Because I am all over all things Iceland, when I heard about Zac Efron in Iceland, I went and watched episode one of his new Netflix series, Down to Earth (actually, I had no idea about it but my sister watched it and took sufficient interest to be able to make noises at me that I was able to interpret as “Gullfoss”). All men with a certain level of fame, and it only has to be a fairly low one, eventually make a travel documentary. This one is interesting in that it focuses on energy – and food, of course. A foodie travel documentary is a must on all men’s media CVs.
His companion – for a travel/foodie documentary requires banter and repartee and therefore two people – is Darin Olien, a “wellness expert” who believes in superfood shakes and plant-based detox. He’s ok. He eats the lava bread.
We start off at Laugarvatn Fontana, my favourite Icelandic spa (which Zac implies is on the edge of a lake on the Reykjanes Peninsula. It’s not. I also take issue with his description of Fontana being “built on the coast” because while it’s on the edge of the water, it’s a lake and lakes aren’t coast). But we don’t go in the water – I do hope Zac & Darin went in after the cameras were switched off because Fontana is high on my Iceland recommendations list. They’re here to harness the power of the Earth to cook a meal – lava bread and hard boiled eggs, both cooked in the boiling sand on the lakeside. Baking bread is one of the few activities in Iceland I haven’t done – whale watching is another.
The recipe is rye, flour, sugar, baking powder and milk, mix it all together, pour it in a dixie, wrap it up firmly in clingfilm and then bury it for twenty-four hours. Then they drop a few eggs in the blue-grey bubbling water oozing out of the sand and put it together. Siggy, their guest here at Fontana, also produces butter and some trout straight from the lake. And normal people can do this! It’s not running this summer because of COVID-19 but in normal times, they run a twice daily geothermal bakery activity where they make and taste the bread.
Next is the Bridge Between the Continents. This is right back on Reykjanes, just ten minutes away from the airport. I don’t think they filmed it in this order. It’s clearly late afternoon when they’re at Fontana and this looks earlier in the day and is much worse weather – in fact, it matches the Blue Lagoon pretty well later on in the episode. The Blue Lagoon being only ten or twenty minutes from here.
They want to make the point about tectonic plates and how they’re responsible for the heat and the energy that we see in this episode. Now, I don’t personally believe that this bridge actually spans two plates. I think it’s just a small fissure that represents the two plates but I don’t know that for certain and it makes the point better than the boulder hop on the way to Þríhnúkagígur or even than Þingvellir, where you stand on the edge of tall cliffs that are literally the edge of the North American plate. The edge of the Eurasian plate is on the other side of the rift valley where you can’t see it. So the Bridge Between the Continents looks good, at least.
Well, it’s not the most picturesque bridge ever but it makes a good point.
Once we’ve covered plate tectonics and their role in geothermal energy, we’re off to Hellisheiði Power Station, on the edge of Þingvellir. This is also visitable to tourists – at least, their Geothermal Energy Exhibition is. I’ve been here too but I came on a Golden Circle tour. There are three main stops on the Golden Circle tour but individual guides will add other things in so you might visit Kerið (an explosion crater) or some geothermal greenhouses or Faxi (a waterfall with a salmon ladder) or a farm restaurant or whatever else your guide thinks is interesting and accessible that day. And in 2012, my tour decided to go to Hellisheiði.
Wikipedia shows six geothermal power stations in Iceland. The two you’re likely to see as tourists is Nesjavellir, which you’ll see on the left on the road between Reykjavik and Hveragerði, and Svartsengi, which is right next door to the Blue Lagoon. Hellisheiði is the third biggest. It drills boreholes down deep into the Earth, to where water leaking through the bedrock is so hot and under so much pressure that it can stay liquid at far higher temperatures than could ever be possible at the surface. As it comes up the borehole, the pressure drops and it turns into steam, which – as per every power station – is used to turn the turbines that generate electricity. The water, now merely at surface level boiling temperature, is used to heat up fresh sulphur-free spring water before it’s returned to the ground.
Something I’ve not seen before, though, is that Hellisheiði takes the gas by-products – carbon dioxide & hydrogen sulfide, mainly – and reinjects them into the rock, where they mineralise and form new rocks. The sample of new rock they show looks like grey salami – it’s basalt fused with little pieces of the solidified petrified gases. The hydrogen sulfide makes something that looks like iron pyrites, fool’s gold. The petrified carbon dioxide is clear and white and looks like a game tile from science fiction. Of course, the real semi-natural stones don’t form nice squares, they form tiny pieces scattered through the bedrock. It’s interesting and could have huge implications for energy and climate change in the future.
Then they go back to the hotel in Reykjavik for some hot-and-cold fun. First a dip in the freezing cold tub followed by jumping into the 39° hotpot, then a hot-and-cold stone massage. I know we’re talking about a Hollywood star and therefore of course they’re going to do it at the Hilton Spa but this would have worked really well at Laugardalslaug, the big public pool in Reykjavik where they have the tubs and I’m fairly sure they have the treatments.
I’m not sure how the visit to Omnom, the local chocolate manufacturer, is related to energy but it’s all locally and sustainably sourced. I’ve not tried Omnom. I’ve not been impressed by Sirius, Iceland’s national chocolate, and while Omnom’s looks good, it also looks quite expensive and I’m not keen on flavours unless it’s orange or mint. Liquorice, caramel, salted almonds, popped barley, dried fruit – not my sort of thing. But they do a couple of milk chocolate varieties and I’ll try them vs Sirius next time I get to Iceland.
Now we’re back up in the vicinity of Laugarvatn to visit Gullfoss to talk about hydro power. They claim this is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Iceland, which it is but in the context of the Golden Circle rather than in its own right. They talk to a young man who they think is a tour guide but in fact is from the Environment Agency rather than a tour company. He’s been a ranger at Gullfoss only since the summer and doesn’t know any of the answers to tourist questions but strictly speaking, I think his job is keeping an eye on tourists and looking after the area and the nature rather than informing and educating. He originally approaches them just to tell them to be careful of the cliff edge. Zac and Darin (and the editor) turn him into an extremely awkward sequence of silences and “I don’t know”s.
The point they want to make here is that Gullfoss was once the centre of a huge hydro power debate when a landowner in 1907 wanted to dam it and build a power station. His own daughter, Sigríður Tómasdóttir, is one of Iceland’s earliest and most notorious environmental protestors and the main reason this waterfall is still a tourist attraction. Zac notes that “with 10,000-plus waterfalls and just ten hydroelectric plants, it feels like a pretty good ratio” of power stations to waterfalls. But not all of them are anywhere near big enough to build a power station on. Seljalandfoss is lovely but it’s fairly small and you’d hardly get enough electricity to power a bike lamp, for example.
And then he goes on to blather about water in motion producing negative ions which are “known” to have all kinds of positive effects on mental health and… I’m not in that camp. I’m so not in that camp.
Now we’re taking a trip back through Laugarvatn – you can literally see the village! – to Ljósafoss hydro power station just south of Þingvellir, probably immediately after their trip to Fontana. You hear a lot about the geothermal power stations because they’re a novelty and the clouds of steam are highly visible but actually, 75% of Iceland’s electricity is generated by hydro power, mostly on big glacial rivers in the Highlands. Ljósafoss is the oldest one owned by Landsvirkjun, Iceland’s National Power Company but it’s fifth lowest of sixteen in terms of capacity and annual production but then the Sog is hardly a huge violent glacial river.
Zac and Darian go into the exhibition and try out the energy demonstrations. You’ll see things like this in a lot of museums – London’s Science Museum has them, I’ve played with them in Portsmouth’s Submarine Museum. I tend to think of them as being to illustrate more abstract concepts for children rather than aimed at educating adults but Zac and Darien seem to enjoy them. They demonstrate how much energy – eg turning a wheel – it takes to light up a small bulb or run a gaming system and it has a wall called “you are energy” where constant pressure rather than initial hit lights it up brightly. The power station itself occupies fifteen storeys underground. I’m not convinced this tour is open to the general public. They walk from the shiny white power station into a cave where the water flows right through the basement and marvel at how the building is built right up against the rock so they’re effectively one entity. And then somehow they walk through a tunnel and emerge at ground level. I can see it goes gently uphill but does it go gently up fifteen storeys?
“Harnessing the elements, like wind, sun and even ocean waves, are things that everyone could be doing more of.” Zac, I like your summer-child solve-the-energy-crisis thinking but it’s actually not quite as easy as that. Sure, we can put solar panels on our roofs but in my part of the world, we don’t get enough sun to be wholly dependent on them and they’re not in a lot of people’s price range. A farmer might be able to put up a windmill or two on their land but putting one up in my back garden isn’t an option and it wouldn’t produce enough electricity to run my house anyway. And normal people simply can’t go and harness ocean waves. It’s all nice and idealistic but it’s not an “everyone doing their bit” possibility.
I’m not interested in their visit to Dill Restaurant back in Reykjavik. I’m a simple soul and… this isn’t to my taste. This is one of the best restaurants in Iceland, as Zac phrases it, and I’m sure the chef is inspired and inspiring but the first course is a pile of dry leaves from his back yard with two sticks poking out of the top, bearing a Wotsit-sized morsel of either swede and carrot for vegan Darin or carrot wrapped in dung-smoked “bacon cut of lamb” for Zac. Next is reindeer, beetroot and dulse tartare with discussion on sustainable reindeer hunting and food waste or beetroot, dulse & blueberries, both served on what looks like a slab of rock or perhaps a broken paving slab. The pudding – and I’m sure an expensive pretentious place like Dill doesn’t call it pudding – is a rutabaga sorbet with crowberries, toasted yeast & dill. I would be at the supermarket for hamburger rolls, plastic cheese slices and a packet of chive-flavoured shar-shaped crisps. This segment was not for me.
And of course, we finish up at the Blue Lagoon, although Zac & Darin meet the creator of Resource Park, which is a consortium of companies that make use of the two geothermal power plants. The main one is the large private energy company that owns and operates the two plants. Then there’s the Blue Lagoon, the clinic, the R&D centre, the local hotel, a biotech company that works in a greenhouse, a fish drying plant that uses the geothermal power to do the drying, a separate fish farm and a carbon recycling plant. The Blue Lagoon, as I regularly remind the internet, is filled with the waste water from the power station next door, and it started as merely a cooling pool that someone asked permission to bathe in. Twenty or so years later, following some study and research, they finally opened the spa. The water is full of sulphur and silica and other minerals that turns out to be really good for the skin (although appalling for hair!) and the psoriasis clinic has grown alongside the tourist pool.
Zac and Darin finally get to go in the Blue Lagoon right at the end, over the credits, and of course they’re in the new extension, the private exclusive expensive end that I can’t even dream of going in. It’s been nearly three years since I was last in the Blue Lagoon.
So they’ve tried to make this a series about the environment and sustainability and all that, so we’ll let them off for things like “flying around the world in the name of environmentalism” and driving a big 4×4. One of the themes they attempt to labour in this episode, at least, is using what would otherwise be waste products – using the cooling water for healing and touristing, using all of the reindeer, cooking with geothermal heat, generating electricity with the water that rushes around. The Blue Lagoon shots are overlaid with a monologue about making change and working with nature and it’s well-meaning but perhaps better aimed at big companies and entire nations. As I said above, I can’t simply create my own mini renewable power station to power my lights and laptop but I entirely agree that the UK can’t keep being reliant on coal-fired power stations. On the other hand, the UK simply doesn’t have the geography to produce geothermal power and I’m pretty sure we can’t provide 75% of our energy needs through hydro power stations on major rivers. Iceland is because it has the geography and it has relatively lower power requirements. Iceland’s entire population is about the same as the population of Croydon.
But a huge amount of its electricity actually isn’t used by its people – it runs the aluminium smelters. Smelting is one of Iceland’s top three industries, the other two being tourism and fishing. It requires a lot of electricity so the raw materials are shipped to Iceland and they use their plentiful cheap green electricity to do the smelting and then the processed aluminium is shipped out again. If you drive from the airport at Keflavik into Reykjavik via the main road along the north coast of Reykjanes, you’ll pass a long green building getting on for half a mile long – that’s one of the big aluminium smelters. So when Zac and Darin ask “what are you really doing with all this electricity?” and joke about secret aircraft and UFOs, they’re right. This is all about heavy industry and it would be nice to have seen them discover this, instead of going away believing that Iceland is generating clean power for the good of the planet.
And Icelanders are heavy car-users. A lot of the time, you need a big car – these two don’t actually need a 4×4 for the road conditions they encounter and neither do 90% of tourists. But if you’re going to drive up onto a glacier, if you’re a glacier guide or a scientist, you need a suitable vehicle. Go to Gullfoss, go to the upper car park and see if that converted missile carrier is sitting in the corner. Public transport is limited. There are city buses in Reykjavik but long-distance buses only run in the summer and generally only one way on each route per day. There are no trains. Tectonically unstable ground doesn’t suit rails, although New Zealand seems to do fine. So Iceland imports a lot of fuel. When I first went in 2011, there was a hydrogen pump at a fuel station on the way out of Reykjavik but the place is long gone by now. Electric cars are good but the batteries don’t last all that long yet and there certainly aren’t chargers every hour or so along the Ring Road yet. In the UK, electric cars don’t make a lot of sense – they’re still running on coal, it’s just the gases are being emitted somewhere where you can’t personally see it, because the electricity still comes from our coal-fired power stations. In Iceland, a car run on geothermal and hydro electricity is running on genuinely pretty clean electricity. But they don’t yet have the infrastructure to make them practical.
So I’d have liked to see the heavy industry and the vehicle fuel issues mentioned but it’s nice to see Iceland on TV and it’s nice to see something other than “this place is cool and I can’t pronounce it!” or music video backdrops. Verdict? I’m not going to bother with the other episodes.