18 // End User
FROM LAVA TO AMMONIA: AN ICELANDIC DISTRICTHEATING SAGA Ves tma n naey ja r ’s dis tric t heatin g sys te m has b ee n r u n nin g o n lava a n d ele c tric b oile r s. It will now u se a 10 M W a mmo nia heat p u mp sys te m. — By Charlotte McLaughlin
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celand’s Vestmannaeyjar once had “one of the weirdest district heating systems ever designed” – it ran on lava from a volcano, Ragnar Ásmundsson from Varmalausnir – Heat RD tells Accelerate Europe.
The story begins in 1973, when the Eldfell volcano erupted on Heimaey (‘Home Island’), the largest of the Vestmannaeyjar ('Westmen Islands' in English), an archipelago, municipality and group of 15 islands in southern Iceland. The lava came in handy. “They had lava flowing through half of the town. So obviously they left. Then they came back and thought to use the heat from the lava for the district heating system,” explains Ragnar, who was in charge of installing a new ammonia heat pump that services over 4,200 inhabitants in the municipality. After the eruption, residents were able to exploit the lava for 10 years, says Ívar Atlason, regional manager of district heating company HS Veitur’s Vestmannaeyjar operations. The young Ívar fled Heimaey for the mainland back in the 1970s. “By 1988 the heat from the lava was gone,” Ívar says. “We’ve been using the electric boiler to heat up water [for residents’ homes ever since]. Now [we’ll use a] heat pump to heat the water.”
Guzzling electricity Unlike lava, which provided more or less free energy for 10 years, electric boilers are costly – especially for district heating. “We were using an electric boiler to produce vapour and a heat exchanger to heat up the circulation water, [but] the electricity price [keeps] going up," Ívar observes. "It always goes up. Electricity prices are not going down.” Energy costs have steadily increased in Iceland amid demand from heavy industries such as aluminum smelting and production of ferrosilicon, which consume nearly 80% of all the electricity generated in the country, according to Orkustofnun, the National Energy Authority of Iceland. “It’s been evolving in that direction. The district heating companies always have more of a struggle to get the same low prices they used to have,” says Varmalausnir – Heat RD’s Ragnar, whose company provides different heating solutions across the land of ice and fire. “Heat costs just a quarter of the price of electricity. You’re downgrading the value of electricity if you turn it directly into heat,” Ragnar argues. In most of Iceland, district heating companies – most of which are owned by local government – are able to exploit natural geothermal energy just under the surface. “ They tried to look for geothermal [in Vestmannaeyjar] and there are many wells there. In my former job I participated in a project there some years ago,” Ragnar says. "But we couldn't find a good source. The island is more or less porous. You have seawater running through it, so it cools down any geothermal system that could possibly survive there.” Accelerate Europe // Spring 2019