At a time when sustainable green energy is in high demand and short supply around the world, the inhabitants of a small region in northern Iceland have more geothermal power than they know what to do with.
When the building of a new luxury hotel was being planned in the region of "Fljot" in Skagafjordur, on Iceland´s north coast, the local utility company decided to drill a new geothermal borehole, in an attempt to provide enough hot water to heat up the hotel and provide water for the adjacent swimming pools.
🚿🛁 A geothermal borehole in Iceland provides so much hot water, only about a fifth can be used. pic.twitter.com/ln9g2sr2G6
— RTÉ News (@rtenews) April 4, 2018
The project was so successful that today, only about a fifth of the water from the borehole is used for the hotel and a few other customers in the area.
The 170m deep borehole provides about 30 litres per second of 110C degree hot water.
Indridi Einarsson, the director of the local power utility says only 5-6l per second are currently used for about 40 customers, through 45km of pipes.
Theoretically, the water from the borehole could heat every residential building in the nearby town of Saudarkrokur (which, incidentally, is already heated up with geothermal water from a different borehole).
Einarsson says it´s not economical to pipe the water over long distances, unless there´s valuable use for it, but says he hopes that the energy source will attract local business in the future.
Iceland has an abundance of geothermal energy which has been harnessed to produce electricity and to heat up houses in most towns and villages in Iceland, including Reykjavik.
Apart from the larger geothermal energy plants in southwest Iceland, around 250 boreholes have been drilled in various places around the country; sometimes for a small group of farms, an area of summer houses, or even individual farmsteads.
Experts say that the borehole in the Fljot region is not the only example of a geothermal power source being under-utilised.
