Iceland effectively has free electricity. I believe they are one of the biggest producers of refined aluminum. Could use it as a way station to process raw material that require a lot of electricity.
The aluminum smelters are paying something like $0.02/kWh.
Foreign buyers who setup real industry will pay about $0.05/kWh.
Bitcoin miners will pay $0.10/kWh.
The real cost to produce from volcanic sources is under $0.01/kWh.
Denmark's 35¢/kWh for households is only 9¢/kWh for industrial users, and (from another site) even less for "very large industrial" users.
Iceland's figure isn't given.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
In case your electricity is run by the government you might also have Freedom of Information laws like Austria, Slovenia or Sweden that would grant you access to such public-sector contracts, if requested.
Though I don’t see much of an issue as that is just a contract between two private parties. What is the ownership structure like in Iceland?
Also in the case of some of the most electricity consuming industries they are mostly buying from themselves (Pohjolan Voima which is a owned by a group of heavy industry companies)
If most of the population has district heating, there isn’t much of a load per residence.
Electricity cost will always be higher during winter where it is needed for heating. And this is where households will also use more.
This is why you don’t see upm kymmene, stora enso, kemira, etc profits go down when electricity prices are high (they go up as they can sell what they don’t need for massive profits). This mainly applies during "normal" times (when olkiluoto nuclear plants go down which they own a big chunk of or something like that the situation might change)
But we can dream that it's free, right?
This site says 90% of the population is covered by the system.
https://www.greencitytimes.com/geothermal-district-heating-i...
Geothermal here is used for heating homes, electricity production comes from Hydropower generation (dams).
Source, an Icelander.
Source: the actual data.
> one of the biggest producers of refined aluminum
> Alcoa arrived in 2007 after Iceland built a giant power plant on the other side of the island, near a sparsely populated region where the fishing industry was in decline.
Iceland’s electric utility built five highland dams that capture glacial meltwater. The largest of the resulting reservoirs is roughly the size of Manhattan. The water is piped 25 miles to an underground power plant, then dropped a quarter-mile down another pipe to make the turbines spin. Finally, the resulting electricity is transmitted 47 miles on high-voltage lines to the ocean’s edge.
Electricity in Iceland costs about 30 percent less than what Alcoa might pay in the United States.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rahnj%C3%BAkar_Hydropow...
I would say that Norway has an advantage because Iceland's remoteness makes it more expensive to ship the bauxite there (there is no bauxite mining in Iceland itself) and the aluminum back. Still, it's apparently the second largest aluminum producer in Europe.
Thousands of jobs left the town and now a several billion dollar plant sits idle. The idea recently floated they sell the land, power and water rights to MSFT for their new water cooled data center’s nearby, but MSFT didn’t want to own all that infra.