector ownership increasing in the 2000s. It has been an active campaigner for peat energy. In a campaign launched in 2010, following the Russia–Ukraine gas delivery disruptions, it lobbied in favor of peat by using, in particular, the energy security argument, taking advantage of the repoliticization of energy security (Lempinen, Reference Lempinen2019). Peat has essentially been linked to a storyline that regards “the energy transition and security as incompatible” (Höysniemi, Reference Höysniemi2022).
Interestingly, peat as an energy security question was mostly brought up by the politicians interviewed and not by other actors. It illustrates the politicization of the peat question over other energy questions and how the security aspect of peat is linked to political tactics. What seems clear is that security of supply has been used as a lobbying tactic as well as a traditional energy security argument in favor of peat, not by the ministries or Defence Forces, but by NESA, as pointed out by one interviewee. The importance of peat for security of supply was, however, argued by another interviewee to be reducing in the transition from combustion to other forms of electricity and heat production. Yet a third interviewee noted that “peat is important, no matter what anyone says.”
The phaseout of peat in energy production has largely been market-based, resulting from the EU emissions trading system. This development, however, experienced a setback in 2022 in response to the security and energy crisis. The crisis led to halted wood imports from Russia, while there was also a concern that domestic wood was being used for energy production instead of higher-grade uses in the forest industry. Therefore, tax-free use of peat was allowed up to 10,000 MWh per year during 2022–2026. Furthermore, the government’s “Climate and Energy Strategy” from 2022 pointed out, for instance, that the reduction of peat and fossil fuels directs attention to the heating sector’s security of supply. It also outlined a new policy, an emergency stockpile of peat used in energy production. Peat production areas are also a focus of the EU just transition efforts and are connected to positive security. To improve socioeconomic security in regions dependent on peat production as a source of employment, funding and advice are made available to develop new businesses, find new employment, and compensate for the depreciation of peat production machinery (MEE, 2022).
Peat as an example of the energy–security interplay places the image of “traditional energy security” as a reference object alongside, perhaps, regional viability – if the latter can be regarded as a referent object for security. Peat, therefore, highlights the negative security aspect of the energy transition, while emphasizing regional livelihoods as positive security. While the latter is important for security, the peat debate includes no long-term approach toward achieving climate and geopolitical security in a rapidly changing world.
6.5.3 Nord Stream 2 Gas Pipeline
The ways in which the Finnish government dealt with the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline application – as it went through Finland’s territorial waters – came up frequently in the expert interviews related to energy and security. This case did not involve Finland’s energy consumption as such, but it was linked to maintaining fossil fuels in Central Europe and Finland’s relations with Russia. Hence, it is covered here briefly.
Nord Stream refers to a network of offshore gas pipelines constructed to supply Russian natural gas to Germany. The company operating the pipelines is majority-owned by the Russian government-owned company Gazprom (with 51 percent), with the remaining shares owned by German, Dutch, and French companies. The two pipelines of Nord Stream 1 were completed in 2011 and of Nord Stream 2 in 2021.
Nord Stream 2 is an example of officially not connecting security to a fossil fuel project important to Europe, when perhaps this should have been done. Several experts noted that in essence the Nord Stream pipeline project was depoliticized on purpose in Finland. An interviewee remarked that there was an avoidance of discussion: The use of the term “security policy” in particular in that context was avoided and a desire existed to view the gas pipeline as a neutral project despite its potential security ramifications. Certainly, Russia regarded it as security policy, another interviewee stated. Yet, essentially, a “political-level” decision was made to not address this issue as a security question and Finland did not take part in international geopolitical discussions.
Officially, the project was addressed as something with potential environmental impacts on the seabed that were assessed in the consultation phase. This perspective was tied to the international agreements of which Finland is a part and the stipulations they have in place. These did not include geopolitical aspects.
Several explanations were offered for the lack of discussion around security. Several experts took the view that the project was important for Europe–Russia relations at the time – and essentially opposition was framed in terms of the economic interests of the US to provide Europe with LNG. It did not affect Finnish energy policy as such and could curtail the energy company Fortum’s ventures in Russia and Germany. One interviewee said that Finland has “a tendency to deal with these kinds of issues calmly” and two referred to the lack of any previous problems.
Given the lack of security discussion, it is hard to define a reference object – perhaps the European energy system or wider geopolitical security. As the debate was depoliticized and desecuritized, any positive and negative security implications remained implicit. Security-of-energy supply for Europe could be seen as an element of positive security. In turn, Europe’s increased dependence on Russia, climate change effects, and possible infrastructure risk (realized in 2022) were elements of negative security.
6.6 Concluding Remarks
Before 2022, there was an explicit and perhaps politically intentional disconnection between energy policy and geopolitical security. This has also been noted by others (Jääskeläinen et al., Reference Jääskeläinen, Höysniemi, Syri and Tynkkynen2018). The strong economic interests of Finland for cheap energy imports for industry and of the Finnish energy company Fortum – together with the history of Finlandization, that is, maintaining friendly terms with the Russian government – prevented a genuine assessment and discussion of the geopolitical risks related to energy trade with Russia. Interestingly, Finland was able to maintain a strong defence policy at the same time, which has also kept many areas of eastern Finland, close to the Russian border, inaccessible for wind power expansion. All in all, Russia has been a major landscape influence on the Finnish energy transition – somewhat slowing it down. This effect has occurred via the aim to achieve inexpensive energy for the export industry – where Russian imports have often been low priced – while, simultaneously, decarbonization of the electricity sector has been rather strongly pursued, creating policy incoherence.
Some energy system aspects, such as peat and nuclear power, have been subject to relatively intensive political debates. Yet, at the same time, a goal to depoliticize those parts of the energy system that were linked to Russian trade has existed. Examples of this include the general reluctance to discuss geopolitical security – while economic perspectives on security of supply existed – the depoliticization of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline debate, and the aim to depoliticize nuclear power. High trust by citizens in expert-based policymaking has supported the depoliticization of some energy questions. Figure 6.5 summarizes the key energy security issues in Finland and their effects on the energy transition.
Figure 6.5 Key energy security aspects and their transition impacts in Finland.
The events of 2022 led to a substantial shift in perceptions of Russia with regard to the energy system context, the politicization of energy policy, and some exceptional energy policy changes. Time will show whether this will also be influential in changing the energy governance system and how. How will energy and geopolitical security be addressed by the next governments and will that result in a less fragmented energy-governance system? How will the negative and positive security implications of energy transitions be anticipated and reacted to? The experimental governance features emphasized by sustainability transitions studies and studied and tested in other Finnish contexts have been rare in the rather “old world” energy administration of Finland but could be of use here (Kivimaa and Rogge, Reference Kivimaa and Rogge2022). Certainly, issues linked to electrification and the expansion of wind power necessitate much governance experimentation and innovation to deal with the defence radar issue as well as the sustainable extraction and supply of critical materials.
The Northern European country Norway has a population of 5.5 million and is among the wealthiest countries in the world. Norway was part of Denmark until the nineteenth century and gained independence from Sweden in 1905. The country is one of the founding members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and, while it chose not to join the EU, it is required to follow some EU legislation and has access to the EU internal market via the European Economic Area (EEA) Agreement, signed in 1992. Norway is located on the western side of Sweden and has limited borders with Russia and Finland to the north. On the northern, southern, and western sides, Norway is surrounded by the Barents Sea, the Norwegian Sea, and the North Sea. Its coastline is over 2,000 kilometers. The continental shelf governed by Norway is four times the size of the mainland and one third of the whole European continental shelf. Therefore, Norway has substantial access to offshore oil and gas reserves located on its continental shelf. It has also deliberated opening an enormous area for deep sea mining of critical minerals (Alberts, Reference Alberts2023).
Norway is a unique country case as it holds such a large magnitude of different kinds of energy reserves: oil, natural gas, and hydropower. These reserves have made Norway fully energy independent in terms of domestic energy consumption, apart from some dry years when it imported electricity to compensate for the lack of hydropower (Figure 7.1). Norway exports about nine tenths of its energy production (Figure 7.2). The country generated 3 percent of global gas (being the seventh-largest producer) and 2.3 percent of global oil production in 2020; the International Energy Agency (IEA) has described Norway as having a politically and economically “stabilizing role in the world’s oil and gas supply” (IEA, 2022, p. 9), which is otherwise concentrated in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the US. The income generated from the export of oil and gas has created substantial societal gains for Norway, but has also meant the country is economically dependent on this income. Despite increasing climate concerns and risks associated with oil and gas production the governance structures of Norwegian hydrocarbon production remained unchanged during 2013–2018 (Bang and Lahn, Reference Bang and Lahn2020).
Figure 7.1 Norway’s electricity imports and exports, 2006–2022, GWh.
Figure 7.2 Norway’s export of oil and gas, 2006–2022, in millions of tons oil equivalent.
Besides hydrocarbons, Norway has ample waterfalls that have, over several decades, led to the development of a sizeable hydropower sector that covers nine tenths of Norway’s total electricity production. Therefore, as Norwegian society is highly electrified and decarbonized, other renewable energy sources have been rather poorly supported politically. Instead, the oil and gas sector were supported by, for example, new concession rounds for exploration during 2015–2017 (Mäkitie et al., Reference Mäkitie, Normann, Thune and Sraml Gonzalez2019). Unlike the other case countries in this book, for Norway, the renewables niche expansion via wind power has often been perceived to mean rising levels of exports and power exchange to other countries without improved security of supply (Hansen and Moe, Reference Hansen and Moe2022). Wind power can, however, play an important role for local security of supply in areas where connections to the transmission network are weak (Skjølsvold et al., Reference Skjølsvold, Ryghaug and Throndsen2020). Whereas wind power was perceived positively in the early 2010s (Karlstrøm and Ryghaug, Reference Karlstrøm and Ryghaug2014), subsequently it faced increasing citizen resistance for various reasons, including the dispossession of Sámi areas (Normann, Reference Normann2021) and the rise of resource nationalist arguments (Hansen and Moe, Reference Hansen and Moe2022). It is only since the 2020s that increased policy support has been given to wind power to accelerate its expansion (see details in Section 7.5).
The abundance of fossil energy has led to a kind of dissonance between Norway’s export-oriented fossil fuels policy and its domestic zero-carbon energy policy, which are dealt with administratively in different domains and ministries, perhaps to reflect the different values involved. The fossil fuel sector represents economic security for Norwegians, while zero-carbon energy reflects the country’s environmental values. Therefore, to limit the emissions of the fossil fuel sector, Norway has developed its hydrocarbon production to be the world’s least carbon-intensive and has invested heavily in the development of carbon capture and storage (CCS). Nevertheless, this dissonance has meant that energy security concerns played a substantially smaller role in Norway prior to 2022 than in the other case countries.
The war instigated by Russia in Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis in Europe have affected Norway differently than other European countries, due to the country’s large energy reserves. The events nevertheless caused changes in Norwegian energy policy too. The impact was twofold. First, Norwegians experienced much higher electricity prices than before due to interconnections with other European countries (Germany, Finland, Sweden, the UK, the Netherlands), although the government compensated consumers for this rise to a large extent. Second, the Norwegian government was able to benefit from record high exports of oil and gas, replacing the quantities previously supplied by Russia to Europe and receiving thanks from the EU President Ursula von der Leyen, for being a valuable source of help in the European energy crisis (von der Leyen, Reference von der Leyen2023). This surplus in income accrued to the whole of Norwegian society because of large state ownership in the fossil fuel sector and a specific fund that saves and reinvests these profits for the benefit of the country and its future generations. Effectively, the way in which the Norwegian fossil fuel sector is governed represents thinking associated with positive security. The approach in which social benefits come from the fossil fuel funds has enabled, for a long time, the creation of high living standards and an economically and socially stable society. It has, however, also created an economic problem related to the potential future phaseout of fossil fuel production, on which no decisions have been made.
The few security concerns regarding the energy system in Norway, prior to 2022, focused mainly on the safety of hydropower installations (see Section 7.5). An area of focus in Norway concerning oil and gas has been control over the Svalbard area where many hydrocarbon resources have been of interest to both Norway and Russia. Additionally, the northern Finnmark region has a border with Russia and, hence, is important for the country’s territorial defence.
As with previous country chapters, this chapter describes the key context, that is, the energy and security regimes in Norway. It then continues with the analytical sections, drawing on Chapter 4, namely the perceptions of Russia as a landscape pressure for the energy sector; policy coherence and interplay between energy and security regimes including the level of securitization; and, finally, positive and negative security related to potential niche development and regime (de)stabilization. The analyzed material covers Norway’s energy- and security-related government strategies published since 2006 and two rounds of interviews with energy and security experts, first between November 2020 and March 2021 and then again between November 2022 and March 2023. The chapter draws from these materials and related literature and selected policy reports.
7.1 Energy Regime
As noted, Norway has a high share of renewable energy in its total energy consumption and its electricity sector is practically fully decarbonized. In 2022, 88 percent of Norway’s electricity consumption was produced with hydropower (reduced circa 10 percent from previous year due to dryer conditions) and 10 percent from wind power (an approximately 25 percent increase from 2021) (Statistics Norway, 2023b). Contrary to an earlier slow development of wind power, particularly due to bottlenecks in the concession process (Blindheim, Reference Blindheim2013), wind power production doubled between 2019 and 2020, increasing threefold by 2022. Despite Norway already being a leading country in the electrification of its society, there are new demands for further electrification, for instance, from the industry and petroleum sectors, data centers, green hydrogen production, and transport (IEA, 2022). This is likely to affect electricity prices and creates a need to expand wind power capacity.
If one looks at total energy production instead of domestic consumption, a different picture emerges. Oil and gas, with an even share, constitute nine tenths of energy production and the remainder is largely hydropower. There are no explicit and immediate plans to phase out oil or gas production. This is due to the economic security these provide for Norway, but also to broader European energy security and arguments that Norwegian oil and gas are produced in a more environmentally friendly way than elsewhere. Still, uncertainty exists regarding future demand for fossil fuels from other countries, even though the events of 2022 stabilized Norway’s role as an oil and gas provider for Europe in the short term and resulted in plans to expand current production fields. In addition, future energy regime development in Norway is described in terms of visions for both blue hydrogen (fossil fuels) and green hydrogen (from renewable electricity generation).
The largest fossil fuel producer in Norway is Equinor. In 2022, it produced over two million barrels of oil equivalent per day and circa 1,650 gigawatt hours of renewable energy (Equinor, 2023). When energy transition began gaining ground, in 2018, Equinor changed its name from previous Statoil and began new renewable energy projects. The state owns 67 percent of Equinor, and it is operated by the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Fisheries. Other oil and gas producers are less than half of the size of Equinor. The largest of these include Esso Norge (part of Exxon Mobil) and Total E&P Norge.
The largest electricity-sector companies include Norsk Hydro, Statkraft AS, and Statkraft Energi AS. The Norwegian state owns 34 percent of Norsk Hydro; with the rest of company owned by private investors. Statkraft AS has multiple subsidiaries, all fully owned by the Norwegian state. It was described by an interviewee as Europe’s largest renewable energy company. Also, municipal ownership of hydropower is significant. Contrary to hydropower, most wind power is foreign-owned. Statnett, the transmission network operator, was established in 1990 when the electricity market was liberalized. In contrast to companies in the other countries described in this book, Statnett is fully owned by the Norwegian state, more specifically by the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy.
Norway’s large public-sector ownership of energy companies is nowadays quite a unique feature and enables tight collaboration between key energy-sector companies and the government. In the administrative side, there are several ministries that can be regarded as key actors pertaining to energy and security. The Ministry of Petroleum and Energy deals with the exporting oil and gas sector, while the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Fisheries is the majority shareholder in Equinor and Statkraft SF. The former has overall responsibility for energy and water resources. The Ministry of Climate and Environment is relevant from the perspective of the climate and the environmental effects of the energy sector. A few experts interviewed described the Ministry of Climate and Environment as weak compared to the energy ministry, which was seen as very strong:
The Ministry of Petroleum and Energy is a very strong and entrenched ministry with a long tradition. It’s come of age alongside Equinor and the industry, and it’s over the years clearly been seen as strongly promoting the exploration of oil and gas on the Norwegian continental shelf and then increasingly abroad.
The Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE) operates under the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy. It is responsible for the management of energy resources and is the regulatory authority regarding the electricity sector. Interestingly, some experts described the NVE as almost as a ministry itself and pointed out that oil and gas exports are in practice separated from electricity production. Such an arrangement can be seen as, on the one hand, advancing the zero-carbon transition of the electricity sector and, on the other hand, as maintaining the oil and gas export sector:
That is a kind of a strange feature of Norway … so you have one ministry for petroleum and energy, but in practice it’s two ministries, or it has been so for a long time where we have separate processes for electricity and for petroleum.
ENOVA SF is a state-owned enterprise that is tasked with the advancement of more environmentally sound energy-sector development and supervised by the Ministry of Climate and the Environment. It does this by managing the Climate and Energy Fund, which aims to realize projects advancing Norway’s climate commitments.
Norway is not an EU member state but is still bound by many EU policies: It participates in the internal energy market as part of the EEA Agreement as well as in EU climate legislation for the period 2021–2030 (IEA, 2022). The EU is also Norway’s largest energy export market. An interviewee, however, remarked that Norway lacks similar holistic climate and energy policy preparation processes to many EU member states. Indeed, compared to many EU countries, renewable energy beyond hydropower has received little policy support in Norway. Renewable energy support was first highly politicized, but from 2010 its status as a salient political issue reduced: “Norway was producing more electricity than it needed domestically; electricity prices dropped, and the electricity utilities changed their position towards the certificate scheme” (Boasson, Reference Boasson, Boasson, Leiren and Wettestad2021, p. 205).
Norway aims to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent by 2030 and by 90–95 percent (from 1990 levels) by 2050. It also has a goal for carbon neutrality by 2030 via domestic reductions, the EU emission trading system, and international cooperation on emission reductions (IEA, 2022). The IEA assesses that Norway has already gone down the easiest routes, such as electrification of many parts of the society, so further greenhouse gas reductions will be more difficult to achieve (IEA, 2022). The Climate Change Act was enforced in 2017 to make the emission targets legally binding. In addition, the 2050 Climate Committee was established to conduct an overall review of Norway’s choices with regard to achieving its 2050 climate target.
In 2021, the Norwegian government published a White Paper “Putting Energy to Work,” which aimed to continue fossil fuel exploration indefinitely. It, however, also described a strategy to repurpose the skills and assets of the Norwegian oil and gas industry toward the development of new industries and technologies, largely offshore wind and green hydrogen but also CCS and blue hydrogen. Therefore, it seems that Norway is on board with the renewables niche expansion but, due to high economic security, it cannot endorse the decline of the fossil fuel export regime. Following the 2022 events, the Norwegian government issued a supplementary White Paper. The updated White Paper stated more strongly than before that policy for the further development, not discontinuation, of the petroleum industry needs to be put in place.
Indeed, since 2022, according to the interviewed experts, Norwegian energy policy has changed substantially. One significant difference is the strengthening of Norway’s role as a stable and credible energy provider to Europe. In 2022, Norway supplied 8 percent of Europe’s oil consumption and it continues to play an important role producing oil and gas for Europe. Existing oil and gas production areas were opened for further exploration. At the same time, wind energy is of interest too, and new areas were opened for offshore wind development. However, an interviewee expressed a concern that the oil and gas sector, as a higher salary-paying sector, will attract the majority of the skilled workforce, with less workers available for the offshore wind sector. This has proved to be the case before too (Mäkitie et al., Reference Mäkitie, Normann, Thune and Sraml Gonzalez2019).
The new plan for wind power expansion could be seen as a break from previous political practice (Kuzemko et al., Reference Kuzemko, Blondeel, Dupont and Brisbois2022). One of the latest developments includes building the world’s largest floating offshore wind farm (Hywind Tampen), based on Equinor’s floating wind technology, with a total installed capacity of 88 megawatts (IEA, 2022, p. 12). Equinor has also invested in wind power production outside Norway. One of the bottlenecks in Norway is the status of transmission and distribution networks. An interviewee argued that the grid is ruled by institutions that were set up following energy market deregulation in the 1990s and geared toward curbing grid investments. Nevertheless, Norway’s industrial policy is pushing for a new direction that focuses on access to renewable energy, battery production, hydrogen production, and new energy infrastructure for shipping:
There has been a strong drive for this green transition. On the one hand, we are producing as much oil and gas as we can, and on the other side, we’re trying to make us be looked at as the greenest country ever. It’s a schizophrenic position somehow. But the war in Ukraine has increased the importance of oil and gas at least for a period of time. The efforts being done in order to position Norway as a key contributor of technology, when it comes to onshore wind, onshore wind, is very much increasing, and it’s a very high priority for the Norwegian government.
Norway has the lowest-emitting oil production facilities globally. It heavily invests in CCS to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of fossil fuel production, driven by the carbon tax introduced in 1991, with Equinor implementing several CCS projects (IEA, 2022).
In February 2022, the Norwegian government appointed an Energy Commission to assess future challenges in Norwegian energy policy up to 2030. In the resulting report in spring 2023, the commission called for a change of pace and the establishment of new green industries. If power production is not increased, the commission warned, there is risk of an energy deficit – potentially as early as 2027. Figure 7.3 summarizes the key aspects of Norway’s energy policy.
Figure 7.3 Key aspects of Norwegian energy policy.
7.2 Security Regime
Norway applies a total defence concept in its defence policy. Total defence has been described as integrated military and civil preparations supported by institutionalized cooperation between ministries, civic organizations, the private sector, and the general public (Wither, Reference Wither2020). The Directorate for Civil Preparedness heads up the Total Defence Working Group and coordinates exercises. A key aspect of Norway’s defence policy has been its membership of NATO. Norway was one of the founding members in 1949. Also, akin to Finland and Estonia, Norway now considers Russia to be the main threat to its national security. Before 2022, Norway (as well as Finland) collaborated with Russia on many economic, environmental, and border security questions (Wither, Reference Wither2020).
Norway also collaborates with the EU on defence and security. This collaboration has been described as ad hoc and based on informal arrangements (Hillion, Reference Hillion2019). In terms of formalized collaboration, Norway has relatively little influence on EU defence and security policy, although it indirectly plays a role as a NATO member country and as an Arctic state. In relation to security and foreign policy, Norway emphasizes the importance of international collaboration, NATO membership, and multilateral systems guided by the UN (Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2019).
The relevant ministries include the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. An interviewee reported some rivalry between the ministries of defence and of foreign affairs. This was prior to 2022 and pertained especially to their orientation toward Russia – the Ministry of Foreign Affairs being more open to collaboration. In the Norwegian parliament, Storting, the Committee on Defence and Foreign Affairs deals with security issues.
Norwegian defence spending gradually reduced by half from the 1960s to 2000. It was at its lowest in 2008, 2012, and 2013, representing 1.4 percent of the GDP. In 2021, 1.8 percent of GDP was used for defence, which corresponds to the lowest percentage of this book’s case countries, but, given Norway’s substantial wealth, in monetary terms this was not the lowest amount.
The national security legislation was revised in 2019. The national defence plan is renewed every four years, and it includes a section on energy security. There is some overlap via organizational roles: Besides its energy policy roles, the NVE (see Section 7.2) develops guidelines for cybersecurity in the energy sector and conducts inspections. A previous analysis of Norwegian security and defence policy documents showed that policies have highlighted the Norwegian responsibility to govern the sensitive and important Arctic areas, while globalization was expected to increase cybercrime and terrorist attacks (Sivonen and Kivimaa, Reference Sivonen and Kivimaa2023). Figure 7.4 shows the key aspects of this sector.
Figure 7.4 Key aspects of Norway’s security and defence policy.
7.3 Perceptions of Russia as a Landscape Pressure at the Intersection of Energy and Security
Norwegian policy documents relate principally to the importance of international collaboration and trade. For example, developments such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the proliferation of nuclear materials, world population growth, increasing resource demand, and climate change are seen as important landscape developments affecting the energy sector (Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2019).
In terms of Russia as a particular landscape pressure, Norway has not been dependent on its oil and gas, unlike Estonia and Finland. Otherwise, the perceptions and expectations in Norway prior to 2022 presented a similar dual approach to Finland, both in policy documents and interviews. Before 2022, about a half of the interviewed experts either did not really consider Russia with regard to the energy–security nexus or perceived relations with Russia to be neutral or good. Of the remainder, one quarter presented mixed perceptions of Russia as a landscape pressure. For instance, the geopolitical threat and increasing military activity of Russia was mentioned but, at the same time, no threat toward energy installations or collaboration in environmental issues was perceived.
There are some nuances about how to balance this so we have some voices that are more concerned about provoking Russia and others are saying that no we should be firmer. That’s a debate we’ve had since 2014 how to balance this. We don’t want to escalate things up North, but we still want to be firm.
Only three interviewees perceived potential Russian developments as a risk. Two mentioned Russia’s increased assertiveness. In addition, risks were perceived in relation to the potential environmental implications of oil and gas transport and nuclear power. Further, three interviewees reported the 2014 invasion of Crimea as a major shift in Norwegians’ perceptions of Russia.
We have experienced a more assertive Russia. A Russia that has become quite harsh when it comes to their characteristics on what’s happening. And then it’s, it’s also a difference on whether Russia speaks to Norway as a NATO member or whether it speaks to Norway as a neighbor.
Russia has become more assertive. They have increased their military reach, and they are very critical of whatever defence measures Norway decides to take, and our cooperation with the Americans and all the allies. So, after Crimea and the sanctions in 2014, Russia has increasingly become untrusted.
Although Norway’s connections with Russia have been quite different from Finland’s, that is, Russia is not an energy importer to Norway but rather shares interests in the Arctic Sea, nevertheless, perceptions of Russia were similar and there was an emphasis on collaborative relations. As in other case countries, 2022 gave rise to a major landscape shock, resulting in more uniform views about Russia in the energy–security nexus.
Norway is supporting all EU sanctions. Norway is supporting any statements from NATO and the European Union and the United Nations. So, we are rock solid on the Western perception of Russia.
Well, I think Russia is now considered a pariah. Even a rogue state. Nobody in the West, with the possible exception of Viktor Orbán, will ever trust Russia again in energy matters, as long as Vladimir Putin remains in the Kremlin.
I think our perception at the moment is that they’re not somebody you can plan with at all, for the European market.
Next, the chapter moves onto discussing policy coherence and interplay at the energy–security nexus.
7.4 Policy Coherence and Interplay
As Norway is a special case of a country fully independent in energy and a major energy exporter, the ways in which security issues unfold in its energy transition differ substantially from that of Finland and Estonia. Norway is not dependent on the import of any energy source and, hence, energy security in Norway does not relate to security of supply but rather broader energy security: the operation of hydropower plants and the potential disruptions they may face, either from hybrid attacks or weather events. As noted in previous literature, the mainstream energy policy discourse “does not see renewables as connected to energy security, independence, or sovereignty” (Hansen and Moe, Reference Hansen and Moe2022, p. 4). In practice, however, this is not so straightforward. There are limitations in transmission capacity between different regions in Norway, which mean that availability and prices of electricity can alter substantially between regions. These issues with the grid infrastructure were not, however, presented as a security issue in Norwegian interviews.
During the expert interviews taking place in 2020 and 2021, security was seldom mentioned as connected to energy in general or energy transitions more specifically. This was due mostly to the energy independence of Norway; the security of the energy infrastructure alone was identified to be potentially at risk (of terrorist attack), yet most regarded this as unlikely. Some references to energy security were made, as potential electricity shortages in dry years would affect hydropower. In addition, cybersecurity was identified as an issue for the energy sector.
Likewise, in the first round of expert interviews, there was little consideration of how energy and security issues cohere with each other in public policymaking. There appeared to be “no committees, working groups or agencies advancing coherence between zero-carbon energy and security” (Kivimaa, Reference Kivimaa2022, p. 8). However, there were features that connect to the energy–security interface. For instance, emergency preparedness procedures and guidelines for cybersecurity by the NVE have been created in this interface. The NVE also heads up the Power Supply Preparedness Organization. Similarly to Finland, this organization, responsible for national emergency strategy, comprises representatives from different ministries, including those in charge of energy and of foreign affairs (IEA, 2022). The Petroleum Safety Authority has responsibilities regarding the security of petroleum production. Nonetheless, the overall interpretation of expert interviews was that, prior to 2022, energy and security policies were not coordinated between the four administrative organizations involved: three ministries and the NVE.
My main understanding is that this combination does not almost exist in Norway.
The oil and energy department has been quite adamant to demonstrate an independence from foreign affairs and security policy. For certain reasons, Norway has its foreign relations, it has its defence and security set up, but apart from the obvious things of securing oil installations and so on, we have tried to keep energy policy separate, not to politicize.
In principle, fossil energy has been depoliticized in connection to the importance of this sector for the Norwegian economy. This has also impacted how its coordination – or lack of it – was pursued in foreign and security policy (Kivimaa, Reference Kivimaa2022). On the domestic side, the security of hydropower installations has attracted attention, especially since a cyberattack on a Norwegian hydropower company in 2019 (see Section 7.5.2). In 2023, Storm Hans showed how extreme weather events resulting from climate change can also be a threat to energy infrastructure. Increase in the water level of the Glåma River destroyed a dam and inundated a hydroelectric power plant (Patel, Reference Patel2023).
There have also been differing views, such as the NVE having close connections to military forces and trials around total defence, and the energy ministry having a subsection conducting security analyses. Moreover, informal interactions via a small elite in a small country were mentioned as justification for the lack of more formalized processes – akin to Estonia. In 2018, the Council for Fuel Preparedness was formally established to increase cross-governmental cooperation on fuel security (IEA, 2022). Nevertheless, synergies between energy transition policy and security policy were not recognized, whereas the fossil fuel sector was identified as a positive factor for Norway’s economic and geopolitical security (Kivimaa, Reference Kivimaa2022).
Since 2022, more coordination has occurred, although an energy business actor noted that actors outside ministries have little awareness of whether and what kind of interaction takes place:
Equinor as the country’s major corporation has in its 50th year of operation finally in part come under the jurisdiction of the National Security Act … I think many of my colleagues will argue that this was long overdue.
Among the interviewees for this book, energy business actors appeared to have a broader awareness of security connections than civil servants. Since 2022, the security of electricity supply – or at least the affordable price of it – became a key part of political discussions. This was the result of new electricity export interconnections from Norway to other countries in 2021 and an overall reduction in energy supply from Russia to Europe in 2022. The updated energy policy from spring 2022 was much more explicit about security than previous strategies. It was entitled “Energy Policy for Employment, Transition and Security in Times of Uncertainty” and emphasized Norway’s continued and stable oil and gas production. Given previous obstacles to develop wind power further, the measures to speed up wind power development can, to a certain degree, be seen as exceptional measures (cf. Heinrich and Szulecki, Reference Heinrich and Szulecki2018). Future developments will show whether the coherence between energy and security policies will improve.
7.5 Niche Development, Regime Stabilization, and Positive and Negative Security
Given the fact Norwegian society is highly electrified and hydropower has been a long-established energy source, interest in new niche development in renewables has been lower in Norway than in the other case countries. However, alongside solar power and energy storage, offshore wind power began to attract more attention since 2022. Nonetheless, it could perhaps still be regarded a socio-technical niche in Norway.
For the same reason, and due to the hydrocarbon export sector being so important for the Norwegian economy (Andersen and Guldbrandsen, Reference Andersen and Gulbrandsen2020), there has been very little talk of regime destabilization among politicians and energy businesses. The petroleum sector pursues decarbonization and not phaseout (Afewerki and Karlsen, Reference Afewerki and Karlsen2022). There is some resistance to further plans for exploration by residents and fishers in certain areas (Korsnes et al., Reference Korsnes, Loewen, Dale, Steen and Skjølsvold2023). The latest policy from 2022 talks about the continuation and further development of the oil and gas sector – albeit a connected development is that of CCS. The latest IEA energy policy review of Norway also brought forward the question of critical materials and Norway’s plan to begin producing them (IEA, 2022). Interestingly, this topic did not come up in the expert interviews in either phase. Therefore, the security issues discussed in this section are associated with stabilizing the existing regime and its security connections.
This section starts with the most dominant issue, that is, the economic and geopolitical security of Norwegian fossil fuel supply, which also serves as grounds to keep stabilizing this regime. Subsequently, the dominant electricity regime, namely hydropower and its security questions, are discussed. Finally, the section will end with the expanding wind power sector and the increasing importance of securing critical energy infrastructure.
7.5.1 Economic Security, Oil, and the Energy Transition
As this chapter has described, oil and gas production have provided substantial income for the Norwegian state, with the state being also a significant owner of the production capacity. The sector is also a sizable employer (Andersen and Guldbrandsen, Reference Andersen and Gulbrandsen2020). A specific sovereign fund was created in the 1990s, which aims to invest this government money wisely in a way that benefits current and future Norwegians, that is, the whole of society: “Emphasis is placed on smoothing out economic fluctuations to contribute to sound capacity utilisation and low unemployment. The framework aims to preserve the real value of the fund for the benefit of future generations. It also isolates the budget from short-term fluctuations in petroleum revenue and leaves space for fiscal policy to counteract economic downturns” (IEA, 2022, p. 17). The way in which the fund has been created reflects elements of positive security, while it also in its own way contributes to increasing climate security risks. The oil fund is argued to be the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, making up about one third of the Norwegian state budget. Therefore, oil production has brought economic security for Norway alongside global (geo)political influence.
The economic security of Norway is so inherently tied to the oil and gas industry which is a massive problem. And it’s a problem that the Norwegian government doesn’t really seem to take in. And to have a society that is so dependent on one type of industry and high oil price. And we don’t have to be, right?
To put it very bluntly and very simply is that Norway punches above its weight. It has gained some advantages both economically and politically, globally. It’s simply because it has had lots of income.
The political mindset has been much more about how to protect the income streams from these industries and no concern that we will run out of power or energy.
Yet some argue that this wealth has also enabled positive environmental developments, such as investments into environmentally beneficial solutions in Norway and abroad. The Norwegian government has made efforts to balance fossil fuel production and the climate and environment. Yet, it is clear that the broader global efforts to lower carbon dioxide emissions bring uncertainty to the Norwegian oil sector. This was especially the case during 2020–2021, although the substantial demand for Norwegian fossil fuels since 2022 has somewhat lowered these concerns.
If the demand side were suddenly taken away, it would be a big risk to unemployment and it would definitely reduce income to Norway, so that aspect of security is present.
The fossil fuel sector is also tied to the more traditional protection of energy infrastructure against physical attacks. For instance, around 2010, the risk of terrorist attacks on Norwegian oil infrastructure was a security concern and military protection and surveillance are now used to protect oil and gas production.
More broadly, and especially since 2022, the Norwegian fossil fuel production has also been argued to be important for European energy security and global stability: “As a reputable and reliable producer, Norway has played a stabilising role in the world’s oil and gas supply, particularly in meeting European demand” (IEA, 2022, p. 137). Norway is a stable insider partner for the EU with respect to fossil fuel supply, as a politician interviewed remarked. Recent strategies emphasize the continued development of the fossil fuel sector:
As the energy crunch struck, there was a sense of anything goes in Europe. Nuclear, coal, you name it. Any kind of energy to compensate for the loss of Russian imports. I believe that the right assessment is that the energy transition has suffered a temporary setback. Even if some people in Brussels and Berlin and wherever will contest that assessment. And I emphasize temporary, because there is little doubt about the direction of travel in the EU longer term. This of course creates a dilemma for a producer like Norway.
Today, it appears that the strong security arguments behind Norway’s oil and gas production support its continuation for the foreseeable future. That is, arguments for the support of economic and geopolitical security of Norway as well as European energy security currently prevail. Hence, regime decline is not evident in terms of disruptions to skills and assets, unlearning, or deinstitutionalization.
7.5.2 Security of Hydropower
As noted, hydropower provides most of Norway’s electricity production and, therefore, protecting this against intentional and unintentional disruptions is important. Annual precipitation levels influence the availability of hydropower. However, it can be stored, so, it is not affected by weather as much as wind and solar power are. Yet, changes in annual precipitation levels, affecting the amount of hydropower generation in Norway, mean that Norway is somewhat dependent on its neighboring countries for electricity supply during dry years. However, during the 1995–2020 period, Norway has maintained a power surplus for seventeen out of these twenty-five years (Hansen and Moe, Reference Hansen and Moe2022). According to the interviewed experts, hydropower infrastructure is not particularly vulnerable to external disruptions or attacks. One of the experts stated that generally hydropower has a very limited military component:
I think most of our large hydropower plants are inside the mountains. I mean there is maybe a one-kilometer tunnel that you have to drive through, so they are, not easy to access, from the outside.
Nonetheless, an event in 2019 showed that the operation of hydropower companies can, for instance, be substantially disrupted by cyberattacks. In March 2019, a Norwegian renewable energy and aluminum manufacturer Norsk Hydro suffered a ransomware attack. The attack on the company, a producer of energy to 900,000 homes, encrypted key areas of the company’s IT network on over 3,000 servers and locked everyone out (Austin, Reference Austin2021). Norsk Hydro did not pay the attacker, which meant stalling production in all manufacturing facilities, because the company needed to shut down all access to the network and stick to manual operation of its critical systems for several weeks – costing approximately $70 million (Austin, Reference Austin2021). Also, as mentioned, stormy weather in 2023 revealed the vulnerability of hydropower dams to extreme weather events, such as flooding.
Indeed, hydropower dam safety and preparedness are some of the few physical security issues mentioned in the expert interviews. Around 500 dams and reservoirs are categorized as having the highest risk of effect if they were to collapse. Increased securing of the dams to withstand larger attacks has driven up the costs of the hydropower sector in relation to wind power:
If one of these dams is destroyed it will give the most damaging effect on the society of all the installations we have in Norway. They are the most dangerous installations we have, because they are so huge and there’s so much water behind them.
Some experts saw tensions in the security regulation concerning the dams, holding the view that civil servants were being overly cautious:
But if you look in the area of security policy, military issues and energy, I’ve only noted one area where we have had significant conflicts or friction … We believe that those risk assessments are not based on best science in the area and that they are very much higher than in other comparable sectors for example oil and gas or industry or let’s say road infrastructure. And that they are very high compared to other countries that also have hydropower.
Such tensions have perhaps been alleviated since 2020–2021. The Nord Stream pipeline explosions in 2022 and the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine in 2023 showed in real terms how energy installations can be targets of physical attacks and the substantial potential harm that may be caused. These events have emphasized the importance of securing critical infrastructure (see Section 7.5.4), that is, increasing the “negative security” orientation of the energy regime.
7.5.3 Tensions around Wind Power Expansion
Wind power expansion has been contentious in Norway, especially since the early 2000s (Korsnes et al., Reference Korsnes, Loewen, Dale, Steen and Skjølsvold2023), although is not directly linked to security. Due to the fact the Norway–Russian border is located at quite some distance from most of Norway’s population, the operation of air surveillance radars was not seen as a problem to the same extent as in Estonia and Finland:
For some of these windfarms that are located in close proximity to where we have military installations, that is an issue. But it’s few and far between still. So, it’s not something that generates lots of attention.
Opposition to new wind power has been based on local environmental effects combined with the little added value perceived by those in opposition. One of the opposing parties has been the Center Party, which has voiced explicit concerns that Norwegian wind power is used to supply mainland Europe and paid for by Norwegian residents, industry, and the environment – something that has been labelled as a resource nationalist view (Hansen and Moe, Reference Hansen and Moe2022). This has created societal tensions, but not to such a degree that the many experts interviewed saw it as a question of internal security. Nevertheless, an ad hoc antiwind power organization, Motvind Norge, was established in 2019. This group was successful in halting all NVE-approved new onshore projects until April 2022 (Korsnes et al., Reference Korsnes, Loewen, Dale, Steen and Skjølsvold2023). There have also been other groups that have used extreme language and compared wind power to wartime occupation, treason, and the Nazi occupation (Hansen and Moe, Reference Hansen and Moe2022). The protests and opposition resulted in a freeze of new wind power permissions from 2019 until 2022, when the European energy crisis somewhat changed the outlook on wind power in Norway. Further, some experts interviewed mentioned the intention by some to physically damage new wind power development sites:
There have been extreme protests against building of windmills in Norway over the last two years. From being a symbol of progress towards an emissions-free energy system and something that has actually been stimulated through tax breaks and state aid, it has turned to be the symbol of destroying Norwegian nature. People don’t want them anymore and that’s been really a very difficult situation … So, there are no new wind parks being established after those that have already had a concession. And those that are being built are having large protests.
The White Paper issued in 2020 proposed changes that involved increasing local and regional involvement in onshore wind power projects and ensuring that environmental matters are taken into account (IEA, 2022), that is, improving the positive security perspective. In 2022, onshore wind development continued in cases where the local authority agreed with the state government.
7.5.4 Security of Critical Infrastructure and Supply since 2022
Security of supply was very rarely discussed by the interviewed experts in Norway prior to 2022. When it was mentioned, it was mainly in the context of electricity (as opposed to the defence sector security of supply, which pertained to oil and petroleum products). Only two out of fifteen interviewees brought this up during 2020–2021, and one noted that
There’s no Norwegian politician, for many decades, who has woken up being afraid that there was no power. That’s simply not, it’s not our problem. Apart from technical collapse there’s clearly no shortage. It’s more price-related and that debate has been surprisingly fierce in my view.
It is, however, important to note that the security of Norwegian energy infrastructure is also of importance to other countries. The Norwegian fossil fuel infrastructure in the North Sea is sizeable, with around 9,000 kilometers of pipelines. For instance, a disruption to the gas pipelines between Norway and rest of Europe would lead to substantial harm to countries at the receiving end (Godzimirski, Reference Godzimirski2022). Moreover, the events of 2022 led to a realization that, although Norway has frequently been the energy exporter, there is mutual reliance on other countries, which is also beneficial for Norway during times when hydropower resources are smaller. Despite this recognition, in Norway the energy crisis did not materialize to the same extent as in rest of Europe and, as an interviewee put it, there is not the same sense of urgency in Norway as elsewhere in Europe.
Since 2022, focus on critical infrastructure in Norway has markedly increased and security zones around energy installations have been broadened. The interviewees reported an increasing number of military capabilities assigned to the North Sea, highlighting the rising negative security focus on energy infrastructure. This has been a result of the war conducted by Russia in Ukraine as well as the explosions of Nord Stream pipelines.
On the security side, it was a wake-up call, when we had the explosions close to Nord Stream 1 and 2. In the lead-up to those explosions, there were observations in Norway on drones close to our onshore installations and also offshore installations.
Both the government and the company have been extremely focused on doing what we can to prevent or mitigate attacks in the cyber domain or indeed physical attacks on sea or land installations or against cables on the seabed. We have seen, this is public knowledge, we have seen the home guard, a branch of the armed forces, patrolling our main onshore installations, and also armed forces have contributed to the patrolling of the Norwegian continental shelf.
Another security implication, associated with positive security and people’s experiences, links to increasing electricity prices. Higher prices, to which Norway’s residents had been unaccustomed, made energy more politicized than before. The political discussions also covered international powerline connections, where some extreme voices argued that Norway should halt its international electricity supply:
Now energy policy is left, right and center in all political discussion, and it didn’t used to be. This [energy] was something we were taking for granted or for given before, but now we see that this is actually not adding up [to] the demands.
Increased demand has put us in a position where Norway occasionally has had the highest energy prices in Europe, which is a significant political challenge because the Norwegian population really doesn’t understand how this can be.
It became very nationalistic, in the beginning, [i.e.,] we need to make sure that we have the power that we need and make sure that we can keep it for ourselves. Also, on the political side, there were those types of discussions.
Although the Norwegian government has compensated consumers for high electricity prices, questions about sovereignty and control over electricity exports have been increasing for some time. In particular, exports based on renewable energy – especially wind power – have raised a resource nationalist discourse based on claims that such exports weaken Norway’s energy sovereignty (Hansen and Moe, Reference Hansen and Moe2022). It is true that, unlike in the other case countries of this book, Norway’s sovereignty is not directly improved by the renewable energy expansion. However, the degree to which such expansion actually leads to adverse sovereignty depends on the perspective taken. Making a distinction between actual and perceived sovereignty, Hansen and Moe (Reference Hansen and Moe2022) pointed out that the resource nationalist discourse, which claims renewable energy exports have adverse impacts on Norwegian sovereignty, is not new but has simply received increasing attention in the last few years. They say that this discourse is not targeted at Norway’s operation in the Nord Pool power exchange but is related to the country’s relationship with the EU. Yet, the counterargument to the sovereignty concern is that, without export, the Norwegian electricity sector is not viable when prices fall too low due to excess supply (Hansen and Moe, Reference Hansen and Moe2022) – not to mention the beneficial effects on European stability of Norwegian electricity exports.
Some interviewees argued that a degree of securitization of energy policy has happened in terms of these questions on control and sovereignty, in addition to the increased perceptions of energy infrastructure as a critical and potential target for military attacks. A further example is bringing Equinor under the Security Act. None of these issues were regarded by the interviewees as examples of a high degree of securitization, though. When taking the view presented in the political economy of energy research on securitization, securitization has happened in Norwegian energy policy to the extent that energy security as a term has become part of the vocabulary in Norway, which it wasn’t before. Further support for some degree of securitization are the exceptional measures taken during 2022–2023 as part of Norway’s energy policy: the more visible military presence safeguarding the critical energy infrastructure and accelerated support for wind power. Some have remarked that higher fossil fuel prices are an additional incentive for the defence sector to implement energy-efficient measures:
It’s definitely been more securitized on [the] political level, and after the explosion of the Nord Stream 1, there [have] been measures and increased attention of the need to make sure that you have both physical and also technical security around the energy grid.
Yet these measures and changes in rhetoric would not be sufficient to meet the security studies’ definition of securitization.
7.6 Concluding Remarks
Norway presents as a very different country case study compared to Estonia and Finland in the previous chapters. In sustainability transition terms, one can say that regime stabilization of the oil and gas sector is taking place instead of regime destabilization. Wind power niche expansion has been rather modest and contentious, especially since 2019, although it has been gaining new traction since 2022. Moreover, energy security only appeared in the vocabulary after 2022.
The importance of the exporting hydrocarbon sector for the Norwegian economy can be framed both in terms of positive and negative security. There is much long-term positive security associated with oil and gas via the revenues generated, which have been used to improve the social security and living standards of Norwegian residents. This has enabled a sense of “freedom from insecurity” and community in Norway (cf. Booth, Reference Booth2007). In addition, there is negative security associated with possible future regime decline, whereby Norway would lose the economic and geopolitical security its fossil fuel reserves offer. The petroleum sector export and revenue have given Norway more geopolitical power and leverage than a country this size would otherwise have and losing this leverage might be seen as a kind of a security threat. Nevertheless, there is also implicit negative security associated with the continuation and further development of the fossil fuel regime. As the negative and disruptive impacts of climate change via adverse weather events and melting permafrost become increasingly evident, this sector – supplying circa 3 percent of world’s oil supply – contributes to increasing climate security risks in the future.
Expectations for future development are divided – or perhaps held together by dissonance – around the continuation of the fossil fuel regime and the partial switch of the electricity regime to wind power, although the latter has been much weaker than the former (see Figure 7.5). Explicit interconnections between energy transitions and security questions were missing before 2022 – this interface was exemplified mostly by incoherent policymaking and a lack of policy coordination mechanisms. There has been a marginal debate whereby some actors have associated negative security, via adverse sovereignty, with the sustainable energy transition (Hansen and Moe, Reference Hansen and Moe2022). This is linked to resistance to the transition, based on opposition to wind power and partly on higher electricity prices due to international electricity interconnections. This has seen aggressive use of language yet, so far, few physical security implications. Nevertheless, one could argue that the negative and polarized discourse reduces the overall positive security of Norwegian society.
Figure 7.5 Key energy security aspects and their transition impacts in Norway, 2006–2023.
Finally, a clear repoliticization of Norwegian energy policy took place in 2022, which also has dealt with these questions of energy sovereignty and energy security that have become part of Norway’s energy policy vocabulary. A strong degree of securitization is not evident, but there have been breaks from previous energy political practices – evidenced by new support for offshore wind power and visible military protection of critical energy infrastructure.
The last country case in this book deals with two dimensions. First, it looks at the UK as a whole and how its energy policy interacts with security and defence policy. Second, it zooms into Scotland as a somewhat comparable country to the other case countries in terms of population size (5.5 million inhabitants), its Nordic location, its pursuit of a zero-emission society, and its rather liberal values. As Scotland’s devolved powers do not include energy policy as such, nor security and defence policy, it mainly addresses energy questions via its powers over energy efficiency and land-use planning policies.
UK energy policy is an interesting mix of relatively strong support for fossil fuels coupled with ambitious long-term climate targets via the world’s first Climate Change Act, which came into force in 2008. The British coal industry has a long history and began destabilizing a hundred years ago. While coal mines began to close on an accelerated basis in the 1960s, coal sales to the electricity sector continued to expand until the 1980s. A “dash for gas” in the 1990s meant replacing coal as a source of heating fuel for buildings and was a start in reducing the carbon dioxide emissions of the energy sector. However, it was a specific policy instrument, the Carbon Price Floor, in 2013, that contributed to a rapid reduction in coal generation, from 39 percent in 2012 to only 2 percent in 2021 (DESNZ, 2023). The British coal phaseout, however, led merely to coal being replaced with natural gas for heating, which also has rather substantial greenhouse gas emissions. The development of the UK energy mix shows a considerable decline in coal use while the use of petroleum products and natural gas has remained relatively constant (Figure 8.1). In the overall energy mix, the share of renewable energy is rather modest. The extent of the gas network makes achieving heating reform by moving to nonfossil energy sources difficult. The electricity sector has, however, progressed with decarbonization, with 65 percent of electricity produced from renewable energy in Scotland and 38 percent in England and Wales.
Figure 8.1 Inland consumption of primary fuels and equivalents for energy use, million tons of oil equivalent.
A kind of rejuvenation of “noncoal fossil fuel” policy happened in 2007, when hydraulic fracking for shale gas was added to the agendas of resource companies and the government alike. Some scholars argue that fracking represents a reproduction of the fossil fuel hegemony justified on the basis of issues such as employment and energy security (Nyberg et al., Reference Nyberg, Wright and Kirk2018). The different UK governments’ stances on hydraulic fracking of gas and oil have fluctuated from support to bans. In the end, fracking has never taken off properly and has ended for now. Overall, the past fifteen years or so have seen the contradictory parallel tracks of aiming to decarbonize and keeping hold of the fossil economy – somewhat similarly to the Norwegian case.
Scotland has been – and is – important for the UK energy and security sectors. Aberdeen (and the surrounding area) is the center of the British oil and gas industry. It has been described as a nexus of Europe’s fossil fuel industry and is the headquarters for many companies (Adams and Mueller-Hirth, Reference Adams and Mueller-Hirth2021). Further, England’s electricity demand exceeds its electricity generation, so it needs transfers of electricity from Scotland, Wales, and Continental Europe. Scotland produced 57 percent of the UK’s renewable electricity in 2021 (DESNZ, 2023). Scotland also has the lowest share of fossil fuel-based electricity generation in the UK and, while it is the hub of fossil fuel production, it uses little of the fossil fuel it produces (akin to Norway). In 2020, 97 percent of Scotland’s electricity generation was from renewable energy (Scottish Renewables, 2023). This means, in practice, a fully renewable energy-based power supply. Scotland’s wind power capacity in June 2022 was 13.3 gigawatts (GW) and, at that time, a further 16.7 GW of wind power was under construction or planned (Scottish Government, 2022).
One of the key future concerns for Scotland is the substantial decline of oil and gas production from the North Sea. In 2019, the oil and gas industry supported 57,000 direct and indirect high-value jobs and accounted for 9 percent of Scotland’s GDP. While the sustainable energy transition will create new jobs, the employment capabilities of the fossil fuel-exporting industry are hard to replace, creating potential socioeconomic insecurity for Scotland. Therefore, support for wind and hydrogen energy is argued to require significant early investment and policy support (Earnst & Young, 2023). The Scottish government wants the fastest possible just transition of the oil and gas sector, by investing, for example, in reskilling fossil fuel workers in the renewables industry and hydrogen sector (Scottish Government, 2023).
Scotland is also an important location with respect to the UK defence system. The country’s Faslane and Coulport naval bases are where UK military nuclear submarines are located. This is despite the opposition of many Scots, and especially the Scottish National Party (SNP), to the use of nuclear technology for energy and security purposes.
Finally, Scotland is an interesting case due to its attention on just transitions. The Just Transition Commission was established in 2018 as one of the first concrete just transition developments in the world.
This chapter differs from the other country chapters in that it examines both UK policies as a whole and then zooms into the specificities of Scotland, which has some devolved powers. The chapter describes the key context, that is, the energy and security regimes. It then continues with subsections, drawing on Chapter 4, namely the perceptions of Russia as a landscape pressure for energy transitions; policy coherence and interplay between energy and security regimes including the level of securitization; and, finally, positive and negative security related to niche development and regime (de)stabilization. The data used to inform the analysis comprises energy- and security-related government strategies published since 2006 and two rounds of interviews with energy and security experts, the first between November 2020 and April 2021, and the second in January 2023. The data analysis has been complemented by literature sources.
8.1 Energy Regime
8.1.1 The United Kingdom
The UK energy regime has a long history, during which the sector has moved from nationalization to privatization. The post-World War II period experienced the nationalization of the energy sector until the 1970s. Prime Minister Thatcher’s government began strongly privatizing the energy sector with the hope of taking advantage of low international energy prices and technological innovation (Bolton, Reference Bolton2021). However, the related closure of many coal mines led to mass labor unrest and national strikes in the mid-1980s. Privatization led to the liberalization of the energy sector in the 1990s – as in many other countries – where production and supply were unbundled and competition opened more fully. In 2000s, decarbonization of the energy sector also became a key part of energy policy.
A Labour Party government in 2008 created the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), subsuming energy-related responsibilities from previous economic and environmental ministries. This was linked to the more ambitious climate policy of the government at the time, with the introduction of the Climate Change Act in 2008, and a White Paper on “Energy and Climate Change” in 2009. However, less than a decade later, in 2016, the Conservative government then in power emphasized energy innovation more than decarbonization of the energy sector, and created the new Department of Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). This change stressed the revival of industrial (energy) policy (Johnstone et al., Reference Johnstone, Rogge, Kivimaa, Farné Fratini and Primmer2021) and was preceded by the removal of many energy transition policies supportive of renewable energy and energy efficiency (Kern et al., Reference Kern, Kivimaa and Martiskainen2017).
The latest administrative change occurred in 2023 with the establishment of the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), which reflected the changes in the energy landscape caused by the Russian war in Ukraine and the European energy crisis of 2022 (see Section 8.3). DESNZ is oriented, for instance, toward building energy efficiency. However, generally the lack of attention paid by UK governments to energy efficiency as something that improves energy security has often been criticized. The organizational change may also mean a repoliticization of previously depoliticized energy policy but this is not guaranteed. Indeed, the UK has a long history of a market-led energy policy paradigm, which has become deeply entrenched and may be difficult to overcome even in these changed circumstances (see Lockwood et al., Reference Lockwood, Mitchell, Hoggett, Knodt and Kemmerzell2022).
While generally, in the UK dialogue on climate and energy policy, the importance of the EU has been downplayed, academic research has pointed to the contrary. The EU acted as a significant supranational institution for UK climate policy and in particular influenced its renewable energy policies, which would have been less ambitious without EU influence, according to estimates (Lockwood, Reference Lockwood2021). The same applies for the influence of the EU on building energy efficiency policies (Kern et al., Reference Kern, Kivimaa and Martiskainen2017). Therefore, Brexit – the departure of the UK from the EU in 2020 – has substantially changed the energy policy setting in Scotland and the rest of the UK.
The energy regime in the UK can be described as being under centralized government power – with relatively frequent shifts in the composition of ministries – with the “Big Six” energy companies (British Gas, EDF Energy, E.ON, npower, Scottish Power, and SSE/OVO), or more recently the “Big Five” after E.ON acquired npower, having a great deal of influence. The ownership of wind energy has also been concentrated within the Big Six (Lockwood et al., Reference Lockwood, Mitchell, Hoggett, Knodt and Kemmerzell2022). With the advancement of decarbonized power supply, the number of suppliers has increased, resulting in around eight with over 5 percent of market share each and smaller suppliers with circa 8 percent of market share in total in the 2020s (Ofgem, 2023). Scottish Power and SSE are the two overall largest companies in Scotland (Wilson, Reference Wilson2022), showing the importance of energy for the Scottish economy.
The Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem) is an important agency in the energy administration, operating under the supervision of the ministry in charge of energy. Its role is to regulate companies that operate gas and electricity networks, decide on price controls, and primarily to protect the interests of consumers, being an important actor in liberalized energy markets. While tasked also with overseeing the fulfilment of environmental considerations, Ofgem was mostly focused on prices and competition until the late 2000s (Pearson and Watson, Reference Pearson and Watson2012). It has been characterized as having a significant degree of regulatory independence, being a lead actor in some areas of energy policy, with this power somewhat slowing down its orientation toward decarbonization (Lockwood et al., Reference Lockwood, Kuzemko, Mitchell and Hoggett2017). The Energy White Paper from 2020, “Powering Our Net-Zero Future,” stipulated that Ofgem also needs to have a role in advancing the zero-carbon transition: “Subject to Parliamentary approval, the Strategy and Policy Statement will require the Secretary of State and Ofgem to carry out their regulatory functions in a manner which is consistent with securing the government’s policy outcomes, including delivering a net zero energy system while ensuring secure supplies at lowest cost for consumers” (HM Government, 2020, p. 86). With regard to the energy transition, Ofgem has earlier recognized as problems the limited role of consumers and lack of consumer-oriented business models (Johnstone and Kivimaa Reference Johnstone and Kivimaa2018). The experience with Ofgem shows that state-mandated organizations with a great deal of independence may in part slow down the energy transition, while such independence could alternatively be used to exceed the decarbonization goals of the state.
Two independent advisory groups operate under parliament with opportunities to critique and comment on government climate and energy policies: the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) and the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC). The CCC was established in 2009 based on the Climate Change Act. It sets carbon budgets that the UK government must meet and which the CCC evaluates annually. The CCC comprises the Climate Change Committee with a chief executive and six academic members, the Adaptation Committee with a chair and five academic members, and the secretariat. The CCC has been regarded as successful in safeguarding long-term policy continuity; its analytical orientation and political awareness has, however, depended on who holds the chairmanship (Fankhouser et al., Reference Fankhouser, Averchenkova and Finnegan2018). The NIC includes two chairs, five commissioners, and the secretariat, with the task of providing impartial advice on infrastructure to the government.
The National Grid has been responsible for maintaining the electricity transmission and gas networks and for security of supply since its establishment in 1935. The company owns one of Britain’s three onshore transmission networks and four electricity distribution networks, and the electricity system operator. However, the Energy Act of 2023 stimulated that the latter is replaced with a government-owned independent public corporation National Energy System Operator (NESO) and a Future System Operator, to become operational in summer 2024. The National Grid is a fully privately owned transmission system operator (TSO), unlike other European countries’ TSOs, and one of the largest investor-owned utilities in the world with a significant share in foreign ownership (Yates, Reference Yates2022). This means that, before the establishment of NESO in 2024, responsibility for supply security has been allocated to the profit-seeking private sector and that the owners of the National Grid may not have been so keen on the kind of transmission network investments that the zero-carbon transition requires. This highlights a feature of UK energy governance whereby power has been partially delegated to the energy industry (Lockwood et al., Reference Lockwood, Mitchell, Hoggett, Knodt and Kemmerzell2022), associated with the depoliticization of energy governance, that is, a lack of political scrutiny (Kuzemko, Reference Kuzemko2014). The move to a government-owned electricity system operator shifts this setting to similar direction as the other case countries. However, as in many countries, in the UK distribution network operators are often privately owned, and this has implications for network development.
8.1.2 Scotland
The Scottish government’s climate and energy policy is more ambitious than the UK government’s, but it does not have substantial policymaking power, with most resources at the UK government level (Lockwood, Reference Lockwood2021). The principal way in which the Scottish government can influence energy production and use are the land-planning policy and energy efficiency measures. In essence, “key aspects of energy policy are ‘executively devolved,’ including control over major energy consent and planning, and operational control over aspects of market support” (Cowell et al., Reference Cowell, Ellis, Sherry-Brennan, Strachan and Toke2017, p. 173). Yet the fast growth of renewable energy in Scotland, an almost 2.5-fold increase between 2012 and 2022 (Scottish Government, 2022), has increased the political negotiation power of the Scottish government with Westminster (Cowell et al., Reference Cowell, Ellis, Sherry-Brennan, Strachan and Toke2017).
As a former BEIS civil servant pointed out:
So, while energy policy broadly defined is a reserved power for the UK government, even across energy policy there’s a huge amount of consultation and engagement that happens between the Whitehall and Scottish government and various parts of Scottish sub-national government et cetera. These things are never really done genuinely in isolation.
Key themes in Scottish energy policy have been the promotion of renewable energy, the energy efficiency of households, and opposition to new nuclear power stations since about 2010. Increasing attention has been paid to energy poverty and energy justice (Santos Ayllón and Jenkins, Reference Santos Ayllón and Jenkins2023). Energy security has received relatively little attention and has mostly been perceived, prior to 2022, via a “markets will deliver” approach, as in the rest of the UK, with no specific Scottish policy on this. An energy expert argued in 2021 that too little attention was paid to the development of energy storage and smart grids as potential facilitators of energy security, with overreliance on the National Grid to deliver.
Scotland has its own Climate Change Act, issued in 2019, and has a net-zero target to reach by 2045. Some interviewees argued that the Scottish Climate Change Act has high targets but has inspired little concrete action. In late 2022, the CCC strongly criticized the lack of concrete plans and insufficient policy progress toward the Scottish climate targets and revealed substantial off-track developments in many areas (CCC, 2022a). Unlike the UK government, the Scottish government has opposed both nuclear power and the fracking of shale gas.
A draft “Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan” was issued by the Scottish government in early 2023. This plan aimed to more than double wind power production, with increased contributions from solar, hydro, and marine energy, and outlined the establishment of a new energy agency – Heat and Energy Efficiency Scotland – alongside emphasizing energy security much more than before (Scottish Government, 2023). Further, it noted that
The Scottish Government is clear that unlimited extraction of fossil fuels is not consistent with our climate obligations. It is also clear that unlimited extraction, even if the North Sea was not a declining resource …, is not the right solution to the energy price crisis that people across Scotland are facing or to meeting our energy security needs.
A small number of actors, including Scottish Power, dominate Scottish energy policymaking. An expert from a think tank argued in 2021 that the Scottish government is influenced by lobbyists representing large companies and it is headed by former industry representatives. This view was shared by an academic who also perceived that the Energy Saving Trust had a great deal of influence, although environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) also played an important role in Scottish policymaking.
The dominance of economic and free market-based energy policy in the UK has been obvious. This originated at least as far back as the 1970s, with emphasis on economics, “rational choice,” and free market, but there have been some periods that were more regulation-orientated, especially during 2006–2008 when the Climate Change Act was enacted (Kivimaa and Martiskainen, Reference Kivimaa and Martiskainen2018). This contrasts with the somewhat more sociodemocratic approach of many Scots –which takes account of the natural environment and the welfare of the poor – even though some contrary views also exist.
My experience is simply: the UK is hard-core free market in its approach to energy. The Scottish government has no ideological approach to energy and has been content to let industry lead. The outcome is that the political perspective is purely about “public communications” – presenting Scotland as a “green powerhouse” or a “world leader in renewables.” There seems next to no interest politically in how that is actually developed.
Nevertheless, Scotland was one of the first countries to form a just transitions body. The Just Transition Commission, set up by the Scottish government, was influenced by a coalition on just transition formed by NGOs and the Scottish Trade Union Congress and established to monitor and counsel on government climate policy according to just transition principles (Santos Ayllón and Jenkins, Reference Santos Ayllón and Jenkins2023). An interviewee noted, however, that it had little political or business influence. Figure 8.2 summarizes the key aspects of UK and Scottish energy policy.
Figure 8.2 Key aspects of UK and Scottish energy policy.
8.2 Security Regime
Britain is an island state so its defence and security policy are related to the control of waters and maintaining free movement of trade, but also to the centrality of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and close cooperation with the US and France (Dorfman, Reference Dorfman2017). The US has been the global hegemon with whom the UK has closely built its security and defence regime (see Regilme and Hartmann, Reference Regilme, Hartmann, Romaniuk, Thapa and Marton2019). Perhaps linking to the UK’s past global power and international security cooperation, the UK has military bases with a wide global reach. They are located in countries in different parts of the world, such as Canada, Belize, Kenya, and Iraq. The UK also wields soft power via extensive diplomatic efforts and relations globally, albeit with some loss of power after Brexit. These factors were apparent in expert interviews in terms of connections to climate and energy questions.
The first “National Security Strategy” was published in 2008 by the Cabinet Office. It was criticized for a lack of consultation with other departments and, hence, was revised as early as 2009, this time employing cross-government consultation (Dorfman, Reference Dorfman2017). The strategy was followed by the establishment of the National Security Council and the post of National Security Adviser in 2010. Since then, each parliament has been expected to produce a parliamentary defence and security review, titled, since 2019, “Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development, and Foreign Policy.” The integrated reviews produced by UK governments have increasingly crosscut several policy domains. The 2023 integrated review stated that: “[t]he most pressing national security and foreign policy priority in the short-to-medium term is to address the threat posed by Russia to European security” and emphasized increases in defence spending (HM Government, 2023, p. 11). It also emphasized broader, nonmilitary security aspects, connecting, for example, to the new Critical Minerals Strategy and the new Semiconductor Strategy. This illustrates the increased importance to secure the supply and promote the science-and-technology development of these materials and components, not only for energy but also for other digitalizing sectors.
Defence policy has as its objective to protect people, to stop conflicts, and to be prepared for potential battles (Ministry of Defence, 2019). Historically, delivering access to oil and gas and securing international supply chains has also been one of the tasks of the UK military sector. In addition, during the current millennium, climate change mitigation has become a part of UK defence policy (Depledge, Reference Depledge2023). British defence policy has also been interested in the Arctic region and the High North, despite the UK not being one of the Arctic states. This concern intertwines with climate change, because defence officials have been concerned about the implications of climate change on Arctic resources and trade routes becoming more available in response to sea-ice melting (Depledge et al., Reference Depledge, Kennedy-Pipe and Rogers2019). Figure 8.3 summarizes the key aspects of the UK security and defence policy.
Figure 8.3 Key aspects of UK security and defence policy.
Central public actors in security, defence, and international relations include the Ministry of Defence (MoD), the British Army, and the Foreign, Development and Commonwealth Office (FCDO). Scotland does not have devolved powers related to security and defence. Therefore, it is dependent on UK government agencies, not only for military defence, but also for cybersecurity (Neal, Reference Neal2017). The UK’s defence spending was 2.2 percent of GDP in 2021 (HM Government, 2021), having had a declining trend until 2022. The state possesses over 200 nuclear weapons, of which 120 are active, with 40 positioned at a time in four nuclear-powered submarines (Dorfman, Reference Dorfman2021). These are located in Faslane and Coulport naval bases in Scotland, although Scotland does not have any say regarding the location of the nuclear weapons. A recent decision was also made by the UK MoD to build twenty-six new military vessels for the Royal Navy in Glasgow.
It is obvious that the political ambitions and worldviews in Scotland differ from that of the broader UK regarding security, defence, and foreign policy:
Well, I think it’s relevant to energy because Scotland, there really isn’t an interest in being a global power anymore. That’s not a worldview that’s held. There’s no idea that, of Scotland’s got to be in the UN Security Council with America and Russia. It’s not an aim. And for Britain, it is a central aim.
The reports produced in connection to the 2014 referendum for Scottish independence emphasized a different approach to defence than that in the broader UK (Neal, Reference Neal2017). An independent Scotland led by the SNP would prefer to be a part of NATO while refusing to hold nuclear weapons or implement nuclear deterrence measures (Ritchie, Reference Ritchie2016). However, there are also those who see that Scotland would suffer from independence and, for instance, lose the defence dividend paid by the rest of the UK to Scotland (Fleming, Reference Fleming, Hepburn, Keating and McEwen2021). Therefore, it would be difficult to depict what the security and defence policy of Scotland would look like if it existed.
8.3 Perceptions of Russia as a Landscape Pressure at the Intersection of Energy and Security
The landscape pressures in energy and policy documents, at the energy–security nexus, were similar to those presented in other countries. For instance, during 2006–2010, globally increasing competition for energy, coupled with some states using energy as a “hostile policy tool,” was regarded as a security concern. Increased supply disruption risks were anticipated due to social unrest and corruption, while nuclear safety was also a specific landscape concern for Scotland. Russia was perceived as a landscape pressure via the Russia–EU gas dispute, and as applying energy as a political lever. New landscape pressures during 2010–2015 included Arctic developments, nuclear proliferation, and crowding of sea space with transport and offshore energy infrastructure. In 2015–2020, policy documents noted the pressures of climate change, pandemics, cyberattacks, and nuclear and chemical weapons (Kivimaa and Sivonen, Reference Kivimaa and Sivonen2021). There was very little discussion of Russia per se as a landscape pressure in the policy documents, even after the high media attention of 2006.
Nevertheless, Russia has been one of the countries of “landscape” concern for UK security and defence policies, as with the other case countries in this book. Due to the absence of a joint border, however, the perceptions of Russian pressure have, in this energy–security nexus, perhaps been less substantial. The changes in Russian energy policy from 2004 onward and the Russia–Ukraine gas dispute in 2006 “marked a reversal from the politically and ideologically significant processes of privatisation and liberalisation that Russia had initiated after the Cold War … they represented the polar opposite of the free markets that UK policy makers, and other institutions, such as the International Energy Agency (IEA), had been so actively seeking to establish” (Kuzemko, Reference Kuzemko2014, p. 265).
Broadly, it seems that, prior to 2022, the influence of the “Russia risk” has been minimal on the UK and Scottish energy regimes. It was barely mentioned by the interviewed energy experts, compared to interviews concerning the other case countries. Some even expressed very relaxed attitudes to any concerns:
Russia has an economy that shouldn’t bother us in the slightest – it is small and vulnerable. It has (as best as I can tell) little capacity to mess around with energy exports based on its economic interests alone.
I think the EU needs to get over its paranoia about Russia. I find this discussion of Nord Stream 2 … just, the amount of energy and effort wasted on it is unbelievable. I think at the end of the day, what you need is a functioning global gas market.
However, in hindsight, the latter person remarked two years later:
I think there was a degree of complacency because we only got 4 percent of our gas from Russia, and I think very quickly it became clear that we were exposed to Europe’s dependency, and because of our reliance on gas being much greater than just about any EU country, with the possible exception of the Netherlands, we’ve been particularly hard hit by the high gas price.
There were select interviewees, however, principally those from the defence and foreign policy sectors, who have always considered the Russian state to be an energy security risk in political decision-making processes. This aspect has been used to legitimize nuclear power by the UK government and renewable energy by the UK and Scottish governments. While, initially, the Scottish decision-makers may have been more concerned than UK decision-makers, their perception became a consensus in 2022:
I think politically in Scotland, the SNP as a whole tends to be slightly more worried about Putin’s Russia and the type of influence it exercises in the world.
For some people the indirect links between Russian and UK energy systems were visible, while, for most, the links only became visible via the energy crisis ensuing from the war:
We see Russia, not necessarily a wholly positive player, our relationship with Russia is difficult at the moment. They will use their economic power, their influence, for their own benefit. We need to counteract that, and make sure our own supplies, as we have done, are diversified, but we are also conscious of the possibilities that, say, a move into Ukraine will have for global security.
What this tells us is that, first, geopolitical concerns over Russia have not been particularly important for the Scottish or wider UK energy policy, as the country is geographically remote. Nevertheless, the energy transition has received some legitimacy from the indirect dependency of the UK on Russian energy flows. More broadly, however, it also shows the high level of market orientation of UK energy policy, which has been more about economic developments than about different dimensions of security. The events of 2022, however, showed that developments concerning Russia also influence the energy sector substantially, in this case in terms of significant energy price increases.
8.4 Policy Coherence and Interplay
8.4.1 Interaction between Energy and Security Issues
The relatively small importance of Russia, or geopolitics more generally, for Scottish and UK energy policy is likely to also have moderated the attention that UK energy policy and the energy administration have paid to horizontal coherence between energy policy and security and defence policies and to integrating security aspects into energy policy. Some argue that the discussion on security in the context of UK energy policy has been tightly limited to “energy security” and, even then, mostly on the kind of security that markets can deliver. Even the new “Energy Security Strategy,” which was issued in 2022, had few concrete actions to create a more secure low-carbon energy system for the UK and still too little attention paid to energy demand reduction and energy efficiency. In the Westminster Research Forum on Energy Security, organized in October 2022, the chair remarked: “It is very clear we need new nuclear power.”
There are, however, deeply rooted interconnections between the energy and security regimes in the UK. The production and expansion of oil benefited twentieth-century war efforts (Johnstone and McLeish, Reference Johnstone and McLeish2022). Further, oil has been connected to UK military efforts in contributing to maintaining stability in the Persian Gulf:
Presence in the Middle East was one of our military tasks we had to perform what we were directed by the government to do in order to ensure free flow of trade and other issues related to UK diplomacy and interaction … It was principally one that fell to the maritime environment and if you’re in the ship you’re going to find yourself operating there as much as you going to find yourself operating in the Caribbean or Far East.
Consequence is that we then have British warships and NATO ships in that region on anti-piracy missions, so there’s a national security impact there and that also then brings increased instability to the supply lines.
These energy–security connections relate more to energy in the external context rather than within the UK.
An analysis of policy strategy documents conducted in 2020 showed that, with regard to objectives, during 2006–2015 there was a rather high level of integration between energy and security policies, which was visible, for instance, through remarks related to energy efficiency, low-carbon technologies, security enhancements at critical energy sites, and Royal Navy ships protecting oil platforms (Kivimaa and Sivonen, Reference Kivimaa and Sivonen2021). However, from 2016, the policy documents paid much less attention to this integration, coinciding with the change of government in 2015 that also resulted in removing many policy instruments supporting low-carbon technologies and building energy efficiency. This means that energy policy was mostly made on economic- and market-based premises with declining interest in both decarbonization and security.
Regarding the latter, the UK energy sector has been governed with the idea that free markets, that is, balancing supply and demand, will deliver energy security. This is a result of a long-term depoliticization of energy policy and the placing of energy policy in technocratic contexts: “Arguably, the placing of elected representatives at a remove from active deliberation also resulted in lack of political capacity to engage with and understand energy and its relationship to wider societal goals, such as security” (Kuzemko, Reference Kuzemko2014, p. 262). There has also been a contrast between a coherent fossil fuel and security approach to safeguard international fossil fuel routes and the advancement of climate security via the energy transition. For instance, policy documents from the period 2011–2015 framed declining domestic fossil fuels production as a security risk, which conflicts with low-carbon energy policy (Kivimaa and Sivonen, Reference Kivimaa and Sivonen2021). This insight was confirmed in the expert interviews conducted in 2021 and again in 2023.
In energy policy, energy security was emphasized, particularly during the first decade of the 2000s, following the UK’s increasing dependence on imported gas, while it was little discussed around 2020. Moreover, energy security has been understood as physical security and self-sufficiency in fuels. This thinking applies also to renewable energy in a sense. The reduced attention of energy policy strategies toward security of supply had practical implications, such as the closing down of Centrica’s Rough gas storage site in 2018, only for it to be reopened after the 2022 events.
International electricity interconnections and the development of demand-side response and energy storage have been regarded as important means of energy security in a low-carbon energy system. Yet, the 2022 CCC progress report, which mentioned security over 100 times, criticized the government’s energy security strategy for not employing demand-side measures that would benefit energy security. It also provided a specific policy recommendation related to improved coherence:
The Government’s 2030 Strategic Framework should set out how the international climate and environment capability built up during the UK’s COP26 Presidency will be resourced, maintained and further developed to enable delivery of international climate goals. Particular focus should be given to plans for coordination and consistency across departments and the embedding of dedicated climate experts in areas such as trade, security and foreign policy.
In addition, it warned about the risk of lock-in to new fossil fuel infrastructure, such as export and import terminals for liquefied natural gas. Such a risk is a real possibility given the low advancement of energy efficiency and heating infrastructure changes in the UK, combined with poor-quality building stock and increasing energy poverty. Hence, the dependence on natural gas is still high.
A related issue, which had already received some attention in 2021 and has since become much more prevalent, is the supply of critical materials – minerals and metals required for low-carbon energy system technologies and infrastructure as well as other digital devices. In addition, the supply of renewable energy technologies and components is a security concern. European countries have acknowledged the substantial role of China in the global trade-and-supply chains of critical materials and renewable energy technologies, and have been developing strategies to respond to this. In late 2022, the UK announced significant funding for battery research and innovation (BEIS, 2022), and the construction of its first lithium refinery plant with the hope that this strengthens the supply chains for electric vehicles (Lawson, Reference Lawson2022).
The UK “Critical Minerals Strategy” was published in 2022, with some updates provided in 2023. While it had been prepared earlier, key roundtables were conducted after Russia initiated the war in Ukraine. The strategy regarded critical minerals as important for energy security and military systems and noted the risks of growing demand for such materials and geopolitical uncertainties (BEIS, 2023). The key investments linked to the energy transition included the Automotive Transformation Fund (£850 million); the Energy Transformation Fund (£315 million), Energy Intensive Industries schemes, and the UK Infrastructure Bank. This is associated with some cross-coordination efforts, for instance, by the Cabinet Office having a convening role via its critical minerals’ portfolio and the Natural Resources Security group operating across different ministries.
Due to not having devolved powers in security policy, it is not surprising that Scottish energy policy has paid little regard to geopolitics. For instance, the “flagship” innovation related to Scottish climate and energy policy, the Just Transition Commission, has not addressed security:
Honestly, I have not heard word security mentioned once in any of the discussions that I have actually heard through the Just Transition Commission. Or indeed any other Scottish policy issues that I’ve engaged with.
Given its devolved powers on land-use planning policy, the Scottish government has been able to consider safety and security in connection to nuclear power. From that perspective, also considering selected security aspects around the just transition could have been possible before the events of 2022.
8.4.2 Elements of Coordination between Energy and Security
On a more concrete level, there has been some movement toward advancing policy integration and coherence in Westminster. According to several interviewees, this was mostly visible in how security, defence, and foreign policies have integrated energy transition pursuits. The examples include climate change as a strategic agenda for foreign policy, stopping the funding of fossil fuel projects overseas, and regular high-level energy discussions in the defence administration.
This perspective is supported in the recent policy documents. For example, the 2021 “Integrated Review” mentioned measures related to energy, such as the diplomatic climate and energy network, and the need for energy transition to mitigate climate change (HM Government, 2021). Energy transition was mentioned in connection to energy security but the means to achieve this were not specified. The 2023 revised “Integrated Review” emphasized that “the transition to clean energy and net zero … is a geostrategic issue” (HM Government, 2023, p. 10). However, a real case in point, bringing the energy transition and security together, was the establishment of the new Department for Energy Security and Net Zero in early 2023, with plans to draft an “Energy Security Plan” and a “Net Zero Growth Plan.”
The MoD has a climate security division. Already in 2015, the “Sustainable MOD Strategy” aimed to improve energy efficiency and reduce dependence on fossil fuels (MoD, 2015). In 2021, the MoD’s “Climate Change and Sustainability Strategic Approach” recognized how climate change impacts create instability and connect to energy geopolitics:
We are already at the forefront of the new and growing green military agenda, trialing new types of vehicles, fuels standards, energy storage and much more. Done right, this will improve how we meet the defence and security challenges of the future.
The actions reported include helping at environmental disaster sites, using alternative fuel sources for aircrafts, and improving biodiversity in defence estates. Yet some have also expressed concern that, for instance, climate issues have been on the shoulders of individual civil servants, with limited institutional memory of the activities carried out.
Two thirds of the experts interviewed brought up issues around departmental interaction, that is, coordinating energy and security between different government ministries. Many interviewed experts observed a lack of interaction between the departments working on energy and security, defence, or foreign affairs. One of the reasons for this was believed to be the dominance of a market-oriented approach to security:
The UK does have a strong belief that the market delivers security. So, they do look at these things, but I think it’s not, yeah, it’s deemed as market issues and wider security issues, then energy security in terms of us having to have access to energy markets. I think within the FCDO climate change is a big issue and remains that.
However, over time, improved policy coherence was observed:
We still operate in silos, the difference is that tops have been lopped off so we can see the different silos and we can engage with one another, so we’ve got much better at it. It’s still not perfect. It’s not seamless by any stretch of the imagination but there are lots now of, what we refer to as cross-Whitehall … cooperation between ministries.
On an organizational level, a team has been placed between the ministry in charge of energy and the Foreign Office to deal with questions of international energy security. In addition, collaboration between climate and foreign affairs was perceived by some as quite strong. Yet it appears that formalized structures are still missing and, indeed, that there is organically arising collaboration. The perspective of one civil servant was that certain government divisions work on security of infrastructures and others on energy transitions, with their interconnections limited to selected meetings. Others mentioned both regular and ad hoc meetings.
The National Security Council and the Climate Adaptation and Implementation Committee were seen as formalized groups advancing coherence, and the Nuclear Skills Strategy Group as an example of more specific collaboration.
One department thought it would be a good idea to phase out fossil fuel funding overseas, that then brought in other departments all who had a view, and this came together under a committee called the Climate Adaptation and Implementation Committee, which was a gathering of, I think six or seven different ministers, chaired by the Secretary of State for Business and Energy; [the] Foreign Secretary was represented on it, the Chancellor was represented on it, so it was a fairly big, high-powered committee.
There’s the Nuclear Skills Strategy Group which includes someone from the MOD, someone from BEIS, someone from Rolls-Royce, but it’s kind of an arm’s length, so they’ve done this very clever thing and I think the reason they’ve done it is to protect from freedom of information requests, it’s an arm’s-length organization where every month these people get around the table and have discussions.
Following the events of 2022, energy, and especially energy security, have moved much higher up the political agenda. There has been consensus about cutting ties to Russian energy sources and the new “Energy Security Strategy” was published in April 2022. Despite these developments, the interviewees did not detect signs of securitizing energy policy in the UK. Generally, many remarked that the rapid changes in prime ministers slowed down policy processes.
The 2023 draft “Energy Strategy of Scotland” paid much more attention to security than previous Scottish energy policies. It emphasized developing the country’s own resources, energy storage, and collaboration around the North Sea. The means outlined were, for instance, UK government-led market mechanisms and the Fuel Insecurity Fund to help struggling households. In Scotland, the highlighted security dimensions pertaining to energy and the energy transition have mainly been the socioeconomic security of its residents and nuclear safety. It seems that options to improve energy security – if not broader security – via the energy transition exist, but it is unclear if sufficient actions have been taken by the Scottish government to advance this development.
8.5 Niche Development, Regime Destabilization, and Positive and Negative Security
There is no niche development that substantially comes up in the security context in Scotland. As outlined, onshore wind power has become an established and significant part of the Scottish energy system. (In England and Wales, it has been “de facto” banned since 2015 due to unfavorable planning conditions.) The destabilization of the fossil energy regime is also rarely discussed in the context of positive and negative security. It has been seen to proceed as planned without major hiccups – albeit with significant implications on employment in Scotland and the need to reskill the workforce.
The offshore wind sector could perhaps be seen as a developing niche given its share is much less than that of onshore wind. Offshore wind began gaining increased support when BEIS launched the new industrial strategy at the end of 2017. A perspective arising from the expert interviews in 2020–2021 is that, with regard to the large offshore wind farms constructed on the east coast of Scotland, controversy has been raised over the substantial amount of prefabrication work conducted, for instance, in China, which has enabled lowered costs and increased scaling of renewable energy – but has increased supply dependencies on non-European actors. One reason for this supply chain dependence on Asia is due to the UK Contracts for Difference model, which looks at development costs and not the overall economic impacts of developments.Footnote 1 This, in essence, is a somewhat of a security-of-supply risk, but elsewhere it has been noted that, broadly, the development of Scottish offshore wind power benefits UK energy security (Qu et al., Reference Qu, Hooper, Swales, Papathanasopoulou, Austen and Yan2021). The energy security argument has provided needed legitimacy for the expansion of the offshore wind sector (MacKinnon et al., Reference MacKinnon, Karlsen, Dawley, Steen, Afewerki and Kenzhegaliyeva2022).
Linked to the established energy regime, an ongoing concern for Scotland has been nuclear power. The Scottish government has taken a no new nuclear power policy stance, led by the SNP, from around 2006. This differs substantially from the rest of the UK’s favorable view of nuclear power. In policy strategy documents from 2006 to 2010, the Scottish government saw its no nuclear policy as “a principled priority where the risk of radiation or terrorist attacks is seen larger than energy gains” (Kivimaa and Sivonen, Reference Kivimaa and Sivonen2021). The general perception in Scotland has been that nuclear power stations and nuclear waste transport and disposal create security risks for society. However, the opposition of nuclear power generation is also linked to the military and its weapons, in essence to the positioning of the UK nuclear deterrent submarines in Scottish waters. Previous research has argued that UK energy policy has adopted a masking strategy that has incorporated nuclear submarine construction costs into civil nuclear programs, which thereby act as a hidden subsidy for military nuclear activities (Johnstone et al., Reference Johnstone, Stirling and Sovacool2017). One interviewed expert stated that, even in the 1950s, the first large-scale commercial civil nuclear power plant’s role was to produce plutonium for the nuclear weapons program. The Scottish government, the SNP, and civil society organizations oppose nuclear weapons, new construction of civil nuclear power, and nuclear research alike, yet these capabilities contribute substantially to the economy of some Scottish regions (Heffron and Nuttall, Reference Heffron, Nuttall, Wood and Baker2017; Ritchie, Reference Ritchie2016).
There are about 65,000 people employed in nuclear in the UK, 30,000 of those are on the defence side. That is the biggest single share of any subsector … The need for nuclear specialists is on the military side. You need to build submarines, that is, you need to build reactors, you need to build warheads, you have to do all these kinds of huge number of activities and, it’s incredibly expensive.
Besides this link between civil nuclear power and nuclear weapons, new security risks related to nuclear infrastructure are emerging due to climate change. The UK civil nuclear infrastructure is argued to be
profoundly unprepared for climate impact and there is a very high probability that reactors and their associated high-level spent fuel stores will become unfit for purpose. Due to ramping climate induced sea-level rise, storm, storm surge, severe precipitation and raised river-flow, UK nuclear installations are set to flood – and much sooner than either the nuclear industry or regulators suggest. This is because risks to nuclear installations from sea-level rise driven extreme climate events will not be linear, as thresholds at which present natural and built environment coastal and inland flood defence barriers are exceeded.
This perspective supports the cautious Scottish approach toward nuclear power.
What is interesting is that the exceptional events of 2022 did not change the Scottish government’s opposition to nuclear power and perhaps even strengthened its no new nuclear policy, while the rest of the UK is even more strongly in favor of nuclear power. The former happened as a response to seeing the vulnerability of nuclear power infrastructure as a potential target of war. This differs quite dramatically from the perceptions of nuclear power in Finland, seen as a partial solution to reduce security risks related to energy imports (see Chapter 6). One potential explanation may be the substantial Scottish lead on the production of onshore wind power, while another links to the broader UK energy system that is able to balance nonwindy periods. Nevertheless, Scotland has much higher electricity prices than our other case countries and problems with socioeconomic security linked to energy poverty.
Fossil fuel phaseout in Scotland is coupled with renewables expansion. North Sea gas production is expected to be completely phased out by 2050. No serious national security risks are seen to relate to this development, while this could give rise to skills and employment-related risks:
I think our biggest risk, for our Scottish industry is, how quick the industry, particularly the oil and gas industry, can retool itself to service the renewable market. So, for example, Aberdeen is a centre of excellence on subsea operations, and particularly things like capping of mines and stuff, capping of wells, and pipes, undersea. How can we convert that expertise into things for, say offshore wind platforms or, subsea mining if we end up going down the subsea mining route for critical minerals, so I think the biggest risk is that the industry isn’t able to evolve and retrain workers quickly enough.
Finally, relatively little has been done in terms of gas security since 2022, apart from reinstating the gas storage facility.
8.6 Concluding Remarks
The links between hydrocarbon energy, the energy transition, and security are rather complex and manifold in Scotland and the wider UK, with relatively fragmented governance in place. While some instances of policy integration between energy and security or defence policies were found, broader policy coherence regarding security and the zero-carbon energy transition appeared lacking (Figure 8.4). This links to the somewhat conflicting intertwining logics of energy and security regimes, which simultaneously support the old energy system while also aiming to change it. In addition, before 2022, many of the efforts that relate to coordination across energy and security regimes were focused on external or global energy questions – such as safeguarding fossil fuel trade routes or advancing energy diplomacy via renewables – instead of domestic energy policy. The events of 2022 seem to have raised questions of security and energy transition links in political and policy agendas pertaining to domestic energy production and use. Figure 8.4 summarizes the key aspects of the energy–security nexus in Scotland and the wider UK and their effects on the energy transition.
Figure 8.4 Key energy security aspects and their transition impacts in Scotland and the wider UK, 2006–2023.
Attention paid to broader security questions in energy policy was low, especially between 2016 and 2021, or was sometimes masked from the wider public, as in the case of civic and military nuclear power. Generally, the large influence of the private sector on energy policy and the dominance of economic and market-based values – essentially an active and deeply ingrained depoliticization of energy – have led to relatively little attention being paid to the connection between security and energy transitions prior to 2022. Some argue that insufficient attention was paid to the expansion of new niches, such as energy storage and smart grids, as means to improve energy security, and that there has been an overreliance on the privately owned National Grid in energy security. However, there is rising interest in these issues, in particular critical materials security.
At the level of objectives, in key policy documents some interconnections were made between energy and security in the early 2000s. These reduced in emphasis after the Conservative government came in power in 2015, alongside dilution of earlier ambitious low-carbon energy policies. In addition, a divergence has existed between a hydrocarbon-based security approach to safeguard international fossil fuel routes (which has been rather coherent) and the advancement of climate security via the energy transition. The former represents a kind of negative security-based thinking where physical attacks to fossil fuel flows were prevented (see Hoogensen Gjørv, 2012; Hoogensen Gjørv and Bilgic, Reference Hoogensen Gjørv and Bilgic2022), while the latter could benefit broader positive security thinking based on enabling communities via the energy transition to be prepared for climate change impacts. The latter could also connect better to the Scottish just transitions agenda. The economic focus of energy policy has had a negative influence on cross-departmental coordination of energy and broader security issues. Such collaboration is seen to be increasing but, at least before 2022, it has tended to be more organic and ad hoc than formalized.
Geopolitical concerns over Russia were not particularly important for Scottish or wider UK energy policy pre-2022, as the island is geographically remote from Russia. Even some of the energy experts understood the indirect interconnections only after the 2022 events. Yet the energy transition, and especially wind power niche expansion, was partly legitimized based on the need to reduce the indirect dependency of the UK on Russian energy flows. Nevertheless, prior to 2022, the discussion on security in UK energy policy was mostly limited to the kind of energy security that markets can deliver or “real-time” security-of-energy supply. While the political rhetoric of energy security became more visible after the 2022 events, little concrete changes in policy instruments were evident in early 2023. However, critical materials availability – linking to growing expectations of geopolitical risks and the need for new learning around the energy transition – is a new issue that brings energy transition and security closer together than before. In the UK, this has mainly been tackled by investments in innovation and domestic lithium production – that is, new niche development.
Scotland has had a different worldview on security in relation to energy transition than the broader UK. While in-depth explorations of these links have been lacking, more attention has been paid to the environmental and health security effects of energy policy choices and just transitions – the latter linking broadly to the conceptualization of positive security. These have been evident, for instance, in the rather long opposition of nuclear power, opposition to fracking, and more consideration of energy poverty and the just transition than in the rest of the UK.
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