Search

Nearly 90% of New Car Sales in Norway Were EVs in 2024

We are an online community created around a smart and easy to access information hub which is focused on providing proven global and local insights about sustainability

15 Jan, 2025

This post was originally published on Eco Watch

According to new data from the Norwegian Road Federation (OFV), nearly 90% of new vehicles sold in Norway in 2024 were electric.

The data revealed that 88.9% of new car sales in 2024 were fully electric, up from the 82.4% of all car sales being EVs in 2023, Reuters reported. As the BBC reported, some months of sales in 2024 saw up to 98% of cars sold being fully electric.

The top two selling passenger cars in Norway last year included the Tesla Model Y and Tesla Model 3, according to the Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association (NEVA). Other top models included the Volvo EX30, Volkswagen ID.4, Toyota bZ4X, Skoda Enyaq, Nissan Ariya, Volkswagen ID.3, Audi Q4 e-tron and Hyundai Kona electric.

“Norway will be the first country in the world to pretty much erase petrol and diesel engine cars from the new car market,” said Christina Bu, secretary-general of NEVA, as reported by Reuters.

The transition is aided by dealerships such as Harald A. Møller, which has been operating in Norway for more than 75 years. The dealership recently removed all gas-fueled passenger vehicles in its showroom in favor of electric vehicles, BBC reported.

“We think it’s wrong to advise a customer coming in here today to buy an ICE [internal combustion engine] car, because the future is electric,” Ulf Tore Hekneby, CEO of Harald A. Møller, told BBC. “Long-range, high-charging speed. It’s hard to go back.”

In September 2024, electric vehicles out-numbered gas-powered cars for the first time in Norway, which also became the first country in the world for this to happen. By that point, 754,303 of the cars were fully electric, while 753,905 were gas-powered.

According to NEVA, for 2024, the total of fully electric passenger vehicles in Norway reached 788,836, while electric light-duty commercial vehicles reached 36,984.

While other countries are increasing the number of EVs sold, they are still far behind the progress made in Norway. For example, in November 2024, the UK hit its record for the share of EVs in total new car sales, with EVs making up about 25% of total car registrations for the month. 

According to Reuters, EVs make up just 8% of total vehicle sales in the U.S. as of 2024, and hybrid vehicles have more demand compared to fully electric vehicles. Experts are also concerned that interest in EVs could plummet if President-elect Donald Trump removes the electric vehicle tax credits upon taking office.

“If you take true demand for the car and you eliminate the $7,500 benefit… it’s really going to change who wants them and how they buy them. So we’re preparing for that,” David Christ, head of sales and marketing for Toyota in North America, told Reuters.

Electric vehicles at a charging station in Oslo, Norway on Jan. 2, 2025. Zhang Yuliang / Xinhua via Getty Images

By comparison, Norway has a goal to have an emissions-free car fleet this year, with all vehicles run by battery or hydrogen. According to Visit Norway, the country offers EV subsidies, lower cost parking for EVs, increased access to bus and taxi lanes, and strong charging infrastructure, including more than 3,000 public charging stations and more than 7,750 fast-chargers. 

“Even in the northernmost parts of Northern Norway — an area with huge distances, more reindeer than people, and really low temperatures in the winter — you can get around easily in an EV,” Bu explained.

Further, Norway taxes gas- and diesel-powered vehicle purchases at a much higher rate to encourage the purchase and use of EVs.

The post Nearly 90% of New Car Sales in Norway Were EVs in 2024 appeared first on EcoWatch.

Pass over the stars to rate this post. Your opinion is always welcome.
[Total: 0 Average: 0]

You may also like…

‘Poisoning the Well’ Authors Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin on PFAS Contamination and Why It ‘Has Not Received the Attention It Deserves’

‘Poisoning the Well’ Authors Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin on PFAS Contamination and Why It ‘Has Not Received the Attention It Deserves’

In the introduction to Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin’s new book, Poisoning The Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America, the authors cite an alarming statistic from 2015 that PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are present in the bodies of an estimated 97% of Americans. How did we ever get to this point? Their book is […]
The post ‘Poisoning the Well’ Authors Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin on PFAS Contamination and Why It ‘Has Not Received the Attention It Deserves’ appeared first on EcoWatch.

The Rise of Chemical Recycling: What Recyclers Should Know

The Rise of Chemical Recycling: What Recyclers Should Know

During WWII, plastic appeared as a “material with 1,000 uses.” Fast forward to today, when global production of plastic has surpassed 359 million tons. While plastic has been helpful in many areas, it’s also created problems within the environment. Microscopic particles of plastic are in the soil, air, and water. They’re in animals, fish, and […]
The post The Rise of Chemical Recycling: What Recyclers Should Know appeared first on RecycleNation.

Turning down the heat: how innovative cooling techniques are tackling the rising costs of AI's energy demands

Turning down the heat: how innovative cooling techniques are tackling the rising costs of AI's energy demands

As enterprises accelerate their AI investments, the energy demand of AI’s power-hungry systems is worrying both the organisations footing the power bills as well as those tasked with supplying reliable electricity. From large language models to digital twins crunching massive datasets to run accurate simulations on complex city systems, AI workloads require a tremendous amount of processing power.

Of course, at the heart of this demand are data centres, which are evolving at breakneck speed to support AI’s growing potential. The International Energy Agency’s AI and Energy Special Report recently predicted that data centre electricity consumption will double by 2030, identifying AI as the most significant driver of this increase.1

The IT leaders examining these staggering predictions are rightly zeroing in on improving the efficiency of these powerful systems. However, the lack of expertise in navigating these intricate systems, combined with the rapidity of innovative developments, is causing heads to spin. Although savvy organisations are baking efficiency considerations into IT projects at the outset, and are looking across the entire AI life cycle for opportunities to minimise impact, many don’t know where to start or are leaving efficiency gains on the table. Most are underutilising the multiple IT efficiency levers that could be pulled to reduce the environmental footprint of their IT, such as using energy-efficient software languages and optimising data use to ensure maximum data efficiency of AI workloads. Among the infrastructure innovations, one of the most exciting advancements we are seeing in data centres is direct liquid cooling (DLC). Because the systems that are running AI workloads are producing more heat, traditional air cooling simply is not enough to keep up with the demands of the superchips in the latest systems.

DLC technology pumps liquid coolants through tubes in direct contact with the processors to dissipate heat and has been proven to keep high-powered AI systems running safely. Switching to DLC has had measurable and transformative impact across multiple environments, showing reductions in cooling power consumption by nearly 90% compared to air cooling in supercomputing systems2.

Thankfully, the benefits of DLC are now also extending beyond supercomputers to reach a broader range of higher-performance servers that support both supercomputing and AI workloads. Shifting DLC from a niche offering to a more mainstream option available across more compute systems is enabling more organisations to tap into the efficiency gains made possible by DLC, which in some cases has been shown to deliver up to 65% in annual power savings3. Combining this kind of cooling innovation with new and improved power-use monitoring tools, able report highly accurate and timely insights, is becoming critical for IT teams wanting to optimise their energy use. All this is a welcome evolution for organisations grappling with rising energy costs and that are carefully considering total cost of ownership (TCO) of their IT systems, and is an area of innovation to watch in the coming years.

In Australia, this kind of technical innovation is especially timely. In March 2024, the Australian Senate established the Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence to examine the opportunities and impacts of AI technologies4. Among its findings and expert submissions was a clear concern about the energy intensity of AI infrastructure. The committee concluded that the Australian Government legislate for increased regulatory clarity, greater energy efficiency standards, and increased investment in renewable energy solutions. For AI sustainability to succeed, it must be driven by policy to set actionable standards, which then fuel innovative solutions.

Infrastructure solutions like DLC will play a critical role in making this possible — not just in reducing emissions and addressing the energy consumption challenge, but also in supporting the long-term viability of AI development across sectors. We’re already seeing this approach succeed in the real world. For example, the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Western Australia has adopted DLC technology to support its demanding research workloads and, in doing so, has significantly reduced energy consumption while maintaining the high performance required for AI and scientific computing. It’s a powerful example of how AI data centres can scale sustainably — and telegraphs an actionable blueprint for others to follow.

Furthermore, industry leaders are shifting how they handle the heat generated by these large computing systems in order to drive further efficiency in AI. Successfully using heat from data centres for other uses will be a vital component to mitigating both overall energy security risks and the efficiency challenges that AI introduces. Data centres are being redesigned to capture by-product heat and use it as a valuable resource, rather than dispose of it as waste heat. Several industries are already benefiting from capturing data centre heat, such as in agriculture for greenhouses, or heating buildings in healthcare and residential facilities. This has been successfully implemented in the UK with the Isambard-AI supercomputer and in Finland with the LUMI supercomputer — setting the bar for AI sustainability best practice globally.

The message is clear: as AI becomes a bigger part of digital transformation projects, so too must the consideration for resource-efficient solutions grow. AI sustainability considerations must be factored into each stage of the AI life cycle, with solutions like DLC playing a part in in a multifaceted IT sustainability blueprint.

By working together with governments to set effective and actionable environmental frameworks and benchmarks, we can encourage the growth and evolution of the AI industry, spurring dynamic innovation in solutions and data centre design for the benefit of all.

1. AI is set to drive surging electricity demand from data centres while offering the potential to transform how the energy sector works – News – IEA
2. https://www.hpe.com/us/en/newsroom/blog-post/2024/08/liquid-cooling-a-cool-approach-for-ai.html
3. HPE introduces next-generation ProLiant servers engineered for advanced security, AI automation and greater performance
4. https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Adopting_Artificial_Intelligence_AI

Image credit: iStock.com/Dragon Claws

0 Comments