The steam and geysers rising from the valleys of Tuscany inspired Dante Alighieri’s vision of hell in The Divine Comedy. Centuries later, they’re providing Italy with an inexhaustible supply of renewable energy. Larderello is home to the world’s oldest geothermal power site, where Enel Green Power turns heat released by the Earth’s core into electricity.

The facility started powering light bulbs in 1904 and now the whole site generates more than 5% of the nation’s clean power production. The same could be done in countries across Europe, which thirsts for green energy to uncouple itself from fossil fuels and become climate-neutral by 2050. The US government posits that geothermal could meet global energy demand twice over, and BloombergNEF calls it a “possible game changer” in the business of renewable power.