"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."
""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."
Deep geothermal heat extraction has traditionally been practical only in volcanically active, geyser-filled regions. Iceland shifted from heavy fossil-fuel dependence to local geothermal energy after the 1973 oil crisis, using public-investment funds to finance costly upfront development. Infrastructure such as the Krafla Geothermal Station and subterranean district-heating systems spread geothermal warmth to almost all homes and even to snow-melting systems in Reykjavík. Today more than a quarter of Iceland's electricity comes from geothermal sources, with most of the remainder from hydropower. Emerging techniques for accessing heat from deep underground may broaden geothermal viability beyond classic hot-spring landscapes.
Read at The New Yorker
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