One of the leading oil suppliers of the world, Norway, is already quite well known for its relatively fast embrace of electric cars, having the highest per capita use and sale of electric cars anywhere in the world.
That embrace is set to continue at pace, though, rather than (as might be expected) slow down to a degree, as evidenced by comments made recently by one of the members of Norwegian Parliament (and also the Chair of the Standing Committee on Energy and the Environment), Ola Elvestuen.
Based on Elvestuen’s comments — made at the recent EV Roadmap 8 conference in Portland — the country is currently aiming for all new vehicles (or nearly all) to be completely emissions-free by the year 2025. This aim is accompanied by: the plan for all municipal vehicles to be electric by 2015, the aim for all public transit to be fossil-fuel-free by 2020, and the goal for all taxis to be emissions-free by 2022.
Pretty impressive goals, ones that are reportedly the result of the fact that the country intends to cut carbon emissions by 40% (from 1990 levels) in just 15 years, and the country already gets the vast majority of its electricity from hydroelectric power plants. So, it’ll need to transform its transportation sector in order to achieve the goal.
As it stands, roughly one in every five new vehicles sold in Norway is now a fully electric one (~18.4% in June) while another 4.5% are plug-in hybrids — this figure is the result of a doubling of sales every year over the last three years. Altogether, about 2.1% (~54,000) of all of the country’s 2.5 million vehicles is now electric.
For more on Norway’s EV policies, you must see this: “Why Norway Is Electric Car World Leader.”
And here’s a video of EV Obsession founder and CleanTechnica director Zachary Shahan interviewing Ola Elvestuen and Ståle Frydenlund, Communications Manager of the Norwegian EV Association, in late 2013, when the country’s electric car market was really heating up: