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.
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)
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.
When you're driving the highway from the international airport at Keflavík to Reykjavík, the first big building you see is a massive Rio Tinto aluminum smelter: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ATHxAWRLKLMf8Gbh8
> one of the biggest producers of refined aluminum
I googled for it. It is not even in the top 10. Norway is #8. My guess: Hydro power from Norway fjords is much cheaper than geothermal power from Iceland.
> 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.
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.
Alcoa actually owns 26% of the output of a hydro electric dam on the Columbia River(Rock Island Dam) directly adjacent to it’s mothballed factory. It’s not that they can’t get power in the US cheaper, it’s that they can resell that power at higher profit than running a smelter with that power.
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.
