Word: icelanders
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Steam has long powered Icelandic dreams. Pockets of underground water heated by the earth's core may not be particularly glamorous, but tiny Iceland has spent decades figuring out useful ways to harness its heat and power, employing it for everything from baking bread to turning turbines. Geothermal power now provides cheap, clean heat to more than 90% of Icelandic homes, and generates 30% of the nation's electricity, a slice worth roughly $120 million. In recent years, as Icelanders became smitten with the idea that their ambitious banks could create a global financial center in the far north Atlantic...
...Iceland. Though they expect credit-crunch delays, the nation's domestic power firms are sticking with plans to nearly treble the geothermal power Iceland produces in a bid to woo companies like aluminum giant Alcoa and tech heavyweight Google. Internationally, a new crop of Icelandic investment firms have started pumping money into projects, offering partners from Djibouti to the Philippines capital, skills and - perhaps most importantly - a sense that this also-ran of renewable energy is really viable. "I think [geothermal power] is the paramount moral obligation of Iceland in the modern world," President Olafur Grimsson told TIME. "There...
Going Underground Ten minutes up the road from Jonasson's bread ovens, over some low hills, a series of dense white steam plumes rise into the cloudy sky. In a flannel shirt and hard hat, Birkir Fanndal maneuvers his truck over one of the dirt roads that crisscross Iceland's first major geothermal power station, Krafla. Soon after the inaugural borehole was drilled here 34 years ago, the first in a series of volcanic eruptions rocked the area. The eruptions, nine in all, went on for nearly a decade, sending engineers scrambling to keep up with the shifting earth. Fanndal...
...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...