faces

 

The Geothermal area Krýsuvík

Geothermal and Hydroelectric are two very different types of electrical generation…With geothermal you’re always producing the same amount of electricity - it’s what we call a base load production. Our capacity is 175 megawatts. We’re producing that every hour of the year. The benefits of a hydro plant are that you can store the electricity - you do that by building a reservoir. If you don’t need the electricity you can turn off the hydro dam for a few hours. That’s a lot more difficult to do in a geothermal plant. If you go from 157 megawatts to 120 megawatts you’re not storing the steam, it just blows out into the air. They’re both good options - you don’t have to buy anything from anyone else, like coal, and they’re completely sustainable. They’re both good, geothermal is better as a base load production, hydro is better if you want to store electricity and have more control.

Aluminum uses 70% of the electricity in Iceland. Icelandic homes use around 5% of the electricity, regular businesses use 15%. The cryptocurrency miners have gone from zero to about 130 megawatts - the total capacity in Iceland is 2700 megawatts. So they are using 6 or 7%. They’re in the top bracket of what we have. It’s always a little bit skewed by the 70%, but if you take out the huge players, it’s large. Homes turn the lights off during the day and during the night and they use less sometimes. But the data centers are base load users. They always use the same amount every hour of the year.

Jóhann Snorri Sigurbergsson
Director of Business Development, HS Orka

Iceland is a good place to mine crypto for a number of reasons, one is energy prices, they’re definitely favorable, though they’re not the best you can get. You can get cheaper energy in other countries, but there are other factors, the second is the climate which works with us here — we’re capitalizing on our bad weather. It’s not a question of it just being cold, but the stability of the climate and the temperature. In the summer it may go over 23’ C two or three days. But our average temperature throughout the year is between 2 and 7 degrees -- that’s cold enough to draw that air into the data center and cool your equipment. That’s a big factor in launching a mining operation or a data center in general. And the political climate, we are one of the safest countries in the world, there’s political stability, and then with the electrical grid, all of these things make this an ideal place to set up.

Daniel F. Jonsson
Mining Specialist, Icelandic Blockchain Foundation

Humans have in many ways taken over this planet. We’ve started use our technology, our tools, our abilities, our skills to manipulate the natural environment to our needs and it turns out that the interaction between these technologies is causing massive environmental harm. Now, I’m not anti-technology at all, but I do feel that there is a very, very strong positive obligation of those who wish to develop those tools ... to be respectful to the environment.... Unlike all of the other technologies we interact with, The earth did not come with a maintenance manual and we have to learn to interact with the earth in a way that tends to its needs as it tends to ours.

Smári McCarthy
Member of the Icelandic Parliament, Pirate Party

Bitcoin was the original and the most widely used cryptocurrency based on blockchain but when it came out in 2014 Icelanders weren’t allowed to use it because of the capital controls that came as a result of the 2008 worldwide economic crisis. So we developed Auroracoin. It’s one of the most recognized “national” cryptocurrencies still in existence. It offers an alternative to central banks’ operated and manipulated fiat currencies. In this new digital era we no longer a need a central authority to maintain ledger transactional support. Though it has become a foreign concept to many, cryptocurrencies like Auroracoin allow you, as the asset holder, sole control to the access of your funds.

Michael Hannes
Auroracoin team

 

Since i was born there have been six, or seven, eruptions, but this is the one I remember, this one felt different. This was the volcanic eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. I was working at a small country hotel before all the tourists had arrived. There were not many guests. I remember the ground shaking in the days before the event. When it erupted we had ash raining from the sky — it would cover the cars. I looked at my arms and at my face and thought I had developed freckles, but it was ash.

I was walking between two buildings when i first saw the ash. And in the night we would see the orange glow in the distance and few weeks later i went hiking there with my father, who is a journalist, and we drove through a massive desert of ash, it was black and gray and you couldn’t see more than two meters in front of you. And we saw these sheep huddled together, as close to the sea as they could get, they were covered in ash and they were quiet and still — trying to get as far from the volcano as they could. We walked on new land that had come from the volcano and we knew that we were the first people to have stepped on this land. We climbed to the top and we could see where the earth had cracked beneath us and we could see the bright glow of the lava, flowing, 50 meters below us. It was one of the scariest moments of my life, knowing that it was alive beneath us.

Ingunn Lára Kristjánsdóttir
Poet, director

Eyþór: There’s a reason behind the endless cycle of trying to make a cryptocurrency that’s harder and harder to mine -- because if you were to make a new cryptocurrency that worked like Bitcoin, the technology behind Bitcoin has already been boiled down and there are ASICS that are very efficient at finding it. But to get people to mine your new cryptocurrency it needs to be easier, so people are coming up with new algorithms, and the main reason is to prevent ASICS from being made....


Elías: Which is one reason now that you have coins that, for example, try to use as much memory as possible, so the main cost becomes memory chips and you can’t make memory chips any cheaper than whoever’s already making them, Samsung or Hynix ... so even if you invent an ASIC you still have to pay just as much for the memory chips as Intel or Nvidia or whoever.


Eyþór: It is slowly becoming not worth it at all to mine Bitcoin. And that’s the reason it’s so popular in Iceland, because the electricity is so much cheaper.


Elías: It’s already not worth it, after the bubble burst. As Bitcoin was going up and up in value everyone was buying equipment and Bitmain was upping production and now you’re spending more on electricity than you’d get back in Bitcoin and all those ASICS get thrown away or recycled for aluminum.


Eyþór: This is why GPU mining is becoming more popular again, because of how quickly the ASICS become obsolete, it’s still not an obvious choice, but there are people for whom the ability to mine almost any given coin is an advantage, because the GPU is generalized, not specialized. It’s not efficient, but people are willing to throw away the benefits of specialization for generalization, especially with the rise of alt-coins....


Elías: ... Both Litecoin and Etherium have ASICS now.
Eyþór: I didn’t know that -- as soon a crypto becomes popular enough there will be people who are willing to start a company to invest in finding a very technical hardware solution to mining a coin which is much, much more efficient.


Eyþór Máni
Programmer, roboticist


Elías Snær Einarsson
Cyptographer, inventor of TimeChain

Our position on crypto is the same as it’s been on the production of metals — it’s the same situation — what is happening right now with data hasn’t been addressed properly, they’re building new data centers in the North of Iceland. There need to be discussions with the small municipalities who, in the near future, will not have enough energy, so instead of prioritizing the municipalities, the logic so far is we’ll build this data center and give them energy and then when the municipality needs power they’ll say we’ll just build more dams. So that’s the danger of building up these high consuming energy industries, even if it is an order of magnitude lower than aluminum smelters but if we make these data centers, using all the energy we have, that means for normal growth of society we’re going to have to damage nature both biological and geological diversity that might not be wise.

Pétur Halldórsson
Chair of The Icelandic Youth Environmentalist Association

Iceland doesn’t have an energy policy, but we’re writing one. At the recent conference they didn’t mention the word “wilderness” and I thought that was a little bit wrong, because our resources are wilderness. It’s very special in Iceland to have this much wilderness. I felt they talked a little bit too much about the economic growth of Iceland, but of course we have to think about that too. I’m very happy that they’re making a policy and I’m very glad that we’re allowed to comment. I’m always trying to understand more the opinions of others. I come into this with a very environmental mind. I’m studying geology, I love hiking, and I was working at a tourist place in the highlands last summer where I got to see all this wilderness being trampled on by tourists, and I think we need to invest in this wilderness that we have. And then I talk to the head of a power company and he says, “we have to use all of these resources that we have because it’s making our lives so much better and, of course, he has a point.

In Iceland our energy is green and renewable, but we “trade” that power and its green stamp to other countries. Iceland is an island so there’s no real energy being imported or exported. But we sell the stamp so people in Europe can say, “we have renewable energy,” and in Iceland we will say, “OK, we have your nuclear energy.” So, on paper, if I look at my power bill it says it’s made from nuclear energy and carbon burning energy, but it’s not.

Þorgerður Maria Þorbjarnordóttir
Youth Environmentalist, University of Iceland

Atli Óðinsson with his home cryptocurrency mining rig made of six ASUS graphics processing units (GPUs). Using GPUs instead of ASICs (application specific integrated circuits) allows miners to easily switch between cryptocurrencies, although GPUs are not nearly as powerful.

Kyle Cassidy

Kyle pic.jpg

I feel my job in a collaboration like this is most often to take abstract ideas and represent them in a visually compelling way that will capture people’s attention in a short amount of time and then direct it at a particular area of research, sort of like ringing a bell and then pointing.


In this case — how do you tell the story of infrastructure, and energy, and a magic, invisible kind of computer money? The way that naturally evolves for me is through people. I can’t really show you the story of an excited electron, traveling from the Earth’s core through wires and homes and technology, but I can introduce you to people whom it’s influenced along the way and hopefully create compelling portraits of them.


I was lucky enough to be able to study under Mary Ellen Mark (B.F.A. ’62, M.A.C. ’64) when she taught here. She saw everything through people and she made friends everywhere she went that helped her tell these stories. I think she would have approved of my photos here, though she definitely would have said I should have shot them on film and probably with a view camera.

 

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