The Nordic energy system is often described as a model of regional integration, backed by low-carbon power generation, mature market institutions, and decades of cross-border cooperation. That description is partly accurate but incomplete. The system is not yet fully operationally prepared for the threat environment that has emerged since 2022.
Three developments exposed the gap between reputation and reality. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine demonstrated that energy market integration transmits geopolitical shocks regardless of domestic energy mix: Nordic electricity prices tracked continental European gas-indexed prices despite the region’s limited natural gas dependence. A sequence of sabotage and anchor-dragging incidents on Baltic Sea subsea infrastructure between 2022 and 2024 established that critical energy infrastructure is subject to direct physical disruption. And the 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis has shown, within days of the strait’s closure, that even a region structurally buffered from Middle Eastern oil imports is exposed through global price transmission.
This report maps the state of Nordic energy security cooperation across all eight Nordic jurisdictions: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and Åland. It assesses the region's energy systems, the existing cooperation architecture, the regional threat picture in the Baltic and Arctic regions, and the carrier-specific vulnerabilities in electricity, oil, and natural gas. It concludes with a roadmap of 25 recommendations for strengthening Nordic cooperation over the short term (zero to three years) and the medium term (three to ten years), complemented by country-specific recommendations for each of the eight jurisdictions.
A dual-track energy system
The Nordic energy system runs on two parallel tracks. The first is a largely decarbonised electricity sector: roughly 90 per cent of Nordic electricity generation comes from hydropower, wind, nuclear, and a growing share of solar. The second is the continuing dominance of combustion-based fuels outside of electricity. Oil alone still covers 29 per cent of total Nordic final consumption, concentrated in road transport, industry, aviation, and as the dominant energy in the Faroe Islands and Greenland. The eight Nordic jurisdictions are not an internally uniform bloc: energy mixes, import dependencies, grid integration, and institutional setups differ substantially across the region, from Norway's position as a structural net energy exporter to the isolated microgrids of Greenland and the oil-dependent system of the Faroe Islands.
The outlook is clear: electricity consumption is expected to rise substantially as transport and industry electrify, with all national scenarios projecting electricity demand growth of 1.2 to 2.6 times current levels by mid-century. At the same time, oil and refined products will remain materially important at least through the 2030s as will natural gas in parts of the Nordics.
Two regional threat theatres: the Baltic and the Arctic
The Nordic energy system sits at the intersection of two distinct strategic environments. The Baltic Sea is shallow, contained, and holds one of the densest clusters of cross-border subsea energy infrastructure in Europe. It generates a clustering risk: many high-value cross-border assets concentrated in a small sea area, where a single anchor-dragging incident can disable a pipeline and a power cable within hours. The Arctic operates on a different geometry. The Norwegian Sea reaches depths of 2,500 metres across a sparsely monitored area, response times to incidents are measured in days rather than hours, and the region's most exposed offshore production sits in waters that have been subject to intensifying geopolitical pressure especially since 2022. The Hammerfest LNG plant on Melkøya, the only export route for Norwegian Barents Sea gas, is the clearest single illustration of Arctic single-point-of-failure exposure. A 2020 fire took the plant offline for 21 months, removing an entire production basin from the export market. The Russian shadow fleet that has emerged since 2022 generates risk in both theatres simultaneously and is the single threat that most clearly bridges them.
Key vulnerabilities
In electricity, weather-dependent sources now account for nearly three quarters of Nordic generation, and system adequacy in any given winter depends on hydrological conditions, wind output, and temperature simultaneously. The 2026 Finnish dunkelflaute, when an extended cold-and-low-wind episode in January and February pushed prices to levels last seen during the 2021–2023 European energy crisis and forced sustained imports averaging 1,830 MW, was the clearest recent operational illustration of this risk. The new Aurora Line between northern Sweden and Finland, commissioned in December 2025, held the system together; had a major nuclear unit been unavailable at the same time, automatic demand restraint might well have been triggered. The early 2030s represent the period of highest modelled adequacy risk as demand growth from electrification outpaces new supply and grid build-out. New demand can come online in one to two years; new transmission lines take seven to eight. That timing mismatch is the central structural risk for Nordic electricity security over the next decade.
For fuels, overall dependence on oil is trending downward and Norway's production base provides a regional buffer that few other parts of Europe enjoy. The aggregate picture, however, conceals the points of real exposure. Nordic refining capacity has fallen by 16 per cent since 2021 and is skewed towards gasoline. Diesel and jet fuel are the products where Nordic refining falls furthest short of demand, with combined Nordic jet fuel import dependency reaching 68 per cent. The stockholding picture is uneven: Denmark, Finland, and Sweden meet their obligations, but Norway reduced its mandatory readiness to 20 days in 2007, and the Faroe Islands and Greenland sit outside both EU and IEA stockholding frameworks entirely despite being the most physically exposed.
In natural gas, Nordic consumption is marginal by EU standards but retains sub-regional significance during the ongoing phase-out, especially in Denmark. The structural asymmetry is that Norway, Europe's largest pipeline gas supplier, sits outside the EU frameworks that govern its main customers, and no pan-Nordic gas coordination forum exists.
Across all carriers, risks to subsea and offshore critical infrastructure have moved from theoretical concern to operational vulnerability. The Nord Stream explosions, the Balticconnector and Estlink 1 damage, and the Estlink 2 cable severance established that subsea energy infrastructure is now a target. Supply chain risk compounds the picture: large power transformers carry 12 to 18 month replacement lead times, and HVDC cable and converter equipment longer still, sourced from a small number of global suppliers.
State of Nordic energy security cooperation
The political signal in support of Nordic cooperation is sharper than at any point in the post-Cold War period. The Nordic Council of Ministers Energy Cooperation Programme 2025–2030 places energy security as the first of four programme goals, and Nordic energy ministers and prime ministers have reinforced this at the highest level. The political will is formally stated. The gap is that the institutional machinery to operationalise it has not yet caught up.
Cooperation is strongest where it has had decades to develop. The electricity market and its operational layer built around Nord Pool and the Nordic Regional Coordination Centre is the most institutionally mature energy cooperation arrangement in Europe. The Nordic Contingency Planning and Crisis Management Forum (NordBER) and the bilateral emergency electricity sharing agreements provide a functioning preparedness architecture. The Finland-Sweden bilateral cooperation between their emergency supply agencies (NESA and MSB) is the most developed preparedness relationship in the region and provides a concrete template for scaling cooperation to the wider Nordic group.
The cooperation gaps are sharpest in four areas. First, the strategic layer: there is no joint Nordic energy security strategy, no standing cross-sectoral forum, and no mechanism for ministers to systematically compare the trade-offs they are managing nationally. Second, the threat-response layer: NordBER, the bilateral transmission system operator (TSO) agreements, and the Nordic System Operation Agreement contain no provisions for hybrid or military attacks that could result in coordinated multi-asset disruption. Third, the Arctic theatre is institutionally thinner than the Baltic: there is no Arctic equivalent of the May 2025 Council of the Baltic Sea States Vihula Memorandum on undersea infrastructure, and the Arctic Council has been operating in reduced functionality since 2022. Fourth, for fuels and gas there is no dedicated Nordic cooperation framework comparable to what exists for electricity.
Roadmap for strengthening Nordic energy security cooperation
The report sets out 25 recommendations across nine cooperation domains, sequenced over short-term (zero to three years) and medium-term (three to ten years) horizons. The principle throughout is to build on what already exists and to focus on areas where Nordic cooperation adds value over national approaches.
Strengthening system-level cooperation. The most consequential recommendation is the development of a Nordic Energy Security Strategy, adopted through the Nordic Council of Ministers, that synthesises cross-border vulnerabilities with actionable cooperation priorities. Complementary measures include an annual joint threat assessment, a standing information-sharing protocol, a feasibility study on a Nordic energy security operations centre, harmonised physical protection standards, priority cable repair vessel access agreements, formalised chief information security officer (CISO) and transmission system operator (TSO)-level cyber cooperation, and a dedicated assessment of energy security in the Island Energy Systems to address the two-tier participation pattern.
Strengthening electricity security cooperation. The priority is to extend the market-and-operations mandate of existing institutions to cover adequacy and security coordination. A Nordic TSO demand pipeline protocol would ensure that major new demand projects, including the 5.4 GW data centre queue already visible in Norway alone, are notified across borders. A common adequacy assessment methodology would provide the foundation for coordinated flexibility and capacity investment. A joint inventory and strategic reserve of critical components targets the long replacement lead times that define recovery time after disruption.
Strengthening fuel supply cooperation. Recommendations centre on a harmonised Nordic emergency demand management protocol with explicit provisions for protecting the remote Faroe Islands and Greenland that are most exposed to fuel supply shocks, private sector fuel security guidelines for logistics-critical sectors, and a dedicated Nordic jet fuel cooperation mechanism addressing the most acute carrier-level vulnerability.
Strengthening natural gas cooperation. The priority is to integrate Norway into Nordic emergency gas coordination through bilateral emergency sharing agreements and a pan-Nordic gas TSO forum, filling the gap that the EU solidarity mechanism does not reach. Over the medium term, the same logic extends to hydrogen: the security-of-supply dimension should be embedded in emerging hydrogen infrastructure from the feasibility study phase rather than retrofitted after the first crisis.
The regional recommendations are complemented by country-specific recommendations. The country profiles surface priorities that do not always emerge at the regional level, including the Bornholm Energy Island pivot for Denmark, the Northern Finnmark grid bottleneck for Norway, and the maritime logistics exposure of the Faroe Islands and Greenland.
The Nordic energy system is not underprepared because of a lack of cooperation. It is underprepared because cooperation has not yet moved into operational reality. Operational preparedness, as used in this report, means the capacity of the Nordics to act jointly and effectively under stress through shared protocols, pre-agreed response procedures, interoperable systems, and material reserves that can be deployed across borders without requiring a lengthy political process in the moment. The political will is now formally stated at the highest level. The institutional machinery, the operational protocols, and the material reserves needed to give that will practical effect are the subject of the recommendations in this report.