Power Source

Fulbright Scholar Kathy Dhanda immerses herself in Iceland's energy

From the Winter 2024 issue of Sacred Heart University Magazine

From an observation deck at the base of a moss-laden volcano, Professor Kanwalroop “Kathy” Dhanda studies her view of Iceland’s largest geothermal power plant. Sacred Heart’s newest Fulbright Scholar watches steam—not smoke, but turbine-rotating steam that is 99.63% water—rise and resolve into the cool, clean air. Even though Hengill, the volcano, hasn’t erupted for 2,000 years, it vents elemental energy.

Several small geodesic domes dot the power plant’s landscape, fascinating Dhanda. Within each dome, an experimental process mixes environmental carbon gas emissions with water, solidifies the mixture inside deposits of bauxite and drives the resulting material deep underground. The newly solid carbon emissions can be sequestered safely there, scientists from the company Carbfix predict, for thousands of years.

For Dhanda, who researches and teaches sustainable economic practices, this power plant’s live panorama is a feast for her intellect.

“I am totally geeking out right now,” Dhanda gushes as she continues her tour of a geothermal exhibition at the power plant. “I studied this stuff for years, but to see these theoretical ideas actually being implemented as cutting-edge technologies, that is pretty amazing for me.

”Dhanda does not bridle her enthusiasm, ever. Why should she? It’s what got her here as a Fulbright Scholar studying Iceland’s energy supply chain. That journey continued this morning in our little Kia Picanto as Dhanda and a photographer-editor team from this magazine followed the roads and power lines 50 miles east from Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital and Dhanda’s home for four months, to Hellisheidi Power Station. Once dependent on foreign oil, Iceland now generates much of its power for its electricity and commercial needs by drilling into the Earth’s crust to access hot, pressurized geothermal fluid—as on display at the base of Hengill.

With continued development of geothermal as well as hydropower, Iceland’s government aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2040, thereby mitigating some of the impacts of climate change on its sensitive Arctic environment. Deepening Dhanda’s research inquiry is the “tension” she has identified between these climate-friendly goals and the island’s climate-unfriendly aluminum smelting industry, for which Dhanda believes the public appetite is dwindling.

“Iceland stands at a crossroads, facing the tension between development and conservation. There are lessons to be learned. All resources are limited,” says Dhanda, the associate dean of faculty affairs & research at Sacred Heart University’s Jack Welch College of Business & Technology. “The real issue is what price are we, as a society, willing to pay for extracting these resources?”

Dhanda’s Arctic studies-focused Fulbright coincides with increased geopolitical maneuvering in the region among world powers such as Russia, China and the United States, who join Iceland among the eight countries with territories in the Arctic Circle. Climate change’s inevitable effects have already melted the polar ice cap enough to raise sea levels and alter the Arctic shipping lanes that those nations jockey to control. At a recent, high-profile Arctic studies conference in Reykjavik’s ultramodern Harpa concert hall, 400 international attendees, including scholars, politicians and business leaders, packed a room as Dhanda previewed her research.

Sacred Heart’s first Fulbright grantee since 2008, Dhanda will publish a case study at the University of Iceland this spring that asks how Iceland should “balance its future path of development.” This academic, educational piece will benefit business and MBA students when she returns to Fairfield.

Land of Elemental Power

Iceland heaves with raw, elemental power: earth, air, water and fire. Volcanic rock roughens the shores of Reykjavik and accents the architecture of its city hall and famed cathedral. Further in-land, geysers dampen the air and coat the ground with sulfurous puddles. Iceland sees an eruption from among its 32 volcanoes about once a year, after which torrid rivulets of lava ooze down their mountainsides. Ancient glaciers envelop more than 10% of the surface of a nation whose northernmost border skirts the Arctic Circle. Steam wafts from uncountable vents in the earth. Summer is nightless. Winter is all but dayless, a darkened stage for the northern lights. More than a millennium since the Vikings arrived, Icelanders have still settled only two percent of an island roughly the size of Kentucky.

Amid all these wonders is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a fissure between shifting tectonic plates. Tectonic plates and ocean ridges are rarely visible on land. (The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is the longest mountain range on the planet, underwater except for where it bisects Iceland.)

After the geothermal exhibition, we piloted our Picanto to the famed Golden Circle scenic route, where we hiked the rift between the two continental plates at Thingvellir National Park.

Once we hit the trail, Dhanda set a pace we could not easily match. Gravel crunched under her boots ahead of us as we plied the continental fissure. To our left was North America. Eurasia was to our right. We followed Dhanda through this seam in the Earth’s crust. Miles beneath us, a mantle plume pumped magma upward—a perfect brew for sustainable energy extraction on this geothermal island.

“I’m attracted to bizarre places,” Dhanda says.

As a young girl, Dhanda followed her father, a botanist who collected rare mushrooms, on multiday treks through the Himalayas.

2024“I would hike for miles and run a fever. At night, I would rest and take some aspirin. The next day, I would be ready to hike again,” Dhanda says. “I think my love of hiking in the mountains probably comes from those early experiences in the Himalayas. It just centers you in a weird way that you don’t even think about it.”

Before we returned to Reykjavik, Dhanda led us to a hydrothermal field where an explosive hot spring called Strokkur popped off every five minutes, to our measureless delight. The site’s name, Geysir, gave us our word geyser.

Immersion is the Way

Extreme as their land is, Icelanders are eminently sensible. When we encountered Dhanda only weeks into her stay, she had long since embraced their lifestyle. She frequented the Kaffihus Vesturbaejar across from her apartment, where she occasionally glimpses iconic singer-songwriter Björk. She made weekly visits to her local outdoor pool. “I’m not a big swimmer, but I will go to that pool every weekend because that’s what local Icelanders do,” she says. (Inexpensive and crowded outdoor pools in each neighborhood include a frigidly cold tank, steam room, hot tubs of varying degrees of heat and a large, warm lap pool. Many Icelanders swim in these public pools at the end of each day.) She quickly applied her language lessons at the University of Iceland (Háskóli Íslands) to punctuate her speech with Icelandic terms and pronounce local place names with relish. “I do think immersion is really the way to understand a country,” she says.

She also tried some unusual dishes, including puffin, Iceland’s adorable, unofficial mascot.

“I did not like it,” she says. “I tried whale and did not want to repeat it. But I think it’s important to try.” She adds, parenthetically: “I’m not trying shark because I’ve heard shark is just absolutely cringey, and I don’t want to go there.”

Her enthusiasm led me toward some immersive experiences of my own: a visit to a public pool, including a couple of rides down a big blue water slide; an afternoon at a local soccer match, a 2-2 draw between visiting Vestri from the northwestern fjord lands and host Knattspyrnufélag Reykjavíkur; and a 45-minute drive north to Akranes, a provincial fishing village, to admire its lighthouses and an abandoned fishing ship candlelit by the sunset. (But, sadly, no Björk.)

“Fulbright Orphans"

Dhanda and her husband live in Wilton. Her kids are in high school and college. But her settled situation is new to a once-itinerant scholar who grew up in the Punjab region of India and emigrated to the U.S. for college. After she studied in Texas and Massachusetts, she taught in North Dakota, Oregon, Chicago and then at SHU, with shorter stints in Auckland, Paris and Luxembourg. On her Fulbright, the worldly Dhanda quickly became a bulwark in Iceland to many of her international colleagues, a social anchor, a visitor who has made a home there for others, including family and friends visiting from the U.S. Several times a month in her airy apartment, she hosts dinner parties for her “Fulbright orphans,” as she calls them—younger, longer-term fellows who, perhaps, remind her of her charges at SHU. Having sourced ethnic spices from a local supplier in Iceland whom she found on Instagram, Dhanda offers her dinner guests a range of Indian dishes and beverages to complement them.

On our final night in Iceland, Dhanda invited photographer Eric Torrens and me to one such dinner party at her home away from home. We talked through a lovely evening with Dhanda and two of her fellow Fulbright Scholars, the younger of whom she considered one of her “orphans.” After many reluctant refusals of continued hospitality, we took our leave and set out into the night to make our final attempt to see the aurora borealis. Eric and I had timed our mid-September visit for the chance to see this dancing display of solar particles burning up in the Earth’s magnetic field, but after nearly a week of monitoring the night sky for visibility, we now assumed that we would board our flights home to the U.S. the next day having missed out.

Aurora Borealis

The two of us wandered for an hour in the Reykjavik night before reaching the rocky shore outcropping where Dhanda had first steered us on our arrival five days earlier. It was nearly midnight. I began to feel around the shoreline boulders in the darkness when I heard Eric cry out in awe.

I looked up.

The incipient shimmer of the aurora borealis now stretched across Reykjavik’s high-contrast night sky. Eric quickly rigged his camera and tripod to capture the ever-changing show of light. Like a luminescent shape shifter, the waltzing northern lights delivered an unforgettable, 45-minute display of supernatural wonder, creating uncanny shapes I struggled to comprehend: a mountain ridge, a surreal hallway, a cityscape, a gleaming eye, a distant tower, a spinning spiral, a crashing wave.

Shocked and giddy, we had to share the moment with our host. Eric texted several of his best exposures to Dhanda, the aurora’s energy glowing green in an unblemished sky. “Stunning!” she replied, taking in the view with her customary, unbounded excitement.