Renewable Energy and Fuel Cell Cars in Iceland - 2

It will take a while. So far, there is just one joint-venture hydrogen filling station, and just two Daimler fuel-cell vehicles on the picturesque roads. But the Smart-H2 project has just taken delivery of 10 hydrogen-burning Toyota Priuses (converted by the American company Quantum). Some of them are destined to be rented to paying customers by the Icelandic branch of Hertz.

I took a ride, and, well, they drive like Priuses. One stalled mysteriously while in a journalist's care, but for the most part they're proving reliable.

Jón Björn Skúlasson, general manager of Icelandic New Energy, at the country's hydrogen station in Reykjavik. (Jim Motavalli photo)

Icelandic New Energy was formed in 1998, joining the University of Iceland, Daimler, Norsk Hydro and Shell. It ran three Daimler fuel-cell buses until earlier this year, and plans to have as many as 40 hydrogen-powered vehicles on the road by 2009. A whale-watching boat is soon to get electric power from a fuel cell. It's a start.

There are only 60 gas stations in Reykjavik, and if just 20 of them offered hydrogen the city would be ready to go. With an abundance of electricity, making hydrogen is the easy part. What's hard is scrounging hydrogen vehicles, most of which are million-dollar prototypes spoken for in test programs around the world. It's a guess when commercial fuel-cell vehicles will be available, which is why the optimistic timeline on the wall of Reykjavik's hydrogen station is falling behind a bit.

I am shivering on a balcony at Iceland's Hellisheidi geothermal power plant. Hellisheidi when fully built will produce 300 megawatts of electricity from its giant Japanese turbines, and 400 megs of heat for homes and factories. The surreal construction scene below me is enveloped in what looks like dirty coal smoke, but is in fact clean steam. When done, the plant will produce 24,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year, compared to millions of tons from the average coal plant.

Although the best I can do in my geologically challenged home in Connecticut is run a geothermal heat pump, California, Utah, Alaska, Nevada and Colorado are all rich in geothermal resources, and only just beginning to exploit it. Iceland's skilled geothermal experts have taken their own country's industry about as far as it's going to go, and startups designed at exporting that expertise (to Europe, Asia, North America and beyond) are bubbling with almost as much energy as the country's restless volcanoes.