At an industry trade show, a Canadian salesman tried to convince me of the benefits of small portable nuclear reactors for power generation in Greenland. I narrowly avoided breaking into laughter, but failed to avoid a broad smile. Yes, Greenland’s population is scattered over many small, remote communities, which are potentially suited to such technology. But still, this man knew rather little about his market.
Aside from considerable resistance to nuclear anything in Greenland, Greenland is also covered in a gigantic melting ice cap; there is no shortage of running water. As a result, more than seventy percent of Greenland’s power is hydroelectric, and they’re aiming for one hundred percent.
A few weeks ago, together with my family, I visited the hydropower plant south of Nuuk on its twenty-fifth anniversary. I am told that one can visit any time really – not just on an anniversary – as long as one of the two operational staff are free for an hour or so. But in order to do so, you need your own boat and it’s a two hour sail from Nuuk. So I guess they don’t have so many drop-ins.
On our visit, we walked down a long, dark, wet tunnel, emerging into a startlingly bright rocky cavern full of thrumming machinery. Our quietly spoken, but bright-eyed Faroese guide thrilled my husband with numbers and statistics about the massive pounding generators. And although I understood only a fraction of the engineering marvels that he effused about, I was nonetheless thrilled by the degree of his enthusiasm. But I did take away some key facts.
One: the hydro-lake is slowly being drained because Nuuk is growing and increasing its power consumption – a future solution is being investigated.
Two: there is a very long cable linking the hydropower plant with Nuuk. Because that cable has to cross a rather wide fjord, it is, in fact, the longest unsupported power cable in the world. The unsupported stretch is more than five kilometres, starting at over a thousand metres on one side of the fjord, dropping to twenty metres above the water in the middle, and back up to over a thousand metres on the other side.
Three: in the winter, they clear the ice from the cable with sliding knives and explosives. Cool.
Somehow it seems only right that in Greenland – where the effects of rapid climate-induced changes are being so keenly felt, and where the people depend critically on the living marine resources that are increasingly at risk from those changes – renewable energy should be such an obvious and simple solution.
