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Paper short abstract

The paper studies a 2024 auction for a wind power subsidy in Norway. Market design was employed as a means to insert competitiveness in the awarding of a state subsidy for green industry. Multiple ideas of what a “market” is and how it may function for the greater good were simultaneously at play.

Paper long abstract

In March 2024, the Norwegian Ministry for Oil and Energy organized an auction to award a subsidy of up to €3 billion euro to produce electricity from wind power on the Norwegian continental shelf. This paper aims to study and contextualize the many-layered processes of valuation and ideas of what makes a market good that were involved in this auction. On a micro level, the consultancy firms carrying out the auction mobilized conceptualizations of markets as devices that would uncover truths. Both about the appropriate level of state subsidy, and about which of the profit-oriented consortiums participating in the auction that would be able to utilize the resource in question most efficiently. On a macro level, the auction was inscribed into ambitious political attempts of instigating an active industrial policy with the aim of combatting climate change and ushering in a green transition – justified specifically with references to how markets could not fix climate change “on their own” (Innset, 2024). Ultimately, however, market design was utilized in order to achieve a stated goal of breaking with market-based policies. The auction sought to create both private value in terms of profit, and common value in terms of electricity and a green transition. The paper addresses recent notions of “the good economy” (Asdal, 2022) and also fits into a stream of research in market studies about the organization of markets for collective concerns (Ossandón et al, 2019), and the “multiple markets problem” which has been identified therein (Frankel, 2019).