ICELAND SET TO BECOME FIRST GREEN LAND
Via TheCarConnection.com...
A cold drizzle marked the first day of the Icelandic summer, but that did little to faze Jon Bjorn Skulason, the managing director of Icelandic New Energy. It's just "a little bit of energy pouring from the sky," he declared during a ceremony outside the capital city of Reykjavik on Thursday. He had reason to be bullish considering he was helping dedicate the industry/government consortium's first hydrogen fueling station. The facility will serve as the heart of an aggressive fuel cell vehicle test program set to begin mid-year, when three city buses - four percent of Iceland's total mass transit fleet - go into operation. The vehicles are being provided by DaimlerChrysler at a cost of about $1.2 million each, though the automaker and other project partners, as well as the European Commission, are kicking in funds to help out. Eventually DCX plans to put 30 hydrogen-powered buses into test fleets around Europe, and possibly more around the world. But there's a lot of interest in Iceland, not just because it is first, but because of the island nation's stated goal of becoming the world's first hydrogen economy. Currently, 72 percent of Iceland's energy comes from renewable sources, primarily geothermal and hydroelectric. It has plenty of excess capacity for electrolyzing - or splitting - water to extract hydrogen, which could eventually serve as an alternative to petroleum in Iceland's cars, trucks, fishing vessels, even aircraft. In fact, the country's leaders see the opportunity to become a sort of hydrogen alternative to OPEC and could easily export enough of the lightweight gas to serve a country the size of Denmark. "The world is watching," said Jeroen van der Veer, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, which built the hydrogen generating and fueling station on the outskirts of Reykjavik. -Paul A. Eisenstein
Iceland's Hydrogen Future by Paul A. Eisenstein (9/4/2000)
Can a whole nation convert over to fuel-cell power?
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