Nukissiorfiit is a government-owned
Greenland
Greenland ( kl, Kalaallit Nunaat, ; da, Grønland, ) is an island country in North America that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Greenland i ...
energy
In physics, energy (from Ancient Greek: ἐνέργεια, ''enérgeia'', “activity”) is the quantitative property that is transferred to a body or to a physical system, recognizable in the performance of work and in the form of hea ...
company. Nukissiorfiit means "where energies are created". The company supplies most of Greenland with electricity, water and heat. Most of the electricity is produced by hydro power such as the
Qorlortorsuaq Dam. 70% of Greenland's energy is produced by renewable sources. The rest is produced by oil burned plants. The company employs 400 people, spread on 17 cities and 54 villages.
There is a lot of potential yet unbuilt hydro power. However the rugged terrain, the fjords and the usually short distance between the ice sheet and fjords means there are many short small rivers, meaning benefit per power plant is smaller. A port and a road must be built for each one. In the winter rivers are frozen, so dams are needed to create water flow during winter.
Sometimes power lines must cross fjords with spans like the
Ameralik Span The Ameralik Span is the longest span of an electrical overhead power line in the world. It is situated near Nuuk on Greenland and crosses Ameralik Fjord with a span width of at . It was built in 1993 by the Norwegian company NTE Entreprise (Nord- ...
, the world's longest span. This means that costs are high and therefore there was a lot of hesitation on replacing oil fired power plants with hydropower.
Rising oil prices supported decision to build more hydro power plants.
List of hydroelectric power plants
References
Greenland hydro capacity increases with new plant
/ref>
References
Companies based in Nuuk
Energy companies of Greenland
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