European defence mobilisation rests on an assumption that is rarely tested and almost never priced: that the electricity system will continue to supply government, logistics, communications and industrial production under conditions far more severe and far more prolonged than anything a wholesale power market is designed to reward. Markets price scarcity in hours and days, and they price it against willingness to pay. They do not price the survival of an industrial capability across a crisis that removes other sources of supply, closes borders, or requires additional domestic production at a moment when the ordinary economics of generation have collapsed. This produces a specific and uncomfortable policy problem. A generating asset may cease to be commercially viable while retaining considerable value to the state, and the value it retains is not the value of the electricity it would sell but the value of the option to produce at all. The question for a public authority is therefore not whether an uneconomic plant should be kept open, which is a question about subsidy, but when preparedness requires paying to preserve the ability to produce electricity without paying for routine production, and what technical, contractual and institutional conditions must hold for that preserved ability to remain usable when it is called. Finland has now run that question through a full cycle, from contract to expiry to replacement, and the record it has left is unusually legible.