Rivka Galchen
When I arrived in Reykjavík, Iceland, last March, a gravel barrier, almost thirty feet at its highest point, had been constructed to keep lava from the Reykjanes volcano from inundating a major geothermal power station not far from downtown. So far, it had worked, but daily volcano forecasts were being broadcast on a small television at the domestic airport where I was waiting to take a short flight to Akureyri, a town on the north coast about an hour’s drive from one of the country’s oldest geothermal plants, the Krafla Geothermal Station. Until the early nineteen-seventies, Iceland relied on imported fossil fuels for nearly three-quarters of its energy. The resources of the country—a landscape of hot springs, lava domes, and bubbling mud pots—were largely untapped. “In the past, people here in the valley lacked most things now considered essential to human life, except for a hundred thousand million tons of boiling-hot water,” the Icelandic Nobelist Halldór Laxness wrote in “A Parish Chronicle,” his 1970 novel. “For a hundred thousand years this water, more valuable than all coal mines, ran in torrents out to sea.” The oil crisis of 1973, when prices more than tripled, proved a useful emergency. Among other efforts to develop local energy, public-investment funds provided loans for geothermal projects, whose upfront costs were considerable. By the early eighties, almost all the country’s homes were heated geothermally; in Reykjavík, a subterranean geothermal-powered system is in place to melt snow and ice off sidewalks and roads. Today, more than a quarter of the country’s electricity comes from geothermal sources, a higher proportion than in almost any other nation. Most of the rest is from hydropower.
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