Meet the Energy Industry - Landsvirkjun & windpower
This week Iceland School of Energy students attended a talk given by Margrét Arnardóttir, the project manager for wind power for Landsvirkjun, as a part of the conference session "Meet the Energy Industry", which will be a weekly event for students in the MSc programmes at Iceland School of Energy. Margrét gave a talk on the state of wind power in Iceland and the ever increasing importance of the energy source in Iceland's energy portfolio.
Landsvirkjun recently finished installing two 900kW pilot wind turbines in an area called Hafið near Búrfell hydro power plant. As a plan to gain public acceptance for Iceland's first big scale wind power project, Landsvirkjun decided to give the public access to real time data from the wind turbines as well as allowing access to the turbines during summertime. The plan succeeded and today there is over 80% acceptance rate within the public.
The wind turbines have been in operation well over a year and a half and the results have been outstanding, reaching a capacity factor well above the world's onshore average. Landsvirkjun is currently investigating the possibility of installing a 200MW wind park in Hafið, where the former two wind turbines are.
When answering questions after the talk, Margrét talked about the high potential for wind power in Iceland, infrastructure is very good and the combination with existing hydro plants offers even more benefits to wind power. Any further instalments of wind power would include much bigger wind turbines as there is great potential for wind power in Hafið.
Landsvirkjun and Iceland School of Energy have had an excellent collaboration in recent years as students from Iceland School of Energy have been doing internships for Landsvirkjun and other research.
We thank Margrét for an extremely interesting talk and hope for a great further collaboration in the coming years.
Special thanks to Landsvirkjun for letting us use their picture.
