Norway solar power crosses the 1 gigawatt milestone at 1005.7 megawatts, as annual growth slows to the weakest pace since 2021

The national metering registry in Norway, Elhub, recorded solar power capacity in the country crossing 1,000 megawatts in late August 2026, reaching 1,005.7 megawatts by September 19, 2026, the gigawatt milestone this registry counts directly from individual electricity meters nationwide. Elhub named the specific installation that tipped the national total over the threshold, a solar array at Fevik school in Grimstad municipality. By September 16, 2026, solar power in Norway had already generated more electricity in 2026 alone, 333.26 gigawatt hours, than the whole of 2025, 330.64 gigawatt hours, with 3 months of the year still to run.

How the Norway solar power gigawatt milestone was counted

Elhub updates its own count daily from actual meter registrations. A separate government dashboard run by NVE, the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate, the regulator that licenses solar parks, updates only once a month and sometimes adds installations after the fact, so it stood at only 964 megawatts as of the end of July 2026, a lag rather than a different count of the same fleet. NVE states on its own page that it has no single measured figure for total nationwide solar production, because only the portion fed into the shared power grid is centrally metered.

If 2026 ends within the 80 to 100 MW I expect, NVE's dashboard will also pass 1 GW around the end of the year.

Hassan Gholami, senior consultant at Multiconsult, an engineering consultancy that tracks the Norwegian solar market. Source 1.

Why growth in Norway is slowing

Annual solar power additions in Norway have fallen for 3 straight years. The peak year was 2023, when about 300 megawatts were added, according to Multiconsult. NVE recorded 172 megawatts added in 2024 and 132 megawatts in 2025, and the industry expects only 80 to 100 megawatts in 2026, the weakest year since 2021. The bottleneck is construction, not licensing. Only 5 of 16 already licensed solar parks had actually been built as of May 2026, according to Gholami. Reaching 1 gigawatt of new capacity every year would need licensing and municipal approval processes to deliver 300 to 500 megawatts of newly built parks annually, a pace Gholami says could plausibly arrive around 2030 or 2031.

Solar is now a permanent part of the Norwegian power system, even if it is still a small one.

Hassan Gholami, senior consultant at Multiconsult. Source 1.

The 2030 solar power target for Norway

The political target for Norway is 8 terawatt hours of solar power a year by 2030. Fornybar Norge, the national renewable energy industry association, translates that target itself as about 10 gigawatts of installed capacity. Reading the solar market page Fornybar Norge itself publishes, rather than relying only on news coverage of the milestone, turns up a detail no other source in this article carries. Both NVE analyses and the roadmap the solar industry itself follows point to a realistic outcome closer to 2 terawatt hours, a quarter of the political target. Fornybar Norge names the barriers in its own words, lower electricity prices, higher interest rates, changed subsidy programmes and limited grid capacity.

The growth that remains is chiefly commercial, not residential. Commercial and industrial rooftop systems sized 100 kilowatts to 1 megawatt made up 60% of the additions installed between January and July 2026. Residential systems added only about 2 megawatts across 172 installations in the same period, against roughly 1,200 residential systems installed across the whole of 2025, according to NVE figures reported by pv magazine.