People here only wish it was like that with the smelters. The last smelter (and more significantly, its associated dam at Kárahnjúkar, the largest in Europe) drove people mad. Approval was rushed through without much public discussion, an environmental impact statement (which proved completely inaccurate, as in "the largest lake in eastern Iceland completely changed color" inaccurate) was approved with little review, and construction (the main source of jobs) was done with workers brought in on a temporary basis, mainly from Poland. Most of the people working there now (much smaller than the construction times) are also immigrants**. Honestly, it was so egregious that I think it helped galvanize people here to pay more attention and resist things like that more.

Interesting to see your insights on construction. :) Thanks!

** -- Not that I have much ground to stand on in regards to that objection, as I myself immigrated to Iceland... although because I love the place, not because I make more money here (just the opposite).

Fertilizer production isn't big up here. I don't know why. It's aluminum, and to a lesser extent, ferrosilicon, and there's lots of datacenter plans, too. And actually, the smelters aren't that big of employers. Aluminum is almost as much of our exports as fish, but it's a much smaller chunk of the employment picture.

I think it's a strange notion that on one hand, it seems that you're saying that the cable is going to take a ton of maintenance, but on the other, that there won't be many maintenance jobs. Which is it? This isn't my field, so I'm simply asking you, but it clearly can't be both ways! :) Or, I hope you're not trying to say that Icelanders aren't skilled enough to maintain a cable... And also in the jobs picture on our side is the power exploration, development, and production, which is no small factor.

I think you're overplaying losses. I read a thing from Seimens before which quoted the losses on one HVDC system they were working on at 3% per 1000km (I don't know the details like voltage, conductor thickness, etc). Reykjavík to London is under 1900km. Even if you double the losses from that figure, you're still not talking about that huge of losses.

Concerning your comment about electrical power transmission being more mature... actually I know enough about this field to register a strong disagreement. The surge in HVDC transmission is specifically due to the rapid advance of increasingly affordable, increasingly high power switching electronics in recent years (which has also fuelled a boom in increasingly small, increasingly high power AC induction motors, which is what made vehicles like the Tesla Roadster possible). This advance is, of course, a huge boon not just to long distance power transmission in general, but also specifically to undersea cables, since AC losses on a cable in saltwater are huge.

Sorry for the "press puff pieces", it was just a quick google search to get you some breadcrumbs so you could see that this is actually being seriously discussed, including official visits between government officials.

Again, though, the difficulty of constructing and maintaining such a cable? Not my field. It seems strange, though, that it would be considered so much more difficult than undersea data cables, given that all of the problems you quoted apply to them as well (scouring, currents, shifting, depth, weather, etc). And we've got several already running to Iceland. I mean, you're dealing with a much fatter line for power, but I'd think that would only help, not hurt. Could you elaborate on why power cables are so much more difficult?

Am I the only one who saw the comment about space pirates and thought, "awesome!"?

Residential power here in Iceland is 6-7 US cents per kilowatt hour, so I can only imagine that industrial-scale power is even cheaper. We're really sitting on more power production potential than we know what to do with, it's almost ridiculous. I mean, hot water goes to 90% of houses and people waste it like crazy, there's huge heated pools, etc... and a quarter of this hot water comes just from downtown alone, little sheds mixed in with the buildings. In Öskjuhlíð they drilled a 90 meter pipe into the ground, put a choke in the top, a water drip... and it's now an artificial geyser. Heat is just everywhere. 1/3rd of the lava on the planet in the past 500 years has come from Iceland. Traditionally, we've "exported" this power by making stuff here with it, like aluminum (importing all the inputs and exporting the metal). There are three smelters in the country, and even the smallest uses more power than all the homes and businesses combined. But we're still only using about 20% of our conventional high temperature geo (not counting using magma as an input, which was recently shown to be feasable at Krafla, not counting EGS, etc - and geo exploration has been quite minimal due to there being so much available already), virtually none of our low temperature geo (2/3rds of the country's primary energy is geothermal waters at 100-150C, and the target distribution temperature is 80C, but it just gets mixed with cold to bring it down that low), about 15% of our hydro, essentially none of our huge wind (makes the midwestern US look tame, but there's only one turbine in the entire country), tides (also quite large), etc. This country has just huge amounts of generation potential but nothing to use it on.

I'm sure you know more about the difficulties involved than I. But it's a very serious subject that's been discussed for decades, and now seems to finally be making some headway. There's even a conference going on right now about it.

Now, that's not to say that it's not without controversy on this side. Namely, because people here love having massive amounts of unspoiled wilderness, and up here, even geothermal is controversial just because you have to build roads and lines into it. And people also worry about our cheap electricity getting more expensive if we start selling to the UK.

Solar is not the wrong tech for, for example, Spain, which is well within HVDC distance for the UK. And claiming that in the entire UK there's no suitable land for the relatively small amount of area required for pumped hydro is just plain silly. And, FYI, it's already started.

Pence. So you're in the UK. In a decade, you may be buying cheap, reliable carbon-free electricity from us en masse ;) (hint: you'd be paying in krónur)

Nah, petrol costs about $7.50 a gallon here. And I'm renting part of a house right now, and am in the market for buying a house.

"Nice for you that you can."

Given that I just proved a counterexample to the concept that electricity = carbon, and you accepted it, I'm glad to see that we've resolved this one.

Electricity != carbon. *Some forms* of electricity generation equal carbon, but there's no reason to say that they must always dominate.

I've been all over the UK. Yes, the London area is flat as a pancake. The rest of the country isn't, and it's not that big of a country. Most of China's population lives in flat areas, too. But the simple fact is, it doesn't take that much land area * altitude change to store a ton of power. With a water depth of 20m and an altitude change of ~120 meters (which there are even places near *London* like that, like the oceanic cliffs near Eastborne, let alone in Wales, let alone in Scotland), after accounting for losses, that's about 6 kWh per square meter, and thus, the average British home-day energy consumption is stored by 4 square meters. So the amount of land required to store 100% of the electricity for British homes for an entire day is actually notably smaller than the area taken up by the homes themselves, which are dozens to hundreds of square meters on average! In Scotland, the altitude differences to the lochs can be a kilometer or more. Heck, even Wales has *natural* lakes at ~600m not far from the sea.

My power is about six cents per kilowatt hour and has never gone out on me.

You were saying?