I'M NOT THE ONLY ENERGY TOURIST on Samsø. Some 2,000 turbine peepers visit the place every year. The island has become a training ground for experts from Thailand, China, Europe, and America, including a group from the University of Virginia. Demand is so great that the town government is helping build a conference center (out of sustainable materials and in the shape of a Viking longhouse) to accommodate the eco-wonks who want to glean the island's secrets.

The week I'm here, so is a delegation from Ireland

After a day, the Irish delegates are awed. "These lads here are light-years ahead of us," says Eugene Houlihan. "We don't have a clue. Cheesus," he says. "We are ashamed to listen to the Danes. Cheesus."

and Scotland. We all watch a former vegetable farmer named Søren Hermansen give a PowerPoint presentation at an old seaside mansion, surrounded by the sound of lapping waves. After a brief demonstration of a Barbie-doll-scale toy hydrogen car—it works, sputteringly—we step outside. The lulling view is broken only by a passing Russian oil tanker bound for a place that is most decidedly not Samsø.

If this is the Fantasy Island of the greenie set, then Hermansen is its Ricardo Montalban. Instead of white suits, though, he wears denim, and it's not hard to picture him in one of those Norse helmets with horns. His ancestors probably wore them, because his family has lived on Samsø for at least ten generations. Part miracle worker, part gracious host, he directs the European Union–backed Samsø Energy Office and has been with the renewable-energy project since its beginning. A part-time rock musician—he plays bass in a band called, fittingly, the Generators—Hermansen has earned the public trust over nearly a decade of meetings, tours, and ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

In addition to orchestrating the development of Samsø's centralized heating plants, which efficiently warm 1,000 residences, he convinced hundreds of retirees to put government-subsidized renewable-energy systems in their homes. In the meantime, among other projects, he's shepherding farmers into a rapeseed-growing cooperative and overseeing a grant from the EU to install a hydrogen-production test facility to power vehicles. Hermansen is determined to extend the green dream to transportation, the one dirty sector left. "The vision is that all the gas stations on the island would pump plant oil," he says.

After a day, the Irish delegates are awed. "These lads here are light-years ahead of us," says Eugene Houlihan, who works for a building-supplies cooperative in Inis Oírr. He shakes his fair head. "We don't have a clue. Cheesus. So we're here to learn how to apply it," he says. "We are ashamed to listen to the Danes. Cheesus."

Well, hey, I point out as we sit in a pub overlooking the picturesque harbor, at least Ireland signed the Kyoto agreement. America can't even accept a cap on greenhouse-gas emissions. "True," he says, brightening. But then Anthony McCarthy, an energy consultant from County Wexford, pipes in: "If Americans get serious about alternative energy, they will fucking pass everybody." He peers deep into his Carlsberg. "That is the beauty of America."