The machine and the season

On the Fosen peninsula in Trøndelag, the Storheia wind farm consists of 80 turbines on a plan area of just under 38 square kilometres, with access and internal roads running about 62 kilometres. Roan, the other installation at issue in the Supreme Court case, has 71 turbines on 24.5 square kilometres and roughly 70 kilometres of road. These are the figures recorded in HR-2021-1975-S, the judgment the Norwegian Supreme Court handed down in grand chamber on 11 October 2021. They are not the numbers that matter most to a reindeer herder, but they are the numbers the law had to work with, and they describe a machine that occupies ground in a particular way: not a point but a lattice, not a footprint but a schedule of access.

The turbine is usually discussed as an object of energy policy. I want to read it as something narrower and stranger: a device for converting one kind of time into another. A herding year is a sequence of movements across pasture, keyed to snow, lichen, calving, and the long northern light. A wind farm is a production curve, keyed to wind speed and grid demand, measured in hours and megawatt-hours. Both are ways of keeping time on the same ground. The question the Fosen judgment raises, and does not answer, is which of those temporalities the grid is permitted to overwrite.

What the court actually decided

The legal core is precise and worth stating without ornament. The Supreme Court unanimously found that the construction of the Storheia and Roan wind farms violated the reindeer herders’ right to enjoy their own culture under Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It ruled the licence and expropriation decisions invalid. It took as its starting point the Court of Appeal’s finding that the winter pastures near Storheia and Roan are in practice lost, and that the development would threaten reindeer husbandry’s existence on Fosen unless remedy measures were implemented. The judgment is available in English translation from the Norwegian Supreme Court.

Two further holdings matter for the argument here. First, the court held that, as a starting point, there is no room for a proportionality assessment balancing the minority’s interests against other interests of society, though a balance must be struck if Article 27 rights conflict with other basic rights. Second, and more quietly, it held that because other, less intrusive development alternatives existed, this case did not involve a collision between environmental interests and the reindeer herders’ right to cultural enjoyment. The court agreed that a green shift and increased renewable production are important. It simply found that, on these facts, the importance did not have to be weighed against the herders’ rights, because the development could have been sited otherwise.

That is a narrower holding than it is often taken to be. The judgment does not establish that cultural rights always defeat energy interests. It establishes that in this case the conflict was avoidable, and therefore not yet a real conflict. The harder case, where no less intrusive alternative exists, is left explicitly open. The court’s reasoning points toward a balancing test in that situation without specifying its terms.

The herding year and the storage problem

To see why the turbine is a cosmotechnical object and not merely a land-use problem, it helps to set the herding year beside the way the Norwegian power system describes its own virtues. Statistics Norway and the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate publish an annual account of the power supply. As of the beginning of 2025, Norway had 65 wind farms with 1,392 turbines, a combined installed capacity of 5,082 MW, and a normal annual production of 15.9 TWh, about 11 percent of total production capacity. More than 75 percent of the country’s production capacity is flexible, and the large reservoir storage capacity makes it possible to even out production over years, seasons, weeks, and days, within the constraints set by each licence and watercourse. Wind and solar, by contrast, are intermittent: electricity can only be generated when the energy is available.

This is a factual contrast, not a verdict. Hydropower’s flexibility is a genuine material achievement, and the grid’s ability to shift water across seasons is one of the reasons the Norwegian system is unusually stable. But notice what kind of time storage is. A reservoir holds water against a future need. It can be filled in a wet year and drawn down in a dry one. The herding year has no equivalent reservoir. A pasture lost to a road or a turbine pad is not stored for later use; it is gone from the sequence, and the animals must be moved through what remains. The court’s rejection of winter feeding as a remedy is instructive here. The Court of Appeal had treated fenced winter feeding, funded by compensation, as a way of making the loss survivable. The Supreme Court found that such a solution is burdened with so much uncertainty that it cannot be significant in determining whether Article 27 has been violated, and that the courts cannot rely on it as part of the herders’ duty to adapt. A technical fix that would have made the herding year compatible with the grid by enclosing it was refused. Not every seasonal practice can be preserved by being fenced.

The turbine as a temporal device

What does it mean to call the turbine cosmotechnical? The term is borrowed from the philosophy of technology, where it names the way a technical object carries a particular world with it: a set of assumptions about what time is for, what land is, who counts as a user. A wind turbine carries the grid’s world. Its blades turn when the wind blows, but its output is meaningful only as a contribution to a system that must balance production and consumption at every moment. The turbine’s time is the dispatch interval, the forecast horizon, the settlement period. The herder’s time is the movement of animals across ground that is read by snow and lichen, not by price.

The Fosen judgment can be read as an attempt to hold these two times apart. The court refused to let the green shift serve as a general justification, because in this instance the shift could have been pursued elsewhere. It refused to let compensation and winter feeding translate the loss into a manageable cost. What it did not do, and could not do, was describe a procedure for deciding which temporality should govern when the alternatives run out. That is the open question the judgment leaves, and it is the question that any honest account of the turbine has to keep open rather than close.

What the judgment does not settle

It is tempting to read Fosen as a settlement. It is not. The judgment invalidated the licences and the expropriation decisions, but it did not specify what should happen to the turbines already built, and the sources available here do not establish their current operational status or the terms of any subsequent agreements between the siidaer and the wind companies. The Supreme Court’s finding that the herders’ rights would be violated if satisfactory remedy measures were not implemented is a conditional, and the condition is not defined in the judgment. The legal question of remedy remains, in a real sense, unfinished.

This is where the essay has to resist the pull of resolution. The court’s refusal of proportionality in this case is sometimes read as a victory of culture over energy. The text supports a narrower reading: the court found that the conflict was avoidable, and therefore did not have to decide what to do when it is not. The harder case, in which a wind farm is sited where no less intrusive alternative exists and the green shift is invoked as a basic right in conflict with Article 27, is the one the judgment gestures toward without resolving. The court’s statement that a balance must be struck if Article 27 rights conflict with other basic rights is the door it left ajar.

The rotation and the movement

Stand at the edge of Storheia and the turbine is a slow, regular motion, a rotation measured in seconds per revolution and in annual production figures. Stand in the path of a herd in late winter and the movement is a different regularity, keyed to the retreat of snow and the condition of the animals. Both are ways of keeping time on the same ground. The law, in Fosen, found that the first had been allowed to overwrite the second without sufficient justification. It did not say how the two should be kept together when the ground is scarce and the alternatives are exhausted.

The turbine will keep turning, or it will not; the sources here do not say. The herding year will keep moving, or it will not; the judgment says the winter pastures are in practice lost, and that remedy measures are required if the practice is to survive. What remains is the question the court left open, and which the grid has not yet had to answer: when there is no less intrusive alternative, and the green shift is invoked as a basic right, which time does the law allow to overwrite the other?

Sources

Norwegian Supreme Court, HR-2021-1975-S, judgment of 11 October 2021, English translation: https://www.domstol.no/en/supremecourt/rulings/2021/supreme-court-civil-cases/hr-2021-1975-s

Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate and Statistics Norway, “Electricity production,” Energifaktanorge: https://energifaktanorge.no/en/norsk-energiforsyning/kraftproduksjon/