Finland’s energy system tells a story of strategic redirection. Twenty years ago the country was nearly 60 per cent net importer of energy, with substantial Russian gas and oil flowing across the eastern border. Today net import dependence is about half what it was, the Russian flows have been replaced, and the electricity system has been built around nuclear, and a tenfold increase in wind generation over the past decade. The country is now a small net exporter of electricity. The underlying institutional culture is the second part of the story: Finland’s National Emergency Supply Agency runs the deepest preparedness apparatus in the region, holding oil stocks well above the EU minimum and coordinating strategic stockpiling across multiple sectors. The Finland–Sweden bilateral preparedness relationship, conducted between NESA and MSB, is the most developed of its kind in the Nordics.
The forward planning challenge is electrification at a pace that strains the system in winter. Industrial electrification, data centres at scale, and the potential for growing hydrogen and power-to-steel production point to 2050 electricity demand at 1.5 to 1.75 times today’s level. The winter of 2025–2026 showed what this means in practice, when an extreme cold-and-low-wind event came close to a real loss-of-load situation in Finland, stabilised through emergency demand reductions and full imports across the interconnectors. Add to this the Gulf of Finland’s status as the most concentrated subsea infrastructure cluster in the region, with Estlink, Balticconnector, and the data backbone all transiting waters now established as a target environment, and Finland sits at the front line of the Nordic energy security agenda.
Key challenges
The Gulf of Finland. Estlink 2, the Balticconnector rupture in October 2023, and the broader pattern of incidents associated with Russia’s shadow fleet highlight the risks to subsea energy infrastructure in the Gulf of Finland. Repair capacity, response times, and the institutional architecture for handling suspected hybrid incidents are all pressure points in the current threat environment.
Winter adequacy under electrification. Finland is the EU’s largest electricity consumer per capita (although both Norway and Iceland are larger consumers among the Nordics). The winter peak demand coincides with the lowest wind output, and the demand pipeline for electricity-intensive projects is among the steepest in the region. The single-bidding-zone structure means that no internal price signal differentiates regions, putting the full weight of adequacy management on cross-border flows and on Fingrid’s system-wide planning.
Porvoo as a regional asset. Finland has the highest share of domestic jet fuel production in the Nordics. Porvoo is the single asset that delivers this. Any extended outage at Porvoo would have a regional consequence given the deeper jet fuel import dependence of Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden.