Iceland has been in the news recently for showing the world how much geothermal energy we have. It literaly gushes from the ground.

One of the first thing early settlers in Iceland noticed was the island localized hot spots. We have a lot of our towns and popular locations named after those hot spots, for example Reykjavík, or the Bay of smoke/steam, Hveragerði, which translates to field of geysers, and of course Geysir, where the english language gets the name geyser from.

There are still a handful of remote villages in Iceland that rely entirely on diesel generators, such as Grímsey, which is a tiny island located at the Artic Circle.

The power generator in Grímsey also serves as the main heating source for the local pool area and local houses, as they use heat exchangers to utilize the coolant from the diesel engines.

Vestmanneyjar is also an interesting case. They are the largest island in Iceland, home to about 4200 people today. At the start of the last century they got all of power from a couple of diesel generators. In the late 1950s, they were looking into other options and one of them was a nuclear reactor from General Electic. Fortunately that idea ended up being rejected, because just over a decade later over a fifth of that island went covered in lava in the eruption of Heimaeyar. In 2019 they got heat pump that use the heated sea close to the active geothermal area. With just those pumps the island cut down the power useage to a third of what it was before.

If you dont like graphs, as the one just above I also have those raw numbers going all the way from the 1940 and to 2020.

We can here see how much the energy production has shifted from importing most of our energy in the form of oil and coal, to utilize our natural resources and produce ten times the energy we import. This shift has been in no small part the result of the Icelandic goverment trying to make the country self-reliant on energy.