An Icelandic mother yells to her son: “Turn off the faucet or you’ll use up all the cold water!”
Admittedly, I didn’t understand the joke until I moved to Iceland and noticed that you had to be careful with the water that came out of the hot tap, or else you could burn yourself. Because Iceland uses the natural heat from geothermal energy, all the water in Reykjavík, its capital city, must be cooled artificially before it enters homes. (In fact, they have so much hot water, many houses pipe it under their driveways to melt the snow and save shoveling.)
However, despite all the hype around Iceland’s access to geothermal reservoirs, cold water might actually be its greatest resource. According to Landsvirkjun, the national power company of Iceland, 92% of the country’s electricity comes from hydropower. Seasonal glacial melting produces a lot of flowing water on the island, some of it moving with intense force. Founded in 1965, Landsvirkjun helps the small nation capture that energy through the means of 15 hydropower stations spread across four areas. Still, the expansive use of running water in Iceland had a much humbler – and clever – origin.
Bjarni Runólfsson was born in 1891 in Vestur-Skaftafellssýsla, one of most remote places of a country that was already sparsely inhabited. He was a farmer in a small and poor village that was bordered by large glacial plains on either side of them. Every spring, the village was cut off from the rest of the island when the glacial rivers flooded, sometimes threatening their homes. However, Bjarni realized that glacial rivers brought not just danger, but also opportunity.
In 1921, Bjarni bought a copy of A Pocketbook of Mechanics in Danish. (Needless to say, such a book didn’t exist in Icelandic.) Although Bjarni could not speak Danish, his wife studied the language at the ladies’ college in Reykjavík and translated the text for him. He then went about the task of teaching himself about hydropower and how to build turbines.
It wasn’t until World War II, when Iceland received money from the United States’ Marshal Plan, that the nation began to modernize. Before then, the small island didn’t have the same access to various resources that other Western nations did, and relied mostly on trade with Denmark. Bjarni could not purchase the metal and some of the other raw materials needed to construct turbines. However, he did buy a Model T Ford from abroad, being the first Icelander to own a vehicle. Every winter, when the ground froze, he drove his truck over the wetlands to a nearby coast, where fishing trawlers typically got stranded. There, he took apart the boats and brought back the steel for his turbines.
By the time of his death in 1938, Bjarni Runólfsson had built 116 farm-run hydroplants near the southern coast of Iceland. Most of them created 5 to 20 kilowatts of energy, which was enough to offer lighting and cooking abilities to the farms. A few bigger plants were able to provide heating as well. The turbines typically relied on streams of water falling from a mountain nearby. On his own farm, he constructed a freezer and a slaughterhouse, allowing him to store almost 200 carcasses at once. Within years, Vestur-Skaftafellssýsla went from a place barely habitable to the nation’s leader in harnessing energy.
Bjarni Runólfsson's pioneering spirit is even more impressive considering that hydropower had not been around that long when he bought the textbook. The first hydroelectric project was constructed in 1878, where a single lightbulb was powered in Northumberland, England. A few years later, a handful of hydroelectric projects sprang up in the U.S. to power mills and provide lighting.
Bjarni’s work was the start of a larger trend, as the use of hydroelectric plants increased exponentially worldwide in the 20th century. After the construction of the Hoover Dam and Grand Coulee dams, 40% of American power was produced by moving water in 1940. Encouraged by economic and population growth following World War II, Europe, the Soviet Union and Japan built large state-owned facilities into the 1970s. Nonetheless, implementation began to stagnate in the 1980s and 1990s in the U.S. and Europe, after studies showed that dams can have a detrimental effect on local ecosystems. However, hydroelectric power remains a significant electricity source in countries such as China and Brazil, and some believe that it will have an important role to play in meeting future energy demands. Today, hydroelectric power is still responsible for 16% of the world’s energy.
The act of farming requires a deep pragmatism and the ability to make do with what is around you. Converting stranded fishing boats into a groundbreaking energy source for the community ranks up there. Today, many agricultural journals hold contests that feature the most clever inventions by farmers. Examples often include easier ways to put tires on silage pits or to make using a headchute easier. If Bjarni Runólfsson was around today, I’d be curious to see what he came up with, as well as how many boats disappeared in the area.
