Iceland: The Geothermal Marvel

No, I haven’t forgotten you! I was on vacation in Iceland, and had very limited access to Internet.

I’ve known for years that Iceland is a geothermal paradise, but to see it in person was quite amazing. Everywhere we went, there were geothermal hotsprings. Everywhere, there were geothermally heated municipal swimming pools and hot tubs (one of the few bargains in a rather expensive country). We visited a geothermal power plant that contained an energy museum. We enjoyed hot, hot showers, as hot as our solar-heated system at home (we saw almost no solar in Iceland, in part because usually they don’t have too much sun, and in part because geothermal is readily available and produces much steadier power).
We cooked eggs in a geothermal spring, and tasted bread that had been baked in the ground, overnight.

One surprise for me was how much geothermal power is used to create steam and spin turbines to generate electricity; I’d expected most of it to be heating water for direct use rather than spinning turbines, because that cuts down on efficiency.

But efficiency and conservation aren’t such big concerns in Iceland. We were rather surprised that conserving water or electricity didn’t seem to be a value. People just ran the water or left lights on.

But that can change with education and a values shift. Meanwhile, Iceland can truly claim to have one of the greenest power grids in the world.

In a country with only 318,452 inhabitants as of January 2011 and approximately 116,000 households, this tiny country has the capacity to supply much of Europe’s energy needs. In fact, plans are afoot to build deep-sea cables that will export as much as 5 billion kilowatt-hours of clean, renewable electricity to the rest of Europe—enough to power 1.25 million homes.