Iceland Renewable Energy Percentage (2026 Data)

Iceland is the closest thing on Earth to a fossil-free economy. About 90%¹ of the primary energy the country uses is renewable, 99.98%² of its electricity flows from hydro, geothermal and wind, and the hot water that heats nine in ten homes comes straight from volcanic ground. It was not always so: in 1940, 69.6%¹ of the country's energy was imported coal, and homes in Reykjavík were heated by oil furnaces.

This page assembles the full picture from official sources - Orkustofnun's 80-year energy balance, Eurostat's electricity statistics and Statistics Iceland's usage tables: the headline percentages, the 1940–2020 transition, the plants behind the numbers, who actually consumes the electricity, and the one sector where fossil fuel still rules.

How much renewable energy does Iceland use?

The headline Iceland renewable energy sources percentage is 90.0%¹ of primary energy use in 2020 - the latest year of Orkustofnun's long-run energy balance. The mix behind that number: 70.4%¹ geothermal, 19.3%¹ hydropower, and small contributions from biofuel and the country's first wind farms; the remaining 10.0%¹ is almost entirely imported oil for ships, aircraft and vehicles.

Three official numbers describe the same energy system, and each answers a different question:

• Primary energy (Orkustofnun): 90.0%¹ renewable in 2020.
• Electricity (Eurostat): 99.98%² renewable in 2024.
• Gross final energy, EU definition (Eurostat): 79.3%³ renewable in 2024.

The 10.7-point gap between the primary and final-energy figures is not a contradiction - it is mostly transport. The EU measure counts petrol, diesel and aviation fuel in the denominator, and Iceland's cars, fishing fleet and aircraft still run on fossil fuel. The electricity grid, by contrast, is effectively carbon-free all year.

From coal to geothermal: 1940–2020

Iceland's energy transition is one of the fastest ever recorded. In 1940¹, imported coal covered 69.6%¹ of primary energy and domestic renewables just 12.4%¹. Twenty years later the renewable share had reached 32.2%¹; by 1980 it was 65.7%¹; by 2020, 90.0%¹.

The switch had two engines. First, hydropower grew steadily from the first 0.01 MW⁴ plant in 1904 into a national grid. Second, and more dramatic: the oil crises of the 1970s pushed the government to finance geothermal district heating in every town - a programme so successful that geothermal overtook oil as the main heating source within a decade⁵. Coal vanished from the energy balance entirely: the last year with any recorded coal use was 2019¹, a rounding error of what it once was.

Peat, which heated turf farms for centuries, disappeared even earlier - its last appearance in the statistics is 1945¹. What remains of fossil energy is oil, and its share keeps shrinking as the car fleet electrifies.

The speed of the change is worth pausing on. A country that heated its capital with coal smoke in 1940 had, by 1985, an energy system in which renewables were the norm and fossil fuel the exception - a full energy transition completed inside one working lifetime¹. Few nations have managed anything similar; most are still at the beginning of that road. The Icelandic case is often studied precisely because it shows what the destination looks like: not a poorer, colder economy, but a larger one, running on a resource it had been standing on all along.

Iceland electricity sources percentage: a 99.98% renewable grid

In 2024 Iceland generated 19,606 GWh² of electricity. The split:

• Hydropower: 13,604 GWh² - 69.4%
• Geothermal: 5,986 GWh² - 30.5%
• Wind: 12.7 GWh² - 0.06%
• Fossil fuels: 3.3 GWh² - 0.017%

Iceland renewable electricity percentage

The renewable share of generation has been above 99.8%² in every year since 1990 - the grid was never significantly fossil. Even in 1990, when geothermal generation was only 300 GWh², hydropower kept the renewable share at 99.87%².

Iceland geothermal electricity percentage

Geothermal's share of generation grew from 6.7%² in 1990 to 30.5%² in 2024, as high-temperature fields at Nesjavellir, Hellisheiði, Reykjanes and Þeistareykir were harnessed one by one. Geothermal's advantage is stability: it runs at full power through freezing winters and dry summers alike, complementing hydro's seasonal swings.

Wind is the newcomer. The first grid-connected turbines started turning in 2013⁴ (the Hafið and Búrfell test farms), and installed wind capacity reached 72 MW⁴ by 2019 - small, but growing fast.

So where does all this power actually go? The answer surprises most visitors, and it is the reason Iceland's per-capita numbers look the way they do.

How many geothermal plants are in Iceland?

Iceland has 9⁶ operating geothermal power plants with a combined listed capacity of 757.4 MW⁶ (2020 register). The largest, Hellisheiði, alone delivers 303.4 MW⁶ - it is one of the largest geothermal plants in the world.

Iceland geothermal energy percentage

Geothermal's share of primary energy - the number most searches call the geothermal percentage - reached 70.4%¹ in 2020, the highest such share of any country. Geothermal is Iceland's workhorse twice over: it generates 30.5%² of electricity and heats the overwhelming majority of buildings.

Beyond power and heat, geothermal steam warms greenhouses that grow tomatoes and bananas, dries fish stock, keeps swimming pools at 39 spawning degrees⁷ - and the total draw of geothermal water tripled from 5.8 million m³⁷ in 1998 to 19.3 million m³⁷ in 2018.

Iceland district heating geothermal percentage: nine in ten homes

About 90%⁵ of Icelandic homes are heated with geothermal energy through district-heating networks - the outcome of the 1970s programme that converted one town after another from oil furnaces to volcanic heat. Reykjavík alone pipes hot water to more than 100,000 households from the Nesjavellir and Hellisheiði fields⁵.

The district-heating systems use far more geothermal water than the power plants do: industry and space heating together drew 19.3 million m³⁷ of hot water in 2018, while services - swimming pools, snow melting and spas - took 1.8 million m³⁷. This direct use of heat, invisible in electricity statistics, is the quiet backbone of the Iceland renewable energy percentage.

The contrast with the rest of Europe is stark. In most countries, heating a house is either a gas-filed bill or an efficiency project; in Iceland it is a plumbing connection. Reykjavík's streets stay ice-free in winter because hot water runs under the pavement⁵, the outdoor pools are open at midnight in January, and the domestic hot-water tap has a faint mineral smell that newcomers notice for a week and locals no longer smell at all. Nine in ten homes are heated by a volcano - a sentence that sounds like tourism copy and happens to be official energy statistics⁵.

Who uses 19,606 GWh? Iceland energy use per capita

Iceland generates more electricity per person than any other country: 51.1 MWh⁸ per inhabitant in 2024 - roughly three times Norway and about fifteen times the world average⁸. The reason is not profligate households; it is industry.

Aluminium: the giant customer

Aluminium smelters consumed 12,490 GWh⁹ in 2019 - 64%⁹ of all electricity generated that year. Ferrosilicon production added another 898 GWh⁹. Metal smelting is, in effect, Iceland's biggest export of renewable energy - embedded in ingots.

How many data centers are in Iceland?

Commercial registries list about 6¹⁰ data-centre facilities in Iceland (2025), and Statistics Iceland's electricity table shows computer server farms drawing 990 GWh⁹ in 2019 - about 5%⁹ of national generation, more than all the country's farms use. Iceland's cold climate, cheap green power and direct fibre links to Europe and North America make it a natural home for computing; the first wave of centres mined cryptocurrency, the current wave trains AI models¹⁰.

General use - every household, shop, office and public building combined - accounted for just 3,375 GWh⁹ in 2019. Iceland electricity consumption per capita for ordinary life is unremarkable; the headline number is industry-driven. Measured as total primary energy, use reaches roughly 695 GJ¹ per person per year (2020) - also among the world's highest⁸.

There is a scale jump worth making explicit. One aluminium smelter potline uses more electricity than every home in the country combined; one data centre hall can draw as much as a small town. Iceland's energy statistics describe a nation of 383,726⁸ people, but its energy system was built - and is continuously resized - to serve continental-scale industry that happens to sit on a volcanic island. When a new smelter or server farm connects, national generation jumps in a visible step, which is exactly what the 1990–2024 generation chart shows².

120 years of capacity: the biggest dam in Iceland

Installed electricity capacity grew from 0.01 MW⁴ in 1904 to 2,923 MW⁴ in 2019: hydropower 2,096 MW⁴, geothermal 753 MW⁴, wind 72 MW⁴ and a residual 2.4 MW⁴ of oil back-up. The Iceland geothermal power capacity total of 753.2 MW sits inside that total, spread across the nine plants listed above.

Kárahnjúkar - officially the Fljótsdalur Power Station - is the largest dam in the country, a 690 MW¹¹ hydropower project in the eastern highlands completed in 2008 to power the Fjarðaál aluminium smelter¹¹. Its reservoir, Hálslón, is the largest lake in Iceland by volume. One dam alone represents nearly a quarter of the country's entire installed capacity, and its story - clean power, heavy industry, contested wilderness - is the story of Iceland's energy economy in miniature.

For a traveller, the engineering is part of the landscape. The ring road crosses spillways and high-tension lines that march across the empty east; the visitor centre at Kárahnjúkar explains how the dam sits in a valley carved by the very glacier that now fills its reservoir. One dam alone represents nearly a quarter of national capacity, and it exists, in the end, to export electricity as metal¹¹.

Where fossil fuels remain

Oil use in Iceland was 590,153 m³¹² in 2020 - up from 492,290 m³¹² in 1982 but well below its 2000s peak. The split explains why the EU-definition renewable share stays near 79%³ while the primary share reaches 90%: road transport burned 283,851 m³¹² (48% of all oil), international aviation and shipping took large shares that never touch the electricity grid, and the fishing fleet - the traditional backbone of the economy - consumed another large slice¹².

These are the last strongholds of fossil energy: ships, planes, and the remaining petrol and diesel cars. Each is now shrinking, but at very different speeds.

The stakes are practical, not just statistical. Iceland imports every drop of oil it uses - the annual bill swings with world prices and the króna, and in a bad year it visibly dents the national economy¹². Every fishing boat that can some day run on renewable-derived fuel, and every car that switches to the grid, is import spending converted into domestic renewable generation. That is why the electric-car curve in the next section matters more to Iceland than to almost any other country: for most nations EVs shift emissions between sectors, but for Iceland they eliminate them outright, because the electricity they draw is already 99.98% renewable².

The electric car shift

Iceland has one of the fastest vehicle electrification rates in the world. From just 15¹³ electric cars in 2012, the fleet reached 30,505¹³ battery-electric vehicles plus 23,805¹³ plug-in hybrids in 2024 - a combined 15.1%¹³ of all registered vehicles. Iceland EV adoption per capita stands among the top three markets globally, helped by cheap renewable electricity, high petrol prices and a compact national charging network¹³.

The consequence for the energy balance is direct: every petrol car replaced by an electric one moves consumption from the oil column - the country's last fossil dependency - onto an already-renewable grid.

The shift has a visible geography. Charging points cluster where tourists drive - the Golden Circle, the south coast, the ring road - because rental fleets turned electric faster than private ownership did. A visitor in 2024 could drive the entire ring road on electricity, a feat that was impractical in 2018¹³. The petrol stations did not close; they added chargers in the forecourt, and the energy flowing through them is now, almost entirely, volcanic.

Conclusions

1. Iceland runs on geothermal heat first and hydropower second: geothermal covers 70.4%¹ of primary energy, hydro 19.3%¹, and together they leave oil just one-tenth of the energy system - almost all of it mobility.
2. The 99.98% renewable grid predates the green-energy era: it was already essentially fossil-free in 1990, because Iceland never had thermal coal power at scale - the transition that other countries are attempting now, Iceland effectively finished in the 1980s².
3. The headline percentages flatter ordinary consumption: two-thirds of electricity goes to aluminium and other heavy industry, and per-capita figures (51.1 MWh⁸ per person) measure smelters, not lifestyles.
4. The three renewable numbers (90% primary, 99.98% electricity, 79.3% EU-final) differ because they count different things - the honest answer to "what percentage" depends on whether the question includes aviation fuel and shipping³.
5. The last fossil chapter is being written on roads and runways: a 15.1% electrified car fleet in 2024 is converting the biggest remaining oil use into renewable electricity, one charging port at a time¹³.