Western sahara

1. Significant part of Iceland’s economy is aluminium smelting (it’s 11th on the list of largest producers worldwide). Smelting is a very power-intensive industry.

That counts to overall energy consumption, and the small population (only ~330k) will result in a big number when we calculate per capita statistics.

Norway also has a large aluminium industry (about 1.5 times bigger in fact), but Norway’s population is 15 times bigger than Iceland’s.

2. Because they afford to. Wikipedia:

Iceland's electricity is produced almost entirely from renewable energy sources: hydroelectric (70%) and geothermal (30%). Less than 0.2% of electricity generated came from fossil fuels (in this case, fuel oil).

And:

The electricity supply and consumption were equal in 2008: 53.1 MWh per inhabitant when the European union (EU15) average was 7.4 MWh.

So they have great renewable production resources, why not utilize them and spend that energy? It’d be very difficult to export that electricity out of Iceland :)

3. Iceland produces extremely cheap electricity from geothermal plants, so they have a lot of very electricity consuming industry, such as aluminium plants.

.western sahara