every day, I realized we were having to go a little further down the valley to find the sun.” By 28 September, the sun completely disappears from Rjukan’s market square. It doesn’t reappear until 12 March. Throughout the seemingly endless intervening months, Andersen says, “We’d look up and see blue sky above, and the sun high on the mountain slopes, but the only way we could get to it was to go out of town. It’s sad, a town that people have to leave in order to feel the sun.” Twelve years after he first dreamed of his Solspeil, a German company specializing in so-called CSP – concentrated solar power – helicoptered in the three 17-sq-m glass mirrors that now stand high above the market square in Rjukan. “It took,” he says, “a bit longer than we’d imagined.” It really works. There were objectors – and plenty of them – petitions and letter-writing campaigns and a Facebook page organized against what a large number of locals saw initially as a vanity project and, above all, a waste of money. But even they now seem largely won over. “I was strongly against it,” admits Nils Eggerud. Like many others, he felt the money could have been better spent elsewhere – on a couple of extra carers to look after Rjukan’s old people, perhaps, or improved school facilities, cycle paths, a bit of rural road resurfacing. “And I still have my doubts