Deep freeze: Iceland's hydrogen push cools off

A hydrogen Prius fills up in Iceland. (Photo: Jim Motavalli)

Brrrr. It can get very cold in Iceland, especially when there’s one of the world’s most severe financial crises underway. Iceland’s banks didn’t just fail, they blew up spectacularly, with a huge debt owned to small investors all over Europe.

 

I’ve been to Iceland twice, and found it both very hospitable and ultra-sophisticated, with a lifestyle akin to Switzerland — and similarly expensive. I sat in an Internet coffeehouse (see below) and sipped $10 cappucino while people around me talked, in four languages, about Noam Chomsky and renewable energy. I can’t imagine what it’s like now that the Icelandic crown has lost half its value, inflation has reached 19 percent and job loss is epidemic.

 

Both times I visited Iceland I checked in on its budding hydrogen infrastructure (as well as its abundant geothermal, of course). The tiny country of just 300,000 people wanted to have the world’s first hydrogen energy infrastructure, and with Shell set up a filling station in Reykjavik and started a three-year very successful experiment running fuel-cell buses, then a small fleet of Toyota Priuses altered to run on liquid hydrogen (more problematic, because of the cold weather). The plan was to eventually run Iceland’s vital fishing fleet on hydrogen (only one boat runs partly on it now).

 

At the Shell station, a large graphic meter showed Iceland’s progress in reaching its fuel-cell goals. Even when I was there, it had fallen a little behind the targets, but now the 2030 transition date has been moved to 2040.