Transitions have a shape. The mining analysts named a shape like this one after Pierre Lassonde. It starts with a discovery peak, when the narrative outruns the asset, then falls into a capitulation trough, when the asset arrives and the narrative has left. A long consolidation follows, and then a second rise that arrives late and is paid for twice.
Finland is in the trough. It entered it in 2023 and has not left. The technology did not fail: the modules got cheaper, the batteries got denser, the heat pumps worked. The valley is demand-side and narrative-driven, and the households standing still inside it are paying for it in monthly instalments. The modules the new would-be users decline are being bought in cash by other buyers who have no choice but to buy them, mostly in emerging markets.
I. The Discovery Peak, 2022
The peak was a panic dressed as an investment decision. European gas repriced after February 2022 and electricity followed, so the Finnish detached-house owner bought the thing the brochure said would make the bill stop.
Thirty thousand detached houses installed solar in the peak year. It was a panic purchase, made by households that had not read the specification sheet and financed at a moment when the ROI was already maxing out by an energy price spike already mean-reverting.
What happened next is the tell: a structural shift does not reverse.
II. The Capitulation Trough, 2024–2026
The crash was total. Installations fell to roughly 10,000 in 2024 and then to 6,500 in 2025. In the Vasa grid area, household installations fell from 796 to 319. In Varsinais-Suomi they have fallen for two consecutive years and sit at roughly a quarter of the peak. One installer gave the number without decoration: solar panel demand has been completely zero for the last two years.
This is speculative capitulation. The market did not soften; it froze. What grows inside the freeze is not new demand. Onninen reported solar sales up over 50 per cent and battery sales up over 60 per cent in January–April 2026 against the previous year, concentrated on the households that already own panels. The door-to-door crews are re-calling the customer list ticked in 2020–2022, not prospecting, because the person who has already read the brochure is the person who buys the second product. A market deepens its installed base when it cannot widen it.
The freeze has a stated reason: the subsidy. Energy prices first tumbled, then jumped back up, above the previous peak, but the state had promised something that would in the eyes of the majority cure high energy prices once and for all: they would make the taxpayers subsidize the consumers. It sounds like using Visa to pay for Mastercard, because that’s exactly what it is, but hold on, the consumer took the bait and ate it too, all the way, hook, line and sinker. That’s what the consumer always does.
The Illusion of the Printing Press
The October 2026 relief package for transport and agriculture was €60 million. Thirty million in fuel support, a €20 million vehicle tax cut, and €10 million to raise the commuting deduction ceiling from €7,000 to €7,800. It was financed inside existing spending limits: €40 million from unused carbon capture funding and €20 million from cutting basic road maintenance.
Holding the pump price flat against the price move that had already occurred would cost roughly €1.25 billion a year on road fuel alone, before heating oil, before the commuting deduction, before professional transport relief. The package was one-twentieth of the invoice. Finland has been in the EU’s excessive deficit procedure since January 2026, with a corrective expenditure path imposed.
The arithmetic of the buffer is linear. The fuel tax regime is worth about €1.18 per litre. At the documented pass-through of roughly €0.11 per litre per $10 of Brent, the entire tax regime is worth about $100–120 of Brent protection. From a $116 barrel, it is exhausted at $223. Past that point, the state can zero every cent of fuel tax and the pump price still rises.
This is assuming zero change in crack spread, but let’s run the scenario like this, for the sake of fun and sports.
A subsidy moves purchasing power from the taxpayer to the driver, not a barrel from the ground to the pump. Finland imports essentially all of its crude and refined product. The driver who receives the transfer competes for the same litres with the driver who does not, and the transfer is bid back into the price. The relief package raises the price of the thing it was meant to make affordable, and the state pays more each year to deliver less.
The printing press does not make any new fuel.
The Identity Tier Trap
Within the bottom 80 per cent of households there is a subset defined by three markers: a diesel car, an oil boiler or a wood stove, and a stated position that the state should subsidize the fuel price. For them, alternatives don’t exist, or if they do, they make them look weak and effeminate, or so they think. It is an identity tier rather than an income tier, and the identity has a carrying cost.
Let’s compare a 92,000 km Nissan Leaf at €7,800 against a 110,000 km petrol Polo at €7,990. The EV is cheaper to buy and roughly quarter of the cost to run. The identitarian buys the Polo, because the diesel is a claim about who the driver is.
The identitarian, if they were smart, would drive an EV for the 355 days and rent a truck for the ten he actually needs it for his stated reason of towing construction equipment and firewood, or something. That is what a fleet manager at his dayjob does, because a fleet manager knows how to calculate ROI. The identity tier also knows how to calculate ROI, but chooses not to, because the EV won’t look good on Instagram, they think.
Over four years the defensiveness costs €10,000–15,000 in increased energy expenses, depending on the heating vintage, and leaves the household with receipts. At scaled manufacturing, a 10 kWp solar and 20 kWh battery kit is €11,000, with a 25–30 year life. Over the course of the forty years they’ll likely signal their identity, they would have paid for their solar panels and battery more than ten times over.
III. The Smart-Money Consolidation Window, 2027–2031
The top 20 per cent of households and the agile commercial actors complete their adoption inside this window, and they do it for a reason that has nothing to do with the price of a barrel of oil.
They capture the retail-minus-spot price wedge on the Nordpool electricity market. The Finnish retail electricity price is the spot price plus the distribution tariff, the electricity tax, and the supplier margin. A battery that charges cheap and discharges into the building’s own load captures the full retail price on the discharge when power is at its most expensive and pays the spot price on the charge. This means ka-ching, direct income in the form of a negative line item on the power bill. Exporting the same energy captures only the spot price and forfeits the wedge. Spot-to-spot trading is a supplementary leg on top of self-consumption. The Estonian Nord Pool study documents €332–446 per year gross for a 10 kWh residential battery, on a system with no building load to discharge into. The bigger the battery, the bigger the profit, so businesses and urban housing co-operatives net a lot more.
Reserve markets are less predictable, because turning a profit on them depends on the average need for load balancing over the course of a season and the size of your pool. Finnish BESS capacity on reserve markets doubled within a single year, and Swedish mFRR capacity prices fell from nearly €50/MW/h to under €5/MW/h — Swedish data, used because it is the clearest published Nordic repricing series. The aggregation rule is not symmetric: Fingrid sets the minimum bid at 1 MW for FCR-D and 0.1 MW for FCR-N. The aggregator that pools these batteries captures the capacity revenue as it reprices. So, the bigger your pool, the more likely you’re going to profit even from small demand in load balancing. This is purely a supplementary leg, nonetheless it’s useful.
The commercial estate has already transitioned. Tokmanni had solar on about 70 stores and its Mäntsälä logistics centres by the end of 2025, and its partner Solarigo has built 61 plants totalling 9.8 MWp since 2016, covering over 9 per cent of the company’s own electricity consumption and nearly half of store electricity in the best summer months. S-ryhmä had more than 120,000 panels across roughly 260 locations by the end of 2023. Lidl has been in Fingrid’s reserve market since 2020, with about 140 stores in a virtual power plant. The commercial and industrial sector are basically going to build more capacity: a supermarket might also cover the parking lot. A factory might lease the nearby wheat field and convert it into agri-solar.
This is the consolidation window. The households with capital and the companies with a plan buy the asset at the trough, capture the wedge, and decouple from the price of a barrel of oil before the government is unable to subsidize fuel any longer at $223 Brent. The rest of the market watches from the sidelines, and waits for a subsidy that will arrive long after the decision to buy the solar panels would have saved them from feeling the pinch.
IV. The Mirage, Early 2030s
By the early 2030s the grid tariff is the largest line on the invoice for 80 per cent of Finnish homeowners, and the political system requires a new narrative that will kick the ball down the road.
The solar panels and the battery exist, they’re relatively cheap, and the only obstacle between the consumer and cheap power is their own attitude. That narrative is unavailable to a political class that has spent a decade promising relief it could not deliver. So a different narrative is supplied: a technology that is always five years away.
Small Modular Reactors and commercial fusion are the hype of the 2030s. The sedative works because the product is technically credible. The problem is whether they scale. Olkiluoto 3 broke ground in 2005, was originally scheduled for 2009, connected to the grid in March 2022, and entered regular commercial production in April 2023 — eighteen years from construction start to routine operation for a single unit of a design already licensed elsewhere. That is the linear-scaling profile of large, regulated, site-specific infrastructure: regulatory friction, component manufacturing constraints, and localised logistics all compound serially.
Fusion carries the same profile with a longer tail. ITER’s initial operation is now projected beyond 2033, with deuterium-tritium experiments deferred to 2039. The relevant fact is not that the technology will fail. It is that the timeline is longer than the consumer usually expects it to be and the power bill still comes every month.
Why install a solar panel and a battery when the baseload question will be settled by an SMR in the next decade? The household will pay eight years of invoices while the SMR clears its first regulatory review.
V. The Great Paralysis, 2032–2069
Here the curve flattens into something worse than a trough. It becomes a plateau of structurally impaired consumption.
The SMR and fusion build-out arrives later than the hype and in a smaller scale than initially advertised.
The Global Allocation: They Buy Because They Have To
Global solar panel and battery module and cell manufacturing is not constrained by Finnish demand. It is allocated by global demand, and the marginal unit goes to the buyer with the fastest-growing requirement and the highest willingness to pay.
That buyer is Indian, Southeast Asian, and African first, followed by the Gulf and Latin America. The reason is that they need the product, and they don’t need to want it.
India added a record volume of solar capacity in recent years, with utility-scale and rooftop installations both accelerating, because the alternative is a coal fleet that cannot be financed fast enough to meet demand growth and a grid that cannot deliver reliable power to hundreds of millions of people. India does not install solar because it wants to lead the transition. It installs solar because the arithmetic of a growing economy with an unreliable grid leaves no other option at the margin.
Southeast Asia faces fast demand growth, fragmented island grids, and a legacy reliance on imported coal and diesel. Rooftop and distributed solar plus storage is the cheapest way to serve a load the transmission network cannot reach, and the diesel it displaces is the most expensive generation on the system. They buy because the alternative is a diesel bill denominated in a currency they do not control, with predictable supply shortages.
Africa is the purest case, because it is the case where the grid never arrived. Hundreds of millions of people are served by off-grid solar, mini-grids and solar-plus-storage systems that leapfrog the transmission network entirely. South Africa’s rooftop boom followed a national grid failure that made self-generation a survival strategy rather than an investment thesis. What do you think people will do when the power is offline for 8 hours per day on a workday? They’ll install solar panels and life goes on.
The Gulf and North Africa follow, because the sun is free and the opportunity cost of burning oil for domestic power is enormous when that oil could be exported at $250 per barrel, whenever the strait is open. Latin America rounds out the list: Brazil and Chile have some of the cheapest solar auctions in the world, and Chile’s curtailment of solar output is a signal of abundance, not absence. Power essentially means solar in Chile. If you want to mine Bitcoin somewhere, possibly think of the Atacama: highest irradiance in the world, and if you donate to the local community, they’ll defend you with their votes.
They adopt because the material constraint is binding now and the modular technology is the cheapest way to relieve it, not because a narrative persuaded them.
This is what the Finnish household is competing with, and it does not know it is competing with these people for the same power. The Finnish domestic sector has a frozen residential market, a cooperative housing sector that cannot pass a motion to save their lives, and a subsidy expectation that keeps it waiting for a financial miracle from politicians.
The global manufacturing base reads that signal and allocates its capital elsewhere.
This Time Is Not Different
The objection to everything above is that the consumer will eventually come around, because the arithmetic is unambiguous. The historical record does not support that kind of optimism.
Finland has already run this experiment once, and it ran for forty-five years.
The first heat pump experiments followed the oil crises of the 1970s. The arithmetic was clear then, too: the heat pump used less energy per unit of heat than the oil boiler it replaced, and the oil boiler’s fuel was the line item that had just repriced higher. The technology worked. The ROI was decent.
The consumer did not move. The objections were specific, and they were rehearsed: the equipment was unreliable, the ground loop required a yard the lot did not have, the maintenance network did not exist, the spare parts would come from abroad, and the Finnish winter would find the weak point. Each objection was reasonable in 1975. None of them survived contact with a second decade. But the objections did not need to survive. They only needed to postpone one decision, and then the next.
By 1984, after a decade, an estimated 10,000 ground source heat pumps had been sold in the entire country. When oil prices fell again, supplier bankruptcies and negative press followed, and the market went quiet for fifteen years. The Finnish Heat Pump Association was formed in 1999 with a target of one million installations by 2020. The millionth unit was reached in 2019, twenty years after the target and forty-five years after the first experiment.
What finally moved the marginal buyer was not persuasion. It was a second shock, arriving from a completely unrelated direction: the renovation boom of the covid years, when people built, renovated, bought summer cottages, and the state subsidised oil boiler replacement. Sales ran at 98,000 in 2019, then 102,000 in 2020, and 1.2 million pumps covered almost 20 per cent of Finland’s heating by 2021.
The pattern is stable because the psychology is stable. The consumer facing a capital expenditure does four things, in order. First, they assert that the local conditions are uniquely difficult. Second, they assert that the payback is not there. Third, they assert that the state will intervene. Fourth, they buy the incumbent system, because the incumbent system is the one the neighbour has and the bank understands.
None of these four steps requires a fact to be true. They require only that the alternatives remain one decision away.
The solar and battery consumer of 2026 is running the same four steps. The winter claim is a technical claim, and it is answered by the specification sheet: a Finnish heat pump had a coefficient of performance measured in this same climate, and a Finnish solar array produces the same kilowatt-hours at the same latitude as the Swedish array next door. The payback claim is an arithmetic claim, and it is answered by the monthly calculation. The subsidy claim is a budget claim, and it is answered by the €60 million against the €1.25 billion invoice. The consumer, for the most part, will choose to defer the purchase into the future and pay the higher price for their energy.
This is the reason to expect a forty-five-year cadence on the second transition as well. Human nature has not changed. The four steps were not a feature of the 1970s. They are a feature of the standard consumer decisionmaking process.
There is one difference, and it is not in the consumer’s favour. The heat pump had a relatively short supply chain and a domestic installer base. The solar module and the battery cell are globally traded goods, and the allocation of those goods now goes to buyers whose material constraint is binding today. The heat pump buyer of 1985 was not competing with three billion consumers in Africa & India for a limited manufacturing run. The battery buyer of 2030 is.
The Indian Ocean is a pool with a calm rim. Where do they think the ships will prioritize going when they leave China?
The contemporary Finnish version of the 1985 freeze is the housing cooperative, where the four steps are institutionalised in a board, a property manager, a general meeting and a shareholder register. Solar adoption stands at 5 per cent in 2026, up from 2 per cent in 2022, while only about one in ten expect their cooperative to acquire a system — a decline from nearly 20 per cent in 2022, when the energy crisis made the topic salient. Valonia‘s two-year observation states the mechanism plainly: property managers advance projects when the initiative comes from the cooperative, and boards wait for support from the property manager. The board waits for the manager. The manager waits for the board. The consumer who says we cannot decide is saying that “we have decided to keep paying a higher price for our power”.
The EV charger shows the process works when a user exists. More than one in three housing cooperatives has at least one charging point; in Helsinki, 44 per cent of apartment-building cooperatives and 61 per cent of row-house cooperatives have them, against 34 and 37 per cent in Western Finland. The EV charger got installed because a driver asked for it. Usually it is just one charger, not a charger on each parking lot. The solar panel and the BESS would benefit everyone, and they’d need to decide on a shared purchase together. Ouch.
The Stranded Fixed Cost
The grid is a fixed-cost network with a volumetric billing structure.
The transmission and distribution network — the siirtomaksu — is priced per kilowatt-hour but incurred per kilometre of line and per megawatt of capacity. The capacity charge — the tehomaksu — is incurred to keep firm capacity available for the peak. Both are largely fixed in cost and largely allocated by volume. When the top 20 per cent install solar and a battery, their metered volume falls, and their peak draw falls. The revenue the network needs does not fall with it.
The regulator can raise the unit rate to recover the same revenue to service a grid over a smaller user base. What follows is a transfer no policy document will describe in these terms: the fixed cost of the network is progressively reallocated from the households that installed the solar panels and the batteries it onto the households that stayed fully exposed to the grid.
This is the mechanism of the great paralysis, and it is self-reinforcing. Every household that exits raises the rate for the households that remain. Every rate increase strengthens the case for the next household to exit. Industrial customers would balance this out, but we can already see how the public views them: unwelcome.
Forty Years of Paying For Nothing
The stranded 80 per cent pays premium utility invoices for forty years. It pays the siirtomaksu at a rate reallocated onto it by the households that left. It pays the tehomaksu for firm capacity it uses at the peak because it has no battery to shave it. It pays the retail-minus-spot wedge to the supplier in every hour, because it owns no asset that captures it. It pays for fuel at 3€ per liter and higher. And it accumulates no equity, because a utility invoice is an expense and a solar panel is a capital asset.
The legacy infrastructure decays on schedule. The cooperative that could not pass a solar motion discovers that it still can pass a motion to fix the pipes, because a pipe may burst in the winter, and the solar panel only saves money on a power bill. The failure that is visible gets fixed. The invisible gets deferred, and the deferral is paid for in instalments, by the same household, for four decades.
The consumer who resists the inevitable is resisting a change in their attitude, no more, and they pay for it every month.
VI. Mainstream Production, 2070s
The transition likely arrives no sooner than in the 2070s, and it arrives out of raw material necessity rather than policy.
By then the legacy stock has physically decayed to the point where replacement is not a choice. The maintenance is late, expensive, and unnecessary in the specific sense that matters: the technical and economic conditions for it existed in 2022. The technology will be obsolete and more expensive to maintain than to upgrade.
VII. What It Actually Costs
The capital required to purchase the transition to cheaper energy is already leaving the consumer’s bank account every month.
It leaves at the pump, where the transfer is bid into the price of a litre of fuel. It leaves in the oil tank, where the heating oil price doubles the winter heating cost for the household that kept the boiler. It leaves in the grid transmission bill, where the fixed cost of the network is reallocated onto the households that did not make the purchase. And it leaves with nothing at the end of it, because a utility invoice is an expense and a panel is a capital asset.
The household is not choosing between paying and not paying. It is choosing what the payment buys. It can buy the utility’s balance sheet, the supplier’s margin, the state’s buffer and the underwriter’s premium, in monthly instalments, for forty years, with no residual value at the end. Or it can buy an asset with a 30-50 year lifecycle that removes the line item from the bill.
The kit is €11,000 at scaled manufacturing. The four-year cost of standing still is €10,000–15,000 counting from October 2026 to October 2030 at the projected fuel and power prices, if nothing much changes.
References
Baltic Exchange. Dirty Tanker Index, 7,444 points, mid-October 2026.
Estonian Nord Pool study. Residential battery spot arbitrage: €332–446/year gross for a 10 kWh system.
Fingrid. Reserve market minimum bid sizes: FCR-D 1 MW, FCR-N 0.1 MW.
Fingrid-lehti. (2024, December 9). Companies are paid for flexibility in the reserve markets. Lidl Finland’s virtual power plant: approximately 140 stores, reserve market participation since 2020.
Finnish Heat Pump Association (SULPU). (2020). Peak year for heat pumps: 98,000 sold in 2019; millionth installation reached, twenty years after the 2020 target and forty-five years after the first experiments. (2021). Another peak year: 102,000 sold in 2020; 1.2 million pumps covering almost 20 per cent of Finnish heating by 2021.
Helsingin Sanomat. (2022, January 18). Ilmalämpöpumppujen myynti kasvoi 25 prosenttia viime vuonna.
IEA. (2024–2026). Renewables reports on solar capacity additions in India, Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America; distributed solar as least-cost generation for off-grid and weak-grid loads.
ITER Organization. Baseline schedule: initial operation projected beyond 2033; deuterium-tritium experiments deferred to 2039.
Kiinteistöliitto. (2026, April 29). Aurinkosähköjärjestelmät yleistyvät hiljalleen taloyhtiöissä: 5% adoption 2026, up from 2% in 2022; expectation down from ~20% in 2022 to one in ten. (2026, August 25). Sähköautojen latauspisteet yleistyneet taloyhtiöissä merkittävästi: 44%/61% Helsinki; 34%/37% Western Finland.
Onninen. (2026). Solar panel sales up over 50% and battery sales up over 60%, January–April 2026 year-on-year.
Rakennusmaailma. (2026, June 11). Suomen aurinkosähkökapasiteetti vastaa jo Olkiluoto 3:a – Pientalojen aurinkopaneelibuumi hyytyi. 6,500 detached-house installations in 2025, vs 10,000 in 2024 and 30,000 in 2023.
Solarigo. (2025, September 1). Tokmanni. 61 plants, 9.8 MWp, over 9% of own electricity consumption; nearly half of store electricity in best summer months.
Teollisuuden Voima (TVO). Olkiluoto 3: construction start 2005; original schedule 2009; grid connection March 2022; regular commercial production April 2023.
Valonia. (2026, January 27). Miksi energiayhteisö ei vieläkään ole taloyhtiöiden aurinkovoimaloissa itsestäänselvyys? Property managers advance projects when the initiative comes from the cooperative; boards wait for support.
Yrittajat.fi. (2024, May 27). Heat pump entrepreneur not discouraged, even though demand has plummeted. During the corona years, a lot of renovations were done, houses were built, and summer cottages were purchased, producing a spike in heat pump investment.
Ässäryhmä / Osto&Logistiikka. About 260 S-ryhmä locations with over 120,000 solar panels by end of 2023.