Iceland Digs Deep To Develop Power in the Wilderness
Converting “melting icebergs into aluminum...is pretty smart,” notes a manager on a vast integrated hydro and smelter project in Iceland. Energy, both hydro and geothermal, is the only significant natural resource Icelanders have to compensate for declining fisheries. The tiny subarctic nation, stranded between Greenland and Scotland, is determined to export as much as it can in energy-intensive products.
Iceland’s biggest electricity project ever, rated at 690 MW, is now being built solely to serve an emerging 322,000- tonne-per-year smelter on an eastern fjord at Fjardaál. For a country of about 300,000 people, the Kárahnjúkar hydro project is a huge undertaking, calling for one of the world’s biggest concrete-faced earth dams, at 8.5 million cu meters, and over 70 kilometers of tunnels.