Iceland’s energy company eyes the Arctic — and a transformational Greenlandic dam

Landsvirkjun has been involved in every hydropower station operating in Greenland today. That relationship stretches back 30 years. Now Iceland’s national power company wants to build something that would make all of them look small.

“Greenland is essentially our oldest port of call outside Iceland,” said Kristján Guðmundsson, Landsvirkjun’s Director of International Projects. “That is where our international story began.”

In 2024, Landsvirkjun formally adopted a policy on international operations, with the Arctic — particularly Greenland and Canada — at the forefront. The goal is for 10% of the company’s revenues to come from foreign operations, with 100 MW of installed capacity abroad by 2035 and 350 MW by 2045. Guðmundsson makes clear those figures are a starting point.

“If things go well,” he said, “might be looking at a higher proportion by 2050.”

The strategy is built on a simple premise: Landsvirkjun has spent 60 years building and operating power plants in some of the world’s most demanding conditions, and most of its European peers have stopped doing that altogether.

“What is unique about Landsvirkjun is that compared to sister companies in the West — say Austria or Australia — no new plants have been built there in decades,” Guðmundsson said. “Everyone with development experience has long since retired. Meanwhile, over the past 20 years, Landsvirkjun has doubled its installed capacity. That is very unusual.”

That expertise is now in demand internationally. In March 2025, Landsvirkjun Power and Growler Energy established Vinland Power, a new joint venture pursuing renewable energy development in Newfoundland and Labrador. The company is also exploring participation in a hydropower project in Scotland in partnership with other Nordic energy companies.

“We are not simply a financial investor like a pension fund,” he said. “We want to choose projects where we can influence the outcome, apply our expertise, and increase the value of the project.”

A principle runs through all of it. “We never go into any venture alone,” Guðmundsson said. “You always want local partners — people who know the conditions, know the politics, are willing to invest alongside you.”

Tasersiaq — a game changer

The centrepiece of all of it is a project called Tasersiaq, a hydropower site in western Greenland that has been under study for over 15 years and remains one of the largest undeveloped opportunities of its kind left in the Western world.

It sits north of Nuuk, two to three hours by boat with no roads connecting them. The nearest town is Maniitsoq, population 2,000. The reservoir is 150 kilometres inland.

At around 700 MW, Tasersiaq would be comparable in scale to Iceland’s Kárahnjúkar plant, one of the largest hydropower stations in Europe. Greenland’s entire existing hydropower capacity is around 90 MW. One dam would produce roughly eight times that.

“You simply don’t find this elsewhere, not in the Alps, not in Iceland,” Guðmundsson said. “There are very few opportunities of this scale and efficiency still available in the Western world.”

A second nearby reservoir could push total capacity toward 1 gigawatt. Climate change, counterintuitively, is expected to strengthen rather than threaten the project. As glaciers melt, inflows to the reservoirs increase.

“Production goes up over the lifetime of the plant,” he said. “That is built into our modelling. Over a roughly 100-year lifespan, output only increases.”

The plant alone would cost an estimated $2 to $3 billion. Landsvirkjun is participating in the Greenlandic government’s tender process alongside two much larger international partners, holding a minority stake of around 10 to 20%.

The biggest unresolved question is who buys the power. Green ammonia was the original frontrunner for many of the consortia involved, a post-Ukraine energy shock idea that gained momentum quickly and collapsed just as fast. It simply proved too expensive. Data centres, aluminium smelting, and a subsea cable to Canada have all been discussed as alternatives. Under the tender, any consortium must bring an energy buyer with them.

“You don’t build a plant like this without someone buying the power,” Guðmundsson said.

Greenland, he argues, is well suited to whatever that buyer turns out to be. The logic is the same as Iceland’s own industrial model. “In Iceland we export electricity in the form of aluminium, silicon, data,” Guðmundsson said. “The electricity stays, the product leaves. That is just our export — it is electricity. The same would happen there.”

The price of ambition is stability

Massive infrastructure investments of this kind, multi-billion dollar and multi-decade in nature, demand one thing above all else: political predictability. A 100-year dam is only viable if the rules of the game are not rewritten halfway through. Guðmundsson is direct about this. Infrastructure of this kind, he argues, needs to be able to operate undisturbed long enough to pay for itself. If that cannot be guaranteed, the risk is simply too great and you do not proceed.

Greenland has changed the rules before. When ownership laws were amended to require 100% Greenlandic control of the fishing industry, foreign investors were forced to divest. Guðmundsson acknowledges the precedent but is measured about the risk of the same happening to an energy project of this scale.

“Anyone who nationalises a multi-billion dollar investment is essentially removing themselves from the rule of law among their neighbours,” he said.

The scale alone, he argues, makes it an unlikely outcome. But he is direct about where the real danger lies.

“The greater risk,” Guðmundsson said, “is that instability means this never gets built at all.”

The Tasersiaq tender has already stalled and restarted multiple times. Alcoa held an exclusive licence on the site around 2012 and walked away. Legislation enabling foreign investment, needed after a recent law change barred foreigners from owning property in Greenland, was expected before the spring parliamentary session, but political uncertainty has slowed progress.

Since returning to the White House, President Trump has repeatedly and forcefully pushed for the United States to annex Greenland, rhetoric that has injected fresh uncertainty into an already complex investment environment. For a project that requires years of regulatory groundwork and billions in committed capital, that kind of geopolitical noise is the last thing developers need. Guðmundsson, however, sees it differently.

“The most natural response for Europe, Denmark, and Greenland,” he said, “is to demonstrate that investment is happening and things are being built. I personally believe American attention will accelerate infrastructure development, not deter it.”

Tasersiaq has been on the drawing board for 15 years. Whether it finally gets built may depend less on engineering than on Greenland’s political will. Landsvirkjun, at least, is thinking in the only timeframe that makes sense for a 100-year dam.

“When I say long term,” Guðmundsson said, “I mean 10, 20, 30, 40 years. It’s a generational question.”

For Landsvirkjun, Tasersiaq is one piece of a broader Arctic ambition. The company has spent three decades advising on Greenland’s power infrastructure, built its reputation on operating in glacial valleys and geothermal fields that would defeat most utilities, and doubled its installed capacity at a time when European peers stood still. That history, Guðmundsson argues, is not just context. It is a competitive edge. In the race to develop the Arctic’s vast and largely untouched energy potential, Landsvirkjun believes it has something that money alone cannot buy: the knowledge of how to actually build there.