The synthesis is straightforward: the political signal in support of Nordic cooperation is sharper than at any point in the post-Cold War era, but the institutional machinery to operationalise it has not yet caught up. Where the gap is widest is the analytical layer that should connect ministerial declarations on energy security to the trilemma trade-offs that ministers are actually managing at home.
3.1 Strategic planning, policy alignment and thematic cooperation
The formal architecture for Nordic strategic energy planning runs through three interlocking structures. The Nordic Council of Ministers for Energy (MR-E) is the political coordination level: energy ministers meet at least annually, issue declarations, and set the mandate for cooperation under the activities of the Council. The current mandate is detailed in the Nordic Council of Ministers (NCM) Energy Cooperation Programme 2025–2030, which for the first time places energy security as the first of four programme goals, ahead of market development and innovation. The programme prioritises areas where the countries can produce stronger results together than separately, with special focus on ensuring high security of energy supply, an enhanced Nordic position in the energy transition, a more efficient electricity market, and a stronger Nordic voice in international cooperation. The Committee of Senior Officials on Energy (ÄK-E) translates ministerial direction into programme and budget approvals for Nordic Energy Research, which serves as the research and implementation arm under the Council.
The political signal from ministers has sharpened markedly since 2022. The October 2024 Stockholm ministerial meeting adopted energy security as the leading priority for the 2025–2030 period. At the October 2025 Helsinki meeting, held under a Finnish presidency that had explicitly prioritised comprehensive security and preparedness, Nordic energy ministers adopted a joint declaration focused on energy security. The declaration emphasised that joint initiatives could be expanded to new areas and intensified considerably, and that securing critical infrastructure and developing strong operating models for regional cooperation had become more pressing. The Nordic prime ministers reinforced this at head-of-government level in a joint statement on crisis preparedness and resilience, which explicitly called for advancing the security and sustainability of Nordic energy infrastructure as a priority.
Yet the institutional machinery has not yet been given a specific mandate, or a dedicated forum, to operationalise a regional approach to energy security.
A senior Nordic ministry official described the state of cooperation as mostly informal: 'there is no nominal energy security group in the Nordic context, but nothing prevents discussing and inviting relevant people within the current framework.' The same interview flagged real constraints on political bandwidth: Nordic energy ministers cannot realistically convene a separate security crisis mechanism every time EU energy ministers are on a call over an unfolding situation. Any new Nordic strategic-planning structure has to fit into a realistic schedule, not an aspirational one.
3.1.1 Nordic working groups and the thematic research base
Nordic Energy Research convenes three Nordic working groups and two networks relevant to energy security: the Nordic Electricity Market Group, covering market design, adequacy, and flexibility; alongside groups on Renewable Energy and Hydrogen; the Nordic-Baltic Group on Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS); the climate-transition-focused Net Zero Islands Network; and Nordsyn, which focuses on energy efficiency, ecodesign, and energy labelling.
The Electricity Market Working Group's Toolbox for a Secure Energy Supply (2025) is the most significant prior Nordic energy cooperation security-focused output and the direct predecessor to this project. Its core finding is that Nordic capacity and flexibility interventions must be coordinated rather than fragmented across national markets and that Nordic-level adequacy cooperation is institutionally feasible and worth commissioning. No working group is currently mandated to look across all energy security dimensions holistically. This report is the first attempt to do so within the Nordic Energy Research (NER) framework, and the 2025–2030 programme provides the political basis for making such a mandate standing rather than project-specific.
3.1.2 Transmission planning and the security-criteria gap
Strategic planning intersects with infrastructure in ENTSO-E's Ten-Year Network Development Plan (TYNDP), which is the vehicle through which Nordic transmission investment is identified, prioritised and channelled towards EU Project of Common Interest status. TYNDP project selection criteria are primarily economic: congestion reduction, renewable integration, market efficiency. Security considerations such as redundancy, sabotage resistance, repair access and resistance to multi-point failure are not primary project prioritisation criteria, even though the security relevance of new interconnectors and offshore assets has changed sharply since the framework was designed.
The 2025–2030 Energy Cooperation Programme explicitly identifies the EU and EEA, and specifically ENTSO-E and the EU's Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER), as forums where the Nordic countries should actively leverage the strength of Nordic cooperation to pursue shared positions. There is a concrete application of this in TYNDP: Nordic countries can develop a joint position advocating for security criteria, including subsea cable vulnerability assessment, redundant routing requirements and security-by-design standards for critical infrastructure, to be incorporated into project prioritisation. This is precisely the kind of issue where aligned Nordic submissions carry materially more weight than the same arguments made country-by-country, and where Norway's ENTSO-E participation provides a route to influence that EU-only frameworks cannot.
3.1.3 The strategic gap and the trilemma
The deeper structural problem is that the NCM framework provides the political forum but not ongoing analytical depth. There is no standing joint Nordic energy security threat assessment, no systematic alignment of national energy security strategies, and no mechanism for ministers to regularly compare the trilemma trade-offs they are managing domestically. The pressures on the three pillars (security, affordability, sustainability) do not align neatly across the region. National energy system planning decisions interact across borders through Nord Pool and the shared transmission system in ways that four or five separately-optimised national plans do not adequately account for.
A Nordic strategic-planning forum that is honest about the trilemma trade-offs would give ministers a shared basis for understanding how national choices reverberate regionally. The institutional pieces to support such a forum already exist: NordBER for the emergency perspective, cooperation between national preparedness agencies, and the Nordic Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) network for the cyber threat picture. What has not happened is the instruction to assemble those inputs into a shared annual product.
3.1.4 National preparedness agencies and bilateral cooperation
Beneath the ministerial and TSO layers, an important strand of Nordic energy security cooperation runs bilaterally through the national preparedness agencies. Finland’s National Emergency Supply Agency (NESA) is the most visible institutional driver of Nordic-relevant cooperation in this layer, partly because Finland’s long security-of-supply tradition gives the agency unusually broad scope. NESA mainstreams business continuity and resilience across critical sectors through public-private partnerships, maintains strategic stockpiles across multiple sectors including energy, and acts as the operational counterpart for cross-border preparedness work.
The most consequential bilateral relationship in this domain is between Finland and Sweden, conducted between NESA and Sweden’s Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB, Myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap) under the framework of the 1992 Finland-Sweden security of supply agreement and the NESA-MSB joint strategic cooperation plan 2021–2025. Concrete areas under active development include material preparedness, in particular the piloting of joint emergency stockpiles, submarine cable repair capacity, and logistics cooperation in the northern regions, alongside exchange of situational information and joint review of the risk and threat environment.
Both governments have publicly stated that the bilateral track is intended to complement rather than substitute Nordic, Nordic-Baltic and EU/NATO cooperation, and that they would welcome extension of the cooperation approach to other Nordic countries. The Finland-Sweden experience is therefore the most concrete template available for scaling preparedness cooperation across the wider Nordic group, with the joint stockpiling pilot of particular relevance to the fuel and critical-component reserves discussed in Sections 5 and 7. The Finland-Swedish bilateral cooperation could also be the basis for a multilateral framework, bringing together all of the Nordic emergency supply agencies.