You know, I have no idea. I guess not. Now that's surprising. I've toured Intalco. They claim to be the largest consumer of electricity west of the Mississippi. If it takes 13 kWh per kg of aluminum and Intalco produces 230 million kilos of aluminum a year - that would be 3 billion kWh. Dayum. Iceland consumes 17.5 billion kWh. In other words, the houses in Iceland are a flyspeck.Iceland’s three aluminium smelting plants are especially power hungry and the biggest electricity consumers in the country.
So if a continuous flow, that'd be 2000 MW steady for 8760 hours/year. Where I am, overnight load is about half of the daytime peak. Assuming a symmetric load shape, low load overnight would be about 1350 MW and daytime peak about 2700 MW. On a global scale, Iceland is a rounding error. On an Icelandic scale, an 18 MW load could increase their load about 1%. It's surprisingly significant.Iceland consumes 17.5 billion kWh
Good point. I wonder if using "consumes energy" limits the narrative. I searched and found: Today, 99 percent of Iceland's electricity is produced from renewable sources, 30 percent of which is geothermal (the rest is from dams—and there are a lot of them), according to Iceland's National Energy Authority.Oct 20, 2008 Which then leaves Iceland consuming 100-99 = 1% of their energy each year in the form of nonrenewable energy. It's much better than, say Venezuela, doing the same crypto mining while burning dinosaur bones only.