WHEN THE 9TH CENTURY Norseman, Hrafna-Flóki Vilgerðarson, gave Iceland its name—‘Íslanð’ (or ‘Land of Ice’ in Old Norse)—it was only because he was grossly unprepared for its winter, which, at between 0°C and -10°C in the southern lowlands and around -25°C in the north, is about the same temperature drop between Gulmarg and Kargil town every winter.
But since Hrafna-Flóki’s animals died of his nonchalance (and general boozy merrymaking), he believed the ultima Thule—the land beyond “the borders of the known world”—to be worthless. His crew, though, saw it as a land of warmth; and, counterintuitive as it might sound, Iceland is indeed a clement country, kept snug today by one of its greatest natural resources: geothermal energy.
This virtually unlimited resource is why car parks, pavements and 40,000 square metres of streets in Reykjavik are heated through winter and part of summer, and the lights never switched off on the 40-km road between Reykjavik and the Keflavik International Airport during the polar nights in deep winter.
The fractured tectonic plate boundary that gives Iceland its 30 active volcanic systems—13 of which have erupted in known history, the most recent that of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010—also gives it its massive non-polluting geothermal reserves which heat 89 percent of its homes, provide 54 percent of its primary energy (as opposed to the fossil fuels that provide 83 percent of primary energy in the US), toast up 130 of its 160 swimming pools, its greenhouses and fish farms, and thaw the permafrost, which covers about 8,000 sq km of its land area and is the country’s main civil engineering impediment.
Geothermal energy utilisation is a tried-and-tested practice in Iceland: although baking the hverabrauth (‘hot spring bread’) and bathing in hot springs has an undated history, it was a farmer who, in 1907, first piped geothermal steam (from a hot spring to his house nearby, a practice that the Svartsengi Geothermal Combined Heat and Power Plant continues in its supply, through 27 km of insulated pipes, of 83°C water to 40,000—a fourth—of Reykjavik’s houses); in 1930, water from Laugardalur (‘Hot Spring Valley’) was piped three km to a primary school at Reykjavik (‘Smoky Bay’) to the west; the country’s first geothermal power plant, a tiny, one-steam turbine affair at Bjarnarflag in the north, began operating in 1969—which was serendipitous in that geothermal energy exploitation in Iceland got underway just before the world-changing oil crisis of the 1970s; today, Iceland has five geothermal power plants and is the leading exporter of geothermal expertise to the rest of the world.
And, still, the country is using only a fraction of the 67 terawatt-hours (TWh) of available geothermal energy—seven TWh (or seven trillion watts) per year against the 20-30 TWh/year feasible today.
Among those reportedly interested in Icelandic geothermal knowledge—aside from Germany and the Philippines, with its prodigious subterranean heat reserves and six geothermal power plants—are Microsoft and Google Energy LLC, which is seeking to contain the galloping multimillion-dollar cost of maintaining Google’s gigantic data centres.
Meanwhile, Iceland has discovered that the secret to keeping geothermal energy recyclable is to send the nonthermal water, leached of its heat, back to where it came from. Before this knowledge played spoilsport with Iceland’s famous hedonism, the effluence from the Svartsengi geothermal power plant, located at Keflavik, created the tourist hotspot known as ‘Blue Lagoon’, a 37-39°C, six million-litre spa rich in healing minerals from the underlying lava field.
All good though this sounds, Iceland still has one of the highest per head greenhouse gas emissions in Europe; blame it on Icelanders using more power per head than any country in the world, and importing fossil fuel to power their trawlers and 4X4 offroaders, which have enough torque to haul icebergs (or so Icelanders claim).
But the world’s redemption might lie in Iceland’s view of which road to take to the future; and heading it is an anti-climate change and geothermal evangelist—its president, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, who said, in 2008 (with an impressive guilelessness, considering that he said it in the US): “The fireball that sits within the Earth is a resource. We walk on it, we sleep on it, we work on it. The question is: How do we harness it?”