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Comment by ponector | Hacker News Reader

Free? Half of the world has cheaper electricity than Iceland according to https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-e...

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Electricity in Iceland is very political.

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.

how do you track Bitcoin miners at home? I will claim I'm producing moonshine!

You look at the electricity bill. If it's much higher than usual, it's most probably either a BTC mining operation or an underground Cannabis farm.

This discussion is about industrial power.

Those are residential consumer prices.

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...

Because all of our wholesale contracts are negotiated in secret without public approval (Icelander here)

Sue them for environmental damage via their energy contracts and request this information under the Aarhus Convention, which your country is a signatory to.

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.

This is mostly the same here in Finland (one of the cheapest non household electricity prices in Europe.)

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)

I wonder how much that cost is just amortizing delivery costs.

If most of the population has district heating, there isn’t much of a load per residence.

Comparing retail prices is pointless when replying to a comment referring the heavy industry.

This data is wildly off base for at least Finland, so I would take it with a grain of salt.

Yeah, summarizing electricity cost with one number is not doable in countries where seasons vary as much as in Finland.

Electricity cost will always be higher during winter where it is needed for heating. And this is where households will also use more.

For heavy industry they are buying from themselves when the electricity prices spike (Pohjolan Voima). Basically they always get it at cost of production (mankala periaate).

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)

I'm always interested in how reality can be different from the popular notions. Sure, they have plenty of geothermal energy but it's not free to turn that heat into electricity. And many other things are pretty expensive on that island so it's not surprising that the cost of generators and other machinery is also expensive.

But we can dream that it's free, right?

There's no need to turn the heat into electricity then back into heat — they use district heating to move the heat directly to buildings.

This site says 90% of the population is covered by the system.

https://www.greencitytimes.com/geothermal-district-heating-i...

>geothermal energy

Geothermal here is used for heating homes, electricity production comes from Hydropower generation (dams).

Source, an Icelander.

And farming in winter!

About a third of your electricity is from geothermal sources.

Source: the actual data.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/IS

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