> 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.
