Word: iceland
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...similar project in the world. Landsvirkjun, the state utility that owns Krafla, has also been in talks to supply power to an aluminum smelter that Alcoa plans to build nearby. The financial downturn has put that project on hold for now, but Alcoa, which already has one smelter in Iceland, still sees the country as a site for cheap, power-intensive smelters. By going geothermal, which has less impact on the environment, Alcoa believes it can mitigate the hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide a smelter emits every year. "If you compare the offset...
...Iceland knows a bit about kicking the fossil-fuel habit. At the turn of the last century, life on the isolated island was bleak. It had been among the poorest nations in Europe for centuries, and a smoky haze choked Reykjavik, thanks to the coal inhabitants burned during the interminable winters. In the 1930s, Icelandic engineers successfully diverted underground water to heat an elementary school, and the rest of the capital slowly followed suit. When the global oil crisis hit in the 1970s, efforts to turn this local resource into electricity - by drilling holes into underground heat pockets and reservoirs...
...that drilling holes deep into the earth destabilizes the land around it. This summer, police arrested a group of environmental activists who had chained themselves to machinery at a drill site near the nation's largest power station outside Reykjavik to protest the plans for a new aluminum factory. Iceland's government has responded to such criticisms by trying to diversify and attract companies like Microsoft, Cisco and Yahoo!, all of which have discussed building massive server farms on the island...
...ensure that geothermal energy powers Iceland's future, the country is boosting the number of university programs dedicated to the subject. It's essential to make Icelanders as enthusiastic about steam as they have been about the finance industry over the past few years. On a blustery Sunday afternoon in May, a circle of visitors in all-weather jackets waits in front of the Strokkur geyser, a popular tourist attraction in southwest Iceland. Among the crowd is a busload of Harvard M.B.A. students fresh from their exams. Georg Ludviksson, an Icelandic grad who helped organize the tour, said he wasn...
...role in the current financial crisis may seem dated. The two and a half months since Lehman Brothers collapsed have been rather eventful—a presidential election, A.I.G.’s bailout, Citigroup’s bailout, a 2,000 point decrease in the Dow, Iceland becoming insolvent, a requested bailout for the Big Three automakers, and as of Monday a bona fide, American-made recession. Because of all of this, it’s easy to forget what started this debacle—the subprime mortgage fiasco. If you’ve forgotten, then...