I think battery buses have comprehensively won this one, to be honest. The biggest hydrogen bus fleet seems to be 35 vehicles; there are many BEV bus fleets in the hundreds and some in the thousands.
As a certified old person, I'm having trouble getting used to them. It is unnatural for a double-decker bus to pull up near-silently, and then move off smoothly when you get on. They are _supposed_ to vibrate violently and sound like they might explode at any moment; it's traditional.
(One of the bus route closest to me has a mix of fancy BEV buses and ancient diesel things from 2007, so I get an interesting selection. The other is mostly plugin hybrids, which are extra-disconcerting, as they're either silent or very noisy depending on mode.)
Where I live in the US my kids still take “cheese buses” to school that haven’t changed a bit. They’re diesel and you can hear them blocks away. When they pull up with their air brakes going off and their diesel shifting to idle it sounds like one of those spice miner things from Dune going to work.
If they ever go electric I’m not sure how we’ll know it’s time to take the kids out. Won’t be able to hear them coming.
You'll see the bus on your phone / home hub. Like ridezoom company does, you see whenever your kid checked in/out of the bus, and the bus itself on a map.
Hopefully in a way not tied to some commercial third party. People should be able to reliably go to public school without having to accept an arbitrary third party contract
My school district has some that are electric and they are quite noisy also. sounds like gear noise mainly, so they must have a reduction gear or some sort of transmission. They also still have air brakes so you hear the compressor and the PSSSSHT of air when they stop.
There's a similar danger with very quiet and/or electric cars where people near the school barely hear them coming and need more attention to keep themselves safe. Avoiding an older gas or diesel car is practically automatic as you can hear their speed, acceleration and location comparatively far away. I think EV manufacturers have added some sort of noise to low speed driving, but I haven't heard anything beyond one being right behind me
Maybe? Problem is either that it can be and is always disabled by driver, or it's very quiet, because I as a healthy man in their 20s, hear the pavement tire noise before any other noise, and the car is already really close at that point
In the EU and UK markets we don’t have an option to disable the AVAS noise generator.
It self disables above something like 10kmh when, as you say, tyre roar is the predominant sound a car makes (unless someone is revving the engine I suppose).
I had a silent moped and I had to pass near a school when kids finished school to get to university. It was absolutely dangerous if I was going at a sane speed (less than the limit). I learnt to get very slow before approaching that
> The biggest hydrogen bus fleet seems to be 35 vehicles
From the OP:
Cologne is one of the few relatively good news stories for hydrogen bus fleets. Regionalverkehr Köln (RVK) has become the largest operator of hydrogen fuel cell buses in Europe, with a fleet that reached 101 vehicles by late 2024 and is expected to grow to 160 by the end of 2025.
Germany has this recurring fixation on hydrogen for whatever reason. Even when Tesla had already long hit the mainstream market, German car manufacturers were still arguing against EVs in favor for hydrogen-powered cars that would theoretically be vastly superior. Well, we all know how that turned out for Mercedes, BMW, and the so on.
1. Germany's existing industrial capacity in terms of machining is a much closer match to hydrogen than to EVs. So in short it is wishful thinking mixed with a kind of self-preservation.
2. There seems to be a (somewhat unfounded) worry about energy storage when it comes to EVs, that many German technologists think is easier to handle and solve with hydrogen.
3. Germans culturally have a slight tendency to be fascinated by intricate and complex systems (which can also be a bad thing, see bureaucracy). Electric vehicles are conceptionally very simple, so the opposite. Hydrogen is a little bit more involved.
> Germany has this recurring fixation on hydrogen for whatever reason.
Hydrogen would enable a lot of very rich and powerful businesses to just pivot their business model a bit: the fossil fuel industry would have a destination for "grey hydrogen", pipeline owners could repurpose natural gas pipelines and bunkers for hydrogen, you'd still need refineries, tanker trucks to refill gas stations, you'd still need a nationwide network of gas stations in the first place...
In contrast, electric cars cut out a lot of the middlemen - once you got the car and a solar panel on your roof, you don't need _any_ of these industries any more. And you can't have that.
Yes - but Hydrogen vehicles have not proven to match or even beat EV's in a lot of key metrics that matter.
The biggest one is efficiency. 40% efficient is one figure I saw, versus 80% for EV's.
Yes, you can refill quicker, but time to "refuel" EV's is dropping precipitously as well, and it's just all around safer than tanking around highly combustible liquid gas.
Yes, to comply with paranoid hydrogen safety regulations cheaply. Also, note how the nitrogen is also being used to purge the entire line. Not just keep condensation away.
With more engineering work an intrinsically safe PTC heater could be certified and used just fine.
> Yes, you can refill quicker, but time to "refuel" EV's is dropping precipitously as well, and it's just all around safer than tanking around highly combustible liquid gas.
I always think of I, Robot where the protagonist gets on a motorcycle and immediately their passenger complains about how dangerous gasoline is.
While not for everybody, EVs have a really great property of being rechargable without much effort on your part. Just spend ~10 seconds plugging it in at home/work and then ~10 seconds unplugging it before your next time. Compared to waiting 20 minutes in line at Costco Gas to save 1 dollar.
Let’s not forget that the highly combustible liquid gas either needs to be stored with complicated cooling or under immense pressure (feel free to disprove me if I haven’t kept up with technology).
It can be done safely, but adds a lot of complexity on top of all the complexity needed for ICE engines.
Add to that the problem of “boil off” / “pressure venting”. There are some cars that empty their hydrogen tanks on their own in about 2 weeks. Just because of this issue.
There are new ways to store hydrogen, but these also need external (=from a separate battery) electricity to release it again and the process is slow and doesn’t provide enough amperage, so it can only be used to slowly charge another big battery that is required for these cars to be able to drive.
> Hydrogen vehicles have not proven to match or even beat EV's in a lot of key metrics that matter
Not yet. That is the nature of technological R&D - if we had the answers, we wouldn't be doing R&D.
AI before the last decade or so didn't beat other computer technologies in key metrics; should they have stopped developing it? Fusion power doesn't beat fission and other options in key metrics; solar didn't beat other sources in key metrics, including costs, ... - should humanity have stopped developing those things?
Toyota have been researching hydrogen cars since the early 90's.
Unless you can find a way to double their efficiency, and also get hydrogen down to close to 1:1 energy input to output it's just not an efficienct use of electricity.
It's not really fair to compare the efficiency numbers directly that way. The efficiency for hydrogen is measured from the hydrogen fuel directly, but the efficiency of the EV is measured from the wall. In reality, generating electricity is about 40% efficient at best. Yes, there's also an efficiency cost to refining the hydrogen, but if we compare apples to apples and take a ton of LNG and use it to power an EV versus a hydrogen car, I doubt the EV is going to get more milage.
Sure but you should be comparing the goal end state, a world in which out energy consumption and generation is green, that's the whole point of our move to bev's and hydrogen. So you should be comparing energy generation by green means to power a BEV or using green energy to produce hydrogen to power a hydrogen car. In that world the whole energy production and consumption chain is about 3x as efficient for BEV, which in my mind means there is no way hydrogen is going to be competitive and we shouldn't waste valuable resources on persuing it.
Hydrogen that doesn't come from the natural gas industry requires that very same electricity to be extracted from water - so they're operating from the same baseline in my efficiency calculations.
Not 100%. A lot in the US, for sure, less in the EU where renewables are a much larger part of the grid, as is Nuclear (thanks to interconnects from France).
And if we work at it that number might go the same way as Coal has within our lifetimes.
Efficiency is the standard red herring of the battery crowd - if efficiency was the prime motivation, we would all be driving bicycles and SUV or sportscars would not exist.
What are your other metrics? It’s an electric drivetrain with all advantages, but with the range of a gasoline car. Refueling cNG or LNG is standard in Europe, LH2 works just fine.
Google “burning Tesla” for that ridiculous take on why batteries would be inherently safe.
Except it's efficiency for the same class of vehicles we're talking about, so a bike is an apples to oranges comparison.
Proton Exchange Membrane is 40-45% efficient. Generating hydrogen from electricity is 70% efficient - meaning for a kWh of input electricity you get 3x the motive power from a BEV.
Then rolling out a refuelling network, with the high pressure tanks and expensive delivery mechanism, will cost far more than installing EV chargers - and that's before we even get onto the CURRENT penetration of EV chargers vs Hydrogen filling stations today (16 in the UK, 54 in the ENTIRE US, and not growing).
Hydrogen might be the solution to emissions from haulage, but BEV's are more than good enough compared to the ICE cars they're replacing for 99.9% of motorists needs. Yes, I'm ignoring the "I need to drive 1000 miles without stopping for fuel, rest, using the bathroom, come back when an EV can do THAT" people.
And on burning EV's, they catch fire at rates 20x lower than ICE cars, and LFP chemistry is far more resistant to thermal runaway.
Now lets talk cost - over the life of the car the BEV will be cheaper to run. Filling a Mirai in the UK will cost you around £90 for 400 miles of range. Charging my EV6 from 0 to 100 will cost me £5.50 for 300 miles of range. We're talking near orders of magnitude difference in cost per mile here - it's almost an unfair advantage that you can charge an EV at home off peak for next to nothing.
The average commute distance is 16 miles, and commutes over 50 miles are quite rare. This means a car with a range of 100 miles would cover the vast majority of use cases. Add some buffer for emergencies and cold weather, and even the 150-mile-range Nissan Leaf is more than enough.
You could also look at once-a-year road trips, of course: a range of 250 to 300 miles is becoming quite common for mid-level SUVs. With current technologies that means a charging session of 30 minutes or so every 3.5 to 4 hours - and it's only getting better. For context, the EU-based commercial truckers have a 45-minute break every 4.5 hours, because non-stop driving for even longer than that poses a safety risk.
BEVs aren't stuck in the 1990s anymore. Their range has significantly improved over the 60-mile range of the GM EV1. If 2025 BEV range is an issue for you, you are the outlier.
Efficiency doesn't matter when you're literally pumping energetic liquid from the ground. It does matter when you need to build 150% more solar panels to produce the energy to create your energetic liquid/gas.
I believe all Hydrogen vehicles are using proton exchange membranes still, which have roughly 40-50% efficiency.
And that's before you take into account that even the most cutting edge hydrogen refining processes are around 70% efficient.
So 1kWh of energy input (electricity) will net you 3X the motive power when used directly in a BEV than first being coverted to hydrogen, and then converted back into electricity.[1]
I don't think any hydrogen vehicle in actual use has a fuel cell (and if there's any, it's an incredibly rare exception). They are all internal combustion engines.
Proton exchange membranes are very unreliable and expensive. They are also not power-dense, one that powers a bus will be very large.
It‘s actually the opposite: some hydrogen cars that use combustion exist, but they are really, really rare. Almost all hydrogen cars that are road legal use a fuel cell in combination with BEV parts to smooth out/extend power delivery.
EV has been tried with great success since the moment the electric motor was invented. Trams, metros, trolleybuses. The bottleneck for free range was always the battery - which was solved by the mobile phones. The electronics industry had the money to invest into batteries because of the premium that people were willing to pay for even minor battery improvements. And the economy of scale pushed it down to where a battery pack was costing less than the GDP of Australia and so viable in a car.
Hydrogen cars will become available only when hydrogen is used as a temporary storage for renewable energy. But probably even there converting it to electricity in industrial scale fuel cell will make more sense.
> The bottleneck for free range was always the battery - which was solved by the mobile phones.
I wouldn't say solved here. Significantly improved into usability yes, but there are still big issues with batteries:
- their low energy density means it's essentially impossible to have a long range in a small car, every long range EV is necessarily quite large, yet still has a shorter range than a city car
- specific energy remains meh, contributing to weight inflation (though by no means the only factor here)
- low temperature performance remains dreary and something you have to manage (and possibly hack / work around e.g. if your car only does automatic battery conditioning)
- while I think fast charge times are a bit overblown as a single driver on long trips (because stretching / resting every 2-3 hours is a good idea anyway), if you have relief drivers and can relay they're a significant impediment
Not that I think hydrogen has any future mind. But EVs do have a lot of drawbacks. And the amount of power you need available to charge a bus fleet in reasonable time is significant if you do pure battery.
This is true but this analysis fails to consider why hydrogen receives so much interest, because similar reasoning could indicate we should be spending more on every other potential fuel source, including biofuels, and maybe running engines on cellulose.
And the fact that hydrogen is most popular in Germany and Japan should provide a clue.
These are countries with well established ICE car industries and therefore shifting to hydrogen provides the least disruption when it comes to their car manufacturing as well as infrastructure.
The disproportionately high interest in hydrogen is likely not being driven because of a belief in its future success, but likely more as a hope to continuing the status quo.
Right. But at some point, you should acknowledge reality. That's why I'm not currently trying to collect VC money for a new start-up on BetaMax recording technology.
Do you expect any problem to appear for batteries at the next century or so? What king of change do you expect on the future for it to not repeat the lessons we learned at the present?
Fossil fuels are on the way out because we do expect problems. Do you have something similar for EVs?
Efficiency is always a problem. EVs wouldn't exist if they weren't more efficient than ICE vehicles, but there is still a cost to EVs - power generation, manufacturing, waste .... A new technology could increase efficiency.
I'm surprised hybrids are so under-represented in this considerations.
Maybe I'm missing something but I would think at the scale of a bus, a hybrid is even more appealing than at the scale of a sedan.
Even locomotives and one or two earthmoving off-highway trucks have electric transmissions, making them series hybrids (With very small batteries not used for traction)
Hybrids are attractive when a short battery range is enough for daily use but you still do semi-frequent long-range driving. Rather than hauling around a heavy and expensive XL battery pack on your daily commute you haul around a tiny combustion engine. It's a great solution for people with range anxiety.
Buses have a completely different use case. They drive a well-known distance, and every day is practically identical. It is fairly easy to scale its battery pack to closely match the actual range needed. Running a true long-distance route like a Greyhound or Flixbus, which physically can't be battery-based yet? Just stick to diesel for now.
Hybrid buses were a huge win around cities before fully electric became viable and I expect they will continue to be important for rural routes.
Buses stop frequently so regenerative breaking is meaningful and crucially they avoid the horrible cloud of diesel particulates as they pull off. It was really noticeable as a cyclist. About 40% co2 savings over diesel in London.
I wonder if diesel electric locomotives are efficient at all.
I think the electric is for infinite torque to get lots and lots of cars moving. But to slow down, "electric" brakes are to bleed off power into resistor banks, not re-capture the electricity.
Meanwhile an electric bus actually has to be efficient, which means batteries and regenerative braking.
As I understand it, straight electric locomotives would use the 'dynamic' braking to send current back up the wires. Apparently this would make for entertaining economics-- a section of the rail network where most of the tonnage went downhill could produce a net negative power bill.
With diesel-electrics, there was nowhere to the braking power, so resistor grids were the order of the day. I wonder if it would be possible or worthwhile to outfit them with battery tenders to recapture the current with modern batteries and power-management circuitry.
> From Riksgränsen on the national border to the Port of Narvik, the trains use only a fifth of the power they regenerate. The regenerated energy is sufficient to power the empty trains back up to the national border.
The twist: these trains aren't connected to the grid. They use regenerative braking to charge batteries when carting ore to the coast, and the batteries power the trip back to the mine.
IIRC there are mine trucks set up similarly in some locations, they're loaded at the top, regen downhill, and that's sufficient to power them back up the hill when empty.
Some diesel electric trains now have large batteries and can recapture the braking power. Though this is seen as a bonus; the primary goal of the batteries is generally to be able to switch off the engines in station to reduce local diesel emissions.
They can (and do) have room if they're designed from the ground up for it. The engines for diesel electric trains are so large because they need to be sized to drive power for peak energy (usually accelerating and hills). If the energy can be stored, the engines for hybrid locomotives themselves can (and are) smaller.
So far you're only seeing hybrid locomotives for trains that stop/start a lot (shunting trains and passenger rail). The cutover for freight will likely take decades because A) locomotive lifetimes are measured in decades and B) longer range freight usually has less stop/start, making it's economical delta less.
Yeah, that could be a problem. Even modern trains often now have multiple locomotives (including in the middle of train sets) to deal with range/weight, so who knows. There’s no reason hybrid trains can’t have multiple locomotives or battery bank-cars for those situations.
As I mentioned above, the freight lines are very conservative with new tech and amortize equipment over decades (often to the point where many rail cars are unsafe, especially outdated tank cars), so even if it exists we won’t see it in practice for awhile yet.
I mean, hybrid buses are common. Dublin Bus’s fleet is about 900 conventional diesel, 300 plug-in hybrid, a trivial number of light hybrid (they never committed to these), and 150 electric. But hybrid buses also don’t seem to have a future (at least as urban buses); at least here the plan is to buy no more diesel or hybrid buses; the current fleet will age out.
>Regionalverkehr Köln (RVK) has become the largest operator of hydrogen fuel cell buses in Europe, with a fleet that reached 101 vehicles by late 2024 and is expected to grow to 160 by the end of 2025.
I mean, right from the second section of the article.
I'm not really sure there is any place for a discussion - you would need a whole new infrastructure for hydrogen powered buses, while keeping a lot of the downsides of fossil fueled air breathing vehicles (eq. air filters filters regardless of if you burn the hydrogen or use it in fuel cells).
With battery buses - you might need to slightly beef up the local transformer and installs some new wires and that's it.
Or even better, do what the city mass transit company does here in Brno, Czech Republic - get trolley busses with batteries, that charge from the overhead wires while on the way, so they can then continue to serve additional destinations past the terminus of road electrification.
It is also super handy for any road work, they just automatically stow their collectors and then once again under wires, deploy them. There is usually a small trough around the wires at this spot, guiding the 2 collectors to the 2 wires. As a result, the driver does not have to leave the vehicles when connecting or disconnecting from wired power.
While I agree with you; just to be clear it's not "slightly" beef up the local transformer. If you imagine a medium sized depot with 50 buses stabled at any one time, and 300kW chargers (I believe you could go higher), that's 15MW peak which is not trivial to add in many cities overnight. You really need some sort of HV connection for that kind of load, the existing local LV distribution grid isn't going to handle it.
I do definitely think green hydrogen has a big future ahead of itself though. We still use an absolutely ridiculous about of H2 in industrial processes (especially fertilizers).
Europe could produce huge amounts of fertilizers in the summer in the future with all the excess solar and wind it has via this method.
It seems to me hydrogen skipped a step - focus on replacing hydrogen feedstocks in industrial processes directly with green hydrogen, instead of replacing stuff up the chain that can be done with batteries directly anyway.
Any decent sized installation will use current clamps at the local transformers to scale the charging rate up and down depending on other users in the local area.
Ie. in the evening whilst everyone has their ovens on, charging might only be 3 kW per bus, but then at 1am when everyone has gone to bed, it can be 30 kW per bus.
Using that approach, you can get far more capacity out of old infrastructure.
Unfortunately, some utility companies aren't amenable to that approach, and instead insist you pay to upgrade the infra, since to them it's a free upgrade.
Not really. Buses need to be charged whenever, not just overnight (it creates enormous logistical problems otherwise). A typical bus route running 5am to midnight say is not going to last with one charge, depending on length.
Also, if it is a cold night and everyone leaves electric heating/heat pumps on, what happens then? Noone can get to work the next day?
Regardless most urban transformers are not going to have 15MW of overnight capacity spare even on a good day. The largest LV substations might be 30MVA in the UK at least - they won't just have half capacity suddenly free.
Lots of busses are split shift. i.e. they drive from ~6:30am to ~9:30am and ~4pm to 7pm. This means that a significant portion of your bus fleet will be able to charge during the middle of the day when energy demand is relatively low and there's a ton of solar power.
As an aside, we have so far really dropped the ball on level 1 electric vehicle chargers at offices. As solar power and EV numbers increase, it's pretty obvious that we want more cars charging during the day and fewer charging at night.
Split shift is a stupid idea that needs to die. It only works for people who always work '9 to 5'. Work a different shift and you drive. Need to go shopping - just drive. Have a day off - drive to whatever you do. Going to church one sundap - drive. Have a kid who might get sick at school - you better drive everyday.
In cities with working public transport it aligns the schedules to accommodate the ridership. Which sucks a bit in the late evening when headways might become a bit long.
The absolutely largest peak is in the morning and then a smaller one in the afternoon.
So you might have a baseline like every 10 or 15 mins and then in rush hour it is every 3 or 5 mins.
Where do you live that buses aren't running during most of the day? That just seems absurd to me. Buses in my city run at only slightly reduced (from the rush hour peak) intervals for the whole day
Agreed, I assume this is a very US centric viewpoint. Wherever I have been in Europe the schedule is basically the same throughout the day, with reduced frequency in the evenings. Potentially slightly higher at rush hours, but nothing dramatic.
The critical bit for infrastructure is generally peak load not simply is anyone using it for anything. A few solar panels and a few batteries on-sight can create a lot of freedom here.
City busses don’t need that much energy because as they don’t move quickly, the cargo is light, and regenerative breaking offsets stop and go.
Thats the genial thing about trolleybuses with batteries - there is alread a substantial city wide charging network, that is even distributed and enables on-the-go charging. :)
Sure, for regular battery buses without trolley collectors, indeed some new transformers might be needed. But even here, I wonder if you could make it somewhat distributed, with some charging happening at the line terminus where the drivers also often have to take a break anyway.
Battery buses have a battery capacity of around 400kWh. Assuming they are stabled for 6 hours overnight, that's only a charging power of 66kW. Suddenly your depot needs a connection with a peak capacity of 3.3MW instead of the proposed 15MW.
This can get significantly better in practice. There's a peak transit demand during commute hours, but that means there are quite a few unused buses in the middle of the day. Those can charge at the depot to take advantage of cheap daytime solar. A lot of bus routes are timed, with a waiting time of 5 to 10 minutes at the turnaround point. Place an overhead charger here, and the charging demand can be distributed across the day. As a bonus, this also reduced the battery capacity needed - and the associated lower weight reduces total energy demand as well.
Sure, bus depots are going to need beefy connections, but that's hardly an insurmountable obstacle. The ongoing rapid rollout shows that it simply isn't a such a big issue in practice.
Firstly you have charging losses - and you're assuming that you can charge at the same rate consistently over the cycle of the charge.
Secondly, doing it like that massively reduces operational flexibility. If buses are all late back (bad traffic for example) you would want to charge more aggressively than the 60kW. You can't so you're going to have buses that are low on charge the next day.
Finally, it's all a bit moot. In most areas you do not have 3MW of spare capacity on the LV network to suddenly plug into. You're going to need a new HV connection or dramatic LV grid reinforcement, so you might as well put a decent connection in at that point. The cost is basically the same, most of the cost is in permits and civils.
Your idea to place charging points at turnaround points is also not as feasible as you make out. It's incredibly hard to do that (TfL massively struggles to get planning for a simple toilet block for drivers at turnaround points) and they are not designed in a way to have buses in a certain exact position to charge often. And even if you could if buses are late they cannot skip the turnaround like now as they need to charge. This will cause massive cascading delays down the route for the rest of the day.
Grid connections are the reason rollout is so slow, at least in the UK. There is relatively plentiful funding for it but most depots are now completely maxed out in power availability - any spare capacity has already been used and the LV DNO queue is 10+ years for local reinforcement.
a lot of people like to laugh very, very loudly at the idea of upgrading the grid to handle EVs. simply remind them that at one point in time there was no grid at all. the grid is not some magical entity that cant be changed
It's a bit like the difference between building a new house, vs renovating an old one. Different skills are required and the renovation project can actually be more complex than new build.
> you would need a whole new infrastructure for hydrogen powered buses, while keeping a lot of the downsides of fossil fueled air breathing vehicles (eq. air filters filters regardless of if you burn the hydrogen or use it in fuel cells)
Australia kind-of already had 'hydrogen' infrastructure and supply chains already, in LPG or 'autogas'. LPG (or dual petrol/LPG) used to be a popular option for small vehicle fuel in Australia in the 2000s though has slowly declined due to petrol/electric hybrids coming along.
It shouldn't be too difficult to bring back 'autogas' infrastructure in Australia. And if we can, I don't see why others couldn't deploy it made sense to do so. Liquid/gas fuels make much more sense in very-low to moderate density areas with long distances between populated centres. Batteries make much more sense in high population density areas with relatively short trips.
Whilst I agree it's not as ideal as a true zero-emissions thing, it's certainly a stepping stone to greatly accelerate the decarbonisation of our fuels, by allowing many to convert internal combustion engines to use much cleaner fuels, without having to buy brand new vehicles.
Given that petrol and diesel these days are usually almost double the cost per litre of LPG in Australia, and that a lot of decently sized long range EVs are still very expensive in Australia, especially considering cost-of-living pressures and the distances many Aussies have to drive in rural and remote areas where EVs just aren't practical, I'm a little surprised LPG hasn't made a comeback.
Australia has since kicked off a project to construct a large green hydrogen generation plant in Western Australia, due to be producing by 2029 and fully operational by the end of 2031, so hydrogen could become a pretty big deal in by 2030.
> many Aussies have to drive in rural and remote areas where EVs just aren't practical
I’m currently in rural NW NSW, and it seems to me that BEVs would be ideal out here once they get a bit cheaper. Plenty of sunlight. Plenty of rooftop solar — every second house and farm shed has solar panels already. Powering farm vehicles from local solar instead of imported diesel seems logical and inevitable really.
Battery and charging technology are getting better constantly. That low density niche won’t last long enough for hydrogen to compete, it’s going to be all EV soon enough.
Do the poles fall off the wires a lot? Our trolley buses in Seattle have a bit of a problem with that. According to the folks I know in San Francisco, theirs do too. They're great otherwise though. Seattle's newer trolley buses can operate off the wire for about 3 miles/5 kilometers (on a LiFePO4 battery) which helps a bit.
I have seen it happen a few times, but it does not seem to happen very often. I don't think I ever saw it happen when riding a trolley bus - usually I saw a stopped trolleybus with the driver stepping out & reatacching the collector poles before driving away. Took a couple minutes at most.
It was usually in some tricky spots - trolley wires crossing streetcar wire on Konečného náměstí (yeah, we have both :) ) or on the top of the rather steep slope of the Kotlářská street next to the Natural sciences faculty of the Masaryk university.
I guess the new trolley busses with batteries and poles thatr can be stowed automatically might be even better for this - no need to fix the poles immediately, but wait for a regular stop or even the line terminus & just use the battery.
Also once when touring one of the trolleybus depos (the small one in Husovice) the local maintenance chief mentioned that the one roundabout wired for trolley buses (yes, that exists) is a pain to maintain & maybe they could scrap it in the future, with the busses crossing it on batteries instead. :)
Oof yeah I can see how a roundabout would cause a headache. I really enjoy the trolleybuses; there are some plans in place to expand the system, but not enough IMO.
> you would need a whole new infrastructure for hydrogen powered buses, while keeping a lot of the downsides of fossil fueled air breathing vehicles (eq. air filters filters regardless of if you burn the hydrogen or use it in fuel cells).
Unless you burn the hydrogen, you aren't producing any emissions... unless you count water as an emission. Fuel cells don't produce any emissions.
Burning hydrogen though, does produce some emissions, however it's pretty minimal. I believe it's only NOx, and even then at far lower rates compared to gas vehicles. No CO2, CO, or any other stuff from gas or not-fully-burnt gas.
That said, I agree hydrogen has seemingly no place in something like buses. Frankly, the only places that I see hydrogen has any future is either going to be for planes and boats, or potentially for intermediate storage akin to batteries (i.e., create hydrogen with excess solar/wind power).
Fuel Cells have a lot in common to ICE. They require a significant balance of plant that helps provide air to the fuel cell, coolant for many of the components, electronics controller and significant electrical harnessing, bracketry for support, filters, coolant pump, air source, radiator... etc.
in one way it is a downside since its more parts and complication than maybe a pure EV architecture, but the similarities to ICE arch means that its an attractive option to transition to for both the OEMs and a tiered supply base used to working on ICE vehicles. If you can get economies of scale going and bring cost down for fuel cell its a great replacement for many (not all) ICE archs.
They are preferred solutions for larger vehicles because of the weight of lithium ion batteries. also because theyre optimized for power density while electric architectures excel with energy capacity/storage. But if you can implement infrastructure at the locations where these larger Class A vehicles are (or busses), then you dont care about capacity for the known universe's lightest (resting mass) fuel as much since H2 refuel times are fast.
You are correct about boats though, it is also a good solution set there. Planes will only work if we can achieve air cooled hydrogen fuel cells and eliminate the expensive and heavy balance of plant (Hysata).
I drove hydrogen Mirai, and it feels pretty much electric in every way but fueling. It drives off battery, no hybrid transmission, hydrogen is only there to charge the battery.
Is that a real problem here? Air filters on ICE cars are easy and not that frequent. You need cabin air filters regardless for passengers, so changing those at the same time isn’t that much different. Filters are cheap unless fuel cell ones are super expensive for some reason.
Hm, I looked up how much a Toyota mirai filter is and they’re quite expensive. $270 it looks like from a 3rd party? It’s every 36k miles though. Not every year/12k like a normal air filters.
There is a very to-the-point diagram called the Hydrogen Ladder [0] that classifies the usefulness of hydrogen by domain. The author makes a good case that, despite its versatility, hydrogen is almost always worse than some other clean technology for any use case. It’s hard to make, store, and use in a scalable/cheap way, and even generous estimates of future progress show a cost curve that requires subsidies basically forever.
Buses are classified as a “Most Uncompetitive” category. Electricity, whether wired or battery powered, is cheaper and easier to scale for the predicable everyday energy use of a city bus.
Busses currently have big engines and fuel tanks (or motors and batteries).
That intuitively makes sense - obviously a big vehicle needs more energy than a small one like a car.
However, typical city bus routes spend most of their time under 30 mph, cutting aerodynamic drag by a whopping 90% compared to 70 mph highway cruising that a car does.
With more work on rolling resistance (buying super-good bearings and fancy tyre designs), regen round trip efficiency, and energy use of the passenger cabin (heat pump heating, double glazing), I could see busses needing similar size batteries to electric cars and still being able to do a full days city work.
In turn, that makes the energy source fairly irrelevant from both an economic and a social perspective.
As an example, most of Dublin Bus’s electric fleet have 450kWh batteries for a range of 320km. So, bigger than a car, but not as much as you’d expect given that the buses are 20 tonne fully laden and take a hundred passengers.
0.7 m/s^2 is a typical acceleration for a city bus - most people won't fall over whilst standing at that acceleration.
A city bus perhaps holds 50 70kg passengers = 3.5 tons of cargo, and a lightweight bus design is perhaps 6.5 tons (typical bus=10 tons). Total = 10 tons.
Peak Power required to accelerate 0.7 m/s^2 up to 30 mph = 93 kilowatts.
Which is car territory. The cheapest tesla model 3 has a 208 kilowatt motor, so would be plenty enough power.
Regen can capture during stopping most of the energy consumed during starting, if well designed, while in a non-electric bus all energy is lost.
The mass of the bus does not matter, only the energy lost due to mechanical friction or electrical resistance, both of which increase much more slowly than the mass for bigger buses.
This math is for future busses designed for city use - so batteries will be much smaller and therefore lighter, and the bus construction itself will be much lighter because, as you point out, with a city bus pulling away ~5 million times in its lifespan, the cost of energy lost when stopping and pulling away far exceeds the cost of upgrading the frame to aluminium and other weight saving measures.
It's possible something could be done about that with air curtains, PVC strip curtains, etc.
Climate control energy varies widely depending on geography - and appropriate door energy saving approaches will probably depend on where the bus operates, and possibly even the season (ie. winter doors swapped for summer doors), or extra batteries added in summer/winter to account for the extra energy use.
The Zürich transportation company also evaluated if they should use hydrogen or electric buses. They decided on battery buses even though they can only run for half a day at the current capacity. Since drivers have a set limit of hours then can work it doesn't matter as much and capacities have only been going up.
Fundamentally battery buses are going to be cheaper to run. Regardless of initial outlay costs electricity that goes directly in with no conversion is achieving near 100% efficiency. Whereas with hydrogen that same electricity is being used to do electrolysis to get the hydrogen to begin with, compressing into fuel containers, travelling the fuel around the country and then pumping the fuel back in and then all the conversion losses from hydrogen to electricity to drive the vehicle. That chain is at best about 30% efficiency so its going to cost 3x as much at least.
While it gets you better fuel density for added vehicle complexity its pricey to run even when the infrastructure exists, which it currently doesn't. Hydrogen is notoriously difficult to store because its the smallest element in the periodic table it just wafts through whatever container we try to put it in too causing a constant loss of fuel.
There might be circumstances where its the right thing to do and the extra cost is worth it, public transport is unlikely to be that scenario. Its got value mostly for remote locations where the nearest electricity is quite far away, although the issue then becomes can you get the hydrogen there. If it never reaches proper economies of scale and infrastructure deployment it might always be a dead end and there really aren't that many people using vehicles so remote to have no access to electricity but are carrying fuel cells to get the range they need.
So H2 fueled vehicles are just indirectly methane fueled, and not carbon-neutral.
Why not electrolyse water? It's not efficient, but if you use solar energy who cares? Set up a plant near the ocean and just let it run. All the inputs are essentially free.
Electrolysis uses a lot of electricity. Solar energy is not free, others pay money for the energy. What are you going to do with the hydrogen? It is better to use the electricity.
Green hydrogen only makes sense when everything is electrified and electricity is cheap. It might be needed for things like industrial heat or shipping where need fuel.
From the article, "A second obvious theme is the prevalence of hydrogen buses in industrial regions and cities that bought into the hydrogen for energy narrative that’s falling apart now. Cologne, Aberdeen, Bolzano, Groningen/Drenthe, and Wuppertal are all trying to be hydrogen valleys, centers of the hydrogen economy’s industry. That’s going badly because it was always a bad idea, devoid of thermodynamic and economic reality."
I think the last sentence speaks alot to hydrogens place in the sustainable energy field. It sounds like a good idea but the applications always seem to struggle with reality.
I fail to understand how using elemental hydrogen for storing energy has ever sounded like a good idea for anyone.
What sounds like a good idea is using fuel cells instead of ICEs, but using hydrocarbons as fuel, not dihydrogen (also solid carbon is a possible fuel).
The use of hydrocarbons can be carbon-neutral and sustainable, by making them from carbon dioxide and water.
There have been various experiments with fuel cells using other fuels than dihydrogen, but the main roadblocks have been a lower power at a given size than with pure hydrogen and the need for more frequent maintenance, besides the main disadvantage common to all kinds of fuel cells for now, high cost, due to expensive catalysts or to components such as separators that must be replaced frequently.
Nevertheless, we know that it is possible to make cheap and performant fuel cells, as demonstrated by any living being that breathes air.
Hydrogen isn't chosen because it's the optimal technical solution (or even a solution at all). It's purpose is to prevent the transition to BEV technology (as a proposed alternative) and thereby protect the businesses making ICEs. It therefore can serve its purpose even if zero Hydrogen vehicles are made.
Of course this was all for the past 30 years. Since everyone can see with their eyes that BEVs work, Hydrogen's job is over.
Electric buses in the form of trolleybuses seems like the better option than either of these, although I do agree that battery buses beat hydrogen every day of the week.
Batteries are cheap. Installing lots of copper lines for trolley buses isn't. That's why trolley buses are pretty rare. Old idea, didn't really take that well. There are a handful of cities that have them. And they've had them for decades. Most of those cities now also have battery electrical buses to service all the areas where the cables don't go. Expanding the network of cables doesn't seem to have a very high priority. Installing chargers (in depots mostly) is much easier and cheaper. And it's not like batteries are that expensive.
With battery prices trending to 50$ per kwh, a decent size bus battery of 250kwh would cost about 12.5K. That's manufacturing cost, not purchase cost. But it drives the point home: long term batteries are going to dip even further. Far below 50$/kwh. It will drive down the cost of battery electric drive trains for everything with wheels to far below that of the traditional setup with ICE engines. And they don't need expensive fuel to run. Or a lot of engine maintenance and servicing.
Currently tens of thousands of electrical buses are produced per year. Most of them in China. Which is of course where they have lots of battery factories. It's a rapidly growing industry.
Yep, hybrid trolleys / battery trolleys are really cool, as they provide the flexibility of batteries to e.g. work around roadworks and blockage, but allow for a more distributed electricity consumption thanks to partially fixed routes / overhead lines.
The poles also make for convenient overhead charging docks, which you can add on a somewhat piecemeal manner. With some automated guidance, that means you can charge the buses at long-wait stops or when they wait to run the route back even though they're not a a depot, without the need for an "accessible" charging infrastructure (or the driver needing to move out, go open an electric cabinet, plug in a charge cable, then remember to unplug before going back out).
Trolly wires generally work out cheaper than batteries if you are running frequent service. Batteries work out better anyway though because they allow you to go around obsticals (roadwork, cars illegally parked in the land...)
Yeah this only reveals a snapshot of the current situation. The truth is that lithium ion has a few more decades of serious R&D and successfully mass produced commercial products on the market. Hydrogen fuel cells arent as fortunate; they still have a high production cost due to low volume, the supply chain has had a fraction of the investment of ICE and EV, and the regulatory environment is even less clear than EV around the world.
But the reality is our society is well on its way to fracturing the fossil fuel dominated infrastructure supporting us, and it wont just be electric to take a piece of the pie. Buses and other large vehicles like mining vehicles, semis, and many Class A vehicles will transition from their diesel engines to instead fuel cell, and not batteries. Battery technology is far too heavy to support vehicle and payload combinations at this level, and these applications prefer the high power density of fuel cells over the accessibility and storage capability of an EV only architecture. Hydrogen is a quicker refuel, and one can imagine a future where industrial sites and logistics warehouses that already have forklifts running on H2 will see the rest of their large work/fleet vehicles transition over to hydrogen as well.
Unfortunately, this premonition is probably at risk of being a few years off thanks to the current government situation.
Actually all the vehicles you mention are already available in battery electric form and typically already far more common than their hydrogen equivalents. Everything from mining trucks to scooters. Batteries are cheaper than fuel cells. And electricity is cheaper than hydrogen. You are right that there's a lot of potential for further cost reductions with battery electric through innovation and numerous paths for doing so.
With hydrogen there simply isn't any obvious path forward. Hydrolyzers are inching closer to their theoretical maximum efficiency. Same for fuel cells. A few percent improvements here a few percent there. End to end battery electric wastes far less electricity. So it's inherently cheaper to charge a battery than it is to fuel a hydrogen vehicle. This is a gap that cannot be bridged.
With batteries we're looking at steep increases in energy density by multiple factors, new chemistries based on commonly available materials, cost reductions, etc. They are already competitive now. But it's going to get far worse for hydrogen very quickly.
Simply put, hydrogen is dead as a door nail for anything with wheels. There's a lot of subsidized inertia in the market. But without subsidized hydrogen, there is no business case to use hydrogen. None whatsoever.
> Hydrogen is a quicker refuel
Only slightly. It's not that fast actually. The naive notion that you just slosh some hydrogen in a tank like you would with diesel is not based in reality. Pumping compressed gas through narrow hoses takes time and hydrogen has a lot of volume. 10-15 minutes to refuel a truck is pretty normal. Charging can take a bit longer; depending on the size of the charger. And there is a path to making that quite a bit faster.
Why would a factory invest in hydrogen fueled forklifts and their associated refueling infrastructure if they can get electric ones that just plug into a wall socket?
Unless research on hydrogen manages to upturn our foundational understanding of thermodynamics, hydrogen will be a waste of useful energy in most applications.
For further reference, check the "clean hydrogen ladder"
Often overlooked but electric buses are very heavy. Here in my small hometown they visibly started decaying the road infrastructure super fast in many places since they got introduced. Not impossible to patch up, but not a negligible cost of moving to the tech.
The US Government did a study in the 1950s and discovered that the damage done to a roadway by a car is proportional to the fourth power of its axle weight.
Imo hybrid trolleys are great. You don't need huge bess nor long charging times. The trolley will use wires in most areas and battery in less dense areas
Besides those working in the technology keeping themselves employed, I'm really confused who is supporting hydrogen.
The infrastructure to support it is far more complex than our current petroleum network, and hydrogen is less safe than petroleum, while at the same time, electric is safer and requires just 10% of the infrastructure as petroleum.
It reaaalllly just feels like scientists and fossil fuel grifters still propping up hydrogens dead xorpse
My impression is it's auto and fuel companies putting out this unworkable alternative to current technologies so they can appear to be concerned about climate change without having to actually stop making money, also if it does work they can crack the petro chemicals to get hydrogen out and people who point out it's basically as dirty as ICE engines will look like pedants.
The scientists are just there because if you give them the opportunity to work on hard technical challenges, they'll take it. The morality is much greyer than the ones being paid to contrive models with the initial goal of "higher CO2 is actually good for everybody."
Hydrogen is difficult to store. But it enjoys the square-cube law. If you increase the size of a tank by a factor of 2 in all 3 dimensions, the capacity increases by a factor of 8, but the cost only by a factor of 4.
Hydrogen has some huge advantages over other green options. But, also some huge disadvantages. If you want to diminish the disadvantages, you need to exploit the square-cube law, and that means you need huge scale.
In other words, hydrogen is a non-starter for cars. It has a very low chance of success for buses, but not zero. It could work very well for trains. And it could work extremely well for electricity generation at city scale.
Storage is just part of the problem with hydrogen. The process of generating hydrogen has never been cost-effective. It's just not possible to make hydrogen cheaply right now. Solar energy, on the other hand, gets so cheap that it won't make sense to produce hydrogen with it, then transport it to a city and convert it to electricity. We should just send the electricity directly.
Only if you completely ignore overhead wires. Electrifying main rail corridors is a no-brainer, and batteries are more than sufficient for short last-mile spurs.
The hydrogen economy hasn't made since to me from when I first heard about it 15+years ago. It's one of the clearest examples of academics not understanding how business works.
The hydrogen economy has had a lot of not very subtle backing from the gas industry, which is fully aware that they would have no problem selling hydrogen cracked out of natural gas if it ever took off.
And they were right. Well done governments! Cheaper transport, cleaner air, less resource extraction, more flexible demand for electricity which allows more renewables (another government backed success story) which in turn means cheaper power and cleaner air.
Hydrogen makes sense as a chemical feedstock for methanol and ammonia. It also scales well to grid energy storage, because you can add hundreds of GWhs at a time, and the technology is mature (Moss Bluff opened in 1983). You wouldn't use hydrogen in vehicles, because methanol is easy to make, and is a much better fuel for non-aero applications. Shipping is moving to methanol for that reason.
Hydrogen also makes sense as a reducing agent replacing coal for producing steel and other metals, where it makes possible the production of metals with less impurities.
With battery powered scooters, battery powered mopeds, battery powered quadricycles, battery powered cars and battery powered buses zipping around I believe big oil and power corporations keep up investing into the hydrogen complex system just as an additional avenue to sustaining their representatives in politics. Who can contribute offsetting all of those investments by keeping up the flood of public subsidies to gas, diesel and all other revenue streams of their sponsors.
Ireland is investing heavily in green energy production at the moment, building two facilities to split water with excess wind energy. I guess the idea is to capture what can't be used at time of generation and make money from it.
The idea is for "heavy transport" and "aviation" sectors to use these. Are there any hydrogen planes?
Perhaps they mean turning it into ammonia through haber-bosch but that requires even further energy.
By your own calculation EROI of Battery buses should be about 15-30 (taking diesel EROI as given as it has no source) if you actually apply the vehicle's efficiency; ~85% efficiency for E2E diesel-generator-to-EV. While diesel bus would be around ~21% effiency.
TL;DR: Hamburgs mobility provider is trying it again, after failure in 2019 with 5 Busses, with 5 Busses (Fuel-Cell) again, this time allegedly 'mass production ready'.
With the intent of max. 10% of the fleet based on this ¹, or similar, in 2030, which is their target for carbon neutrality.
Got a little bit more range, refuels faster (in 15 minutes), than the few hours E-Busses (currently) need.
Regarding infrastructure this has to be seen in the context of Hamburg wanting to be a hydrogen hub, because of its harbour, shipping, processing and such.
Shrug? We'll see...
¹ actually the Hamburger Hochbahn isn't the only provider, about the other half comes from VHH ( https://vhh-mobility.de ) which don't use or intend to use hydrogen, instead going for battery electric exclusively. Which in the context of 'Hydrogen Hub Hamburg' mentioned above, seems logical, because they operate lines far out of that also.
There's a few companies and labs in Germany who still manage to somehow sell hydrogen as a "local innovation" to government grants every now and then... Hydrogen busses, hydrogen trams, hydrogen trains. It never sticks, unsurprisingly.
I think there's a risk of "it's too soon to say here" when deciding on fuel vs battery Vs hydrogen. The problem is that this is a highly complex dynamic system with different people experiencing different externalities.
Reasons answering this question is difficult are, for example:
- given the demands for highly valuable electricity and alternative use cases, why do we insist on using it in locomotion?
- given marginal electricity pricing, everyone is subsidising cleaner air in cities for the benefit of air quality of only those living in cities
- might electric buses be prevalent because of smaller up front costs to infrastructure, and not because it's the right thing longer term?
- if electrification of transport in general was a bad idea (first bullet) then how does this change the economics of hydrogen given the longer run access to SMR sourced hydrogen from longer term fossil fuel extraction?
- how sure are we that we are solving a co2 climate crisis with the actions we are taking?
This all in the context of "greening" our economies when all the dirty industry and carbon emissions are exported to China, out of sight but not out of the true equation. And then there's the destruction of industrial capacity in Europe carried out by green agendas, all in favour of the Chinese Communist Party longer term.
I think this "debate" is largely irrelevant: China has decided that locomotion will be (battery) electric. That is the largest scale you can get, so any effects of scale for an alternative will at best be as large as the battery electric one.
And then there are the variety of other disadvantages that come with hydrogen:
- significant leakage and high greenhouse factor
- heavy support equipment need (both for storage and for usage)
About the only advantage of hydrogen (vs. lithium-ion batteries) is gravimetric energy density (where it's about a factor of 300). But even volumetric energy density differs only be a factor of 5-10. (Both numbers ignore that the storage thing will add significant weight). And those are _already_ not limiting for locomotion needs.
- how sure are we that we are solving a co2 climate crisis with the actions we are taking?
The thing here is yes: Even if we would generate the energy for the locomotion completely with fossil fuel! Large plants are significantly more efficient (10-35% vs up to 60%) and it would be _much_ simpler to, e.g. think about carbon capture if we had tens of thousand CO2 emitters rather than a billion. But we are not doing that!
I think battery buses have comprehensively won this one, to be honest. The biggest hydrogen bus fleet seems to be 35 vehicles; there are many BEV bus fleets in the hundreds and some in the thousands.
As a certified old person, I'm having trouble getting used to them. It is unnatural for a double-decker bus to pull up near-silently, and then move off smoothly when you get on. They are _supposed_ to vibrate violently and sound like they might explode at any moment; it's traditional.
(One of the bus route closest to me has a mix of fancy BEV buses and ancient diesel things from 2007, so I get an interesting selection. The other is mostly plugin hybrids, which are extra-disconcerting, as they're either silent or very noisy depending on mode.)
Where I live in the US my kids still take “cheese buses” to school that haven’t changed a bit. They’re diesel and you can hear them blocks away. When they pull up with their air brakes going off and their diesel shifting to idle it sounds like one of those spice miner things from Dune going to work.
If they ever go electric I’m not sure how we’ll know it’s time to take the kids out. Won’t be able to hear them coming.
You'll see the bus on your phone / home hub. Like ridezoom company does, you see whenever your kid checked in/out of the bus, and the bus itself on a map.
Hopefully in a way not tied to some commercial third party. People should be able to reliably go to public school without having to accept an arbitrary third party contract
Oh don't worry, you won't even get asked. It's your school district decides to pay a lot of your tax dollars to the third-party company.
My school district has some that are electric and they are quite noisy also. sounds like gear noise mainly, so they must have a reduction gear or some sort of transmission. They also still have air brakes so you hear the compressor and the PSSSSHT of air when they stop.
It wasn't easy, but the bus company managed to make their EV leak oil and need gear maintenance.
> If they ever go electric I’m not sure how we’ll know it’s time to take the kids out. Won’t be able to hear them coming.
I'm sure they'll just have an app.
How about playing a ditty just like an ice cream truck?
There's a similar danger with very quiet and/or electric cars where people near the school barely hear them coming and need more attention to keep themselves safe. Avoiding an older gas or diesel car is practically automatic as you can hear their speed, acceleration and location comparatively far away. I think EV manufacturers have added some sort of noise to low speed driving, but I haven't heard anything beyond one being right behind me
I thought they all had AVAS fitted? Are there markets where this isn’t the case?
Maybe? Problem is either that it can be and is always disabled by driver, or it's very quiet, because I as a healthy man in their 20s, hear the pavement tire noise before any other noise, and the car is already really close at that point
Most pedestrians have airpods in nowadays and probably couldn't hear an ambulance.
In the EU and UK markets we don’t have an option to disable the AVAS noise generator.
It self disables above something like 10kmh when, as you say, tyre roar is the predominant sound a car makes (unless someone is revving the engine I suppose).
I had a silent moped and I had to pass near a school when kids finished school to get to university. It was absolutely dangerous if I was going at a sane speed (less than the limit). I learnt to get very slow before approaching that
They’ll simply use ice-cream van style chimes :)
> The biggest hydrogen bus fleet seems to be 35 vehicles
From the OP:
Cologne is one of the few relatively good news stories for hydrogen bus fleets. Regionalverkehr Köln (RVK) has become the largest operator of hydrogen fuel cell buses in Europe, with a fleet that reached 101 vehicles by late 2024 and is expected to grow to 160 by the end of 2025.
Still, their point was directionally correct. London has 1397 electric buses and Moscow has over 2300.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_emission_buses_in_London
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_buses_in_Moscow
Germany has this recurring fixation on hydrogen for whatever reason. Even when Tesla had already long hit the mainstream market, German car manufacturers were still arguing against EVs in favor for hydrogen-powered cars that would theoretically be vastly superior. Well, we all know how that turned out for Mercedes, BMW, and the so on.
Reasons I can think of for that fixation are:
1. Germany's existing industrial capacity in terms of machining is a much closer match to hydrogen than to EVs. So in short it is wishful thinking mixed with a kind of self-preservation.
2. There seems to be a (somewhat unfounded) worry about energy storage when it comes to EVs, that many German technologists think is easier to handle and solve with hydrogen.
3. Germans culturally have a slight tendency to be fascinated by intricate and complex systems (which can also be a bad thing, see bureaucracy). Electric vehicles are conceptionally very simple, so the opposite. Hydrogen is a little bit more involved.
Toyota had a hydrogen fixation too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai
A more complete theory would encompass the Japanese drives as well.
> Germany has this recurring fixation on hydrogen for whatever reason.
Hydrogen would enable a lot of very rich and powerful businesses to just pivot their business model a bit: the fossil fuel industry would have a destination for "grey hydrogen", pipeline owners could repurpose natural gas pipelines and bunkers for hydrogen, you'd still need refineries, tanker trucks to refill gas stations, you'd still need a nationwide network of gas stations in the first place...
In contrast, electric cars cut out a lot of the middlemen - once you got the car and a solar panel on your roof, you don't need _any_ of these industries any more. And you can't have that.
If people followed that reasoning, there would be few EVs now because EVs had been tried for decades without success; so were airplanes and AI.
If people quit as easily as you say hydrogen car manufacturers should, we wouldn't have much of anything.
Yes - but Hydrogen vehicles have not proven to match or even beat EV's in a lot of key metrics that matter.
The biggest one is efficiency. 40% efficient is one figure I saw, versus 80% for EV's.
Yes, you can refill quicker, but time to "refuel" EV's is dropping precipitously as well, and it's just all around safer than tanking around highly combustible liquid gas.
> Yes, you can refill quicker
Unless the hydrogen fueling nozzle freezes to the car, which is apparently quite common in high humidity weather and/or when multiple cars are fueled consecutively. See e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036031992...
That's just a minor problem, not a fatal flaw. Obviously you can fix that with a small heater for negligible energy cost.
Commercially available solutions seem to use a flow of nitrogen to purge condensation from the nozzle, which is quite a bit more complicated: https://www.weh.com/en_us/general-news/preventing-the-fuelin...
Yes, to comply with paranoid hydrogen safety regulations cheaply. Also, note how the nitrogen is also being used to purge the entire line. Not just keep condensation away.
With more engineering work an intrinsically safe PTC heater could be certified and used just fine.
Now you have a heater in immediate proximity to hydrogen gas.
It’s not impossible, but I think you’re underestimating the complexity of doing that safely.
Hydrogen ignition temperature is 535°C.
Did you never do the science experiment? One small spark...
Don’t smoke while fuelling your car. Unless it’s a diesel that is…
> Yes, you can refill quicker, but time to "refuel" EV's is dropping precipitously as well, and it's just all around safer than tanking around highly combustible liquid gas.
I always think of I, Robot where the protagonist gets on a motorcycle and immediately their passenger complains about how dangerous gasoline is.
While not for everybody, EVs have a really great property of being rechargable without much effort on your part. Just spend ~10 seconds plugging it in at home/work and then ~10 seconds unplugging it before your next time. Compared to waiting 20 minutes in line at Costco Gas to save 1 dollar.
And much cheaper to fill as well.
On a pretty efficienct ICE that I had I was averaging about 20p per mile driven. On my EV I'm averaging 2.5p per mile driven.
Let’s not forget that the highly combustible liquid gas either needs to be stored with complicated cooling or under immense pressure (feel free to disprove me if I haven’t kept up with technology).
It can be done safely, but adds a lot of complexity on top of all the complexity needed for ICE engines.
Your points are also great.
Add to that the problem of “boil off” / “pressure venting”. There are some cars that empty their hydrogen tanks on their own in about 2 weeks. Just because of this issue.
There are new ways to store hydrogen, but these also need external (=from a separate battery) electricity to release it again and the process is slow and doesn’t provide enough amperage, so it can only be used to slowly charge another big battery that is required for these cars to be able to drive.
> Hydrogen vehicles have not proven to match or even beat EV's in a lot of key metrics that matter
Not yet. That is the nature of technological R&D - if we had the answers, we wouldn't be doing R&D.
AI before the last decade or so didn't beat other computer technologies in key metrics; should they have stopped developing it? Fusion power doesn't beat fission and other options in key metrics; solar didn't beat other sources in key metrics, including costs, ... - should humanity have stopped developing those things?
Toyota have been researching hydrogen cars since the early 90's.
Unless you can find a way to double their efficiency, and also get hydrogen down to close to 1:1 energy input to output it's just not an efficienct use of electricity.
EVs were researched for decades before they came to fruition. That's the nature of research.
It's not really fair to compare the efficiency numbers directly that way. The efficiency for hydrogen is measured from the hydrogen fuel directly, but the efficiency of the EV is measured from the wall. In reality, generating electricity is about 40% efficient at best. Yes, there's also an efficiency cost to refining the hydrogen, but if we compare apples to apples and take a ton of LNG and use it to power an EV versus a hydrogen car, I doubt the EV is going to get more milage.
Sure but you should be comparing the goal end state, a world in which out energy consumption and generation is green, that's the whole point of our move to bev's and hydrogen. So you should be comparing energy generation by green means to power a BEV or using green energy to produce hydrogen to power a hydrogen car. In that world the whole energy production and consumption chain is about 3x as efficient for BEV, which in my mind means there is no way hydrogen is going to be competitive and we shouldn't waste valuable resources on persuing it.
Hydrogen that doesn't come from the natural gas industry requires that very same electricity to be extracted from water - so they're operating from the same baseline in my efficiency calculations.
But the electricity is generated by burning natural gas.
Not 100%. A lot in the US, for sure, less in the EU where renewables are a much larger part of the grid, as is Nuclear (thanks to interconnects from France).
And if we work at it that number might go the same way as Coal has within our lifetimes.
Efficiency is the standard red herring of the battery crowd - if efficiency was the prime motivation, we would all be driving bicycles and SUV or sportscars would not exist.
What are your other metrics? It’s an electric drivetrain with all advantages, but with the range of a gasoline car. Refueling cNG or LNG is standard in Europe, LH2 works just fine.
Google “burning Tesla” for that ridiculous take on why batteries would be inherently safe.
Except it's efficiency for the same class of vehicles we're talking about, so a bike is an apples to oranges comparison.
Proton Exchange Membrane is 40-45% efficient. Generating hydrogen from electricity is 70% efficient - meaning for a kWh of input electricity you get 3x the motive power from a BEV.
Then rolling out a refuelling network, with the high pressure tanks and expensive delivery mechanism, will cost far more than installing EV chargers - and that's before we even get onto the CURRENT penetration of EV chargers vs Hydrogen filling stations today (16 in the UK, 54 in the ENTIRE US, and not growing).
Hydrogen might be the solution to emissions from haulage, but BEV's are more than good enough compared to the ICE cars they're replacing for 99.9% of motorists needs. Yes, I'm ignoring the "I need to drive 1000 miles without stopping for fuel, rest, using the bathroom, come back when an EV can do THAT" people.
And on burning EV's, they catch fire at rates 20x lower than ICE cars, and LFP chemistry is far more resistant to thermal runaway.
Now lets talk cost - over the life of the car the BEV will be cheaper to run. Filling a Mirai in the UK will cost you around £90 for 400 miles of range. Charging my EV6 from 0 to 100 will cost me £5.50 for 300 miles of range. We're talking near orders of magnitude difference in cost per mile here - it's almost an unfair advantage that you can charge an EV at home off peak for next to nothing.
Range is almost entirely irrelevant.
The average commute distance is 16 miles, and commutes over 50 miles are quite rare. This means a car with a range of 100 miles would cover the vast majority of use cases. Add some buffer for emergencies and cold weather, and even the 150-mile-range Nissan Leaf is more than enough.
You could also look at once-a-year road trips, of course: a range of 250 to 300 miles is becoming quite common for mid-level SUVs. With current technologies that means a charging session of 30 minutes or so every 3.5 to 4 hours - and it's only getting better. For context, the EU-based commercial truckers have a 45-minute break every 4.5 hours, because non-stop driving for even longer than that poses a safety risk.
BEVs aren't stuck in the 1990s anymore. Their range has significantly improved over the 60-mile range of the GM EV1. If 2025 BEV range is an issue for you, you are the outlier.
Efficiency doesn't matter when you're literally pumping energetic liquid from the ground. It does matter when you need to build 150% more solar panels to produce the energy to create your energetic liquid/gas.
Try 2-300%.
How is that efficiency calculated, respectively?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/fuel-cell-e...
I believe all Hydrogen vehicles are using proton exchange membranes still, which have roughly 40-50% efficiency.
And that's before you take into account that even the most cutting edge hydrogen refining processes are around 70% efficient.
So 1kWh of energy input (electricity) will net you 3X the motive power when used directly in a BEV than first being coverted to hydrogen, and then converted back into electricity.[1]
[1] 0.5*0.7 = 0.35.
I don't think any hydrogen vehicle in actual use has a fuel cell (and if there's any, it's an incredibly rare exception). They are all internal combustion engines.
Proton exchange membranes are very unreliable and expensive. They are also not power-dense, one that powers a bus will be very large.
It‘s actually the opposite: some hydrogen cars that use combustion exist, but they are really, really rare. Almost all hydrogen cars that are road legal use a fuel cell in combination with BEV parts to smooth out/extend power delivery.
That is completely incorrect, it is the opposite.
BEVs aren't 100% efficient though so it's closer to 2x rather than 3x.
I’ve also gone for the max efficiency figures for the Hydrogen car.
And that’s before we get to the fuel costs - £90 to go 400 miles in a Mirai, versus £5.50 to go 300 in an EV6.
EV has been tried with great success since the moment the electric motor was invented. Trams, metros, trolleybuses. The bottleneck for free range was always the battery - which was solved by the mobile phones. The electronics industry had the money to invest into batteries because of the premium that people were willing to pay for even minor battery improvements. And the economy of scale pushed it down to where a battery pack was costing less than the GDP of Australia and so viable in a car.
Hydrogen cars will become available only when hydrogen is used as a temporary storage for renewable energy. But probably even there converting it to electricity in industrial scale fuel cell will make more sense.
> The bottleneck for free range was always the battery - which was solved by the mobile phones.
I wouldn't say solved here. Significantly improved into usability yes, but there are still big issues with batteries:
- their low energy density means it's essentially impossible to have a long range in a small car, every long range EV is necessarily quite large, yet still has a shorter range than a city car
- specific energy remains meh, contributing to weight inflation (though by no means the only factor here)
- low temperature performance remains dreary and something you have to manage (and possibly hack / work around e.g. if your car only does automatic battery conditioning)
- while I think fast charge times are a bit overblown as a single driver on long trips (because stretching / resting every 2-3 hours is a good idea anyway), if you have relief drivers and can relay they're a significant impediment
Not that I think hydrogen has any future mind. But EVs do have a lot of drawbacks. And the amount of power you need available to charge a bus fleet in reasonable time is significant if you do pure battery.
This is true but this analysis fails to consider why hydrogen receives so much interest, because similar reasoning could indicate we should be spending more on every other potential fuel source, including biofuels, and maybe running engines on cellulose.
And the fact that hydrogen is most popular in Germany and Japan should provide a clue.
These are countries with well established ICE car industries and therefore shifting to hydrogen provides the least disruption when it comes to their car manufacturing as well as infrastructure.
The disproportionately high interest in hydrogen is likely not being driven because of a belief in its future success, but likely more as a hope to continuing the status quo.
Right. But at some point, you should acknowledge reality. That's why I'm not currently trying to collect VC money for a new start-up on BetaMax recording technology.
Nobody doubts EVs are more popular now. You should see the numbers for ICE buses too. The discussion is about the future.
Do you expect any problem to appear for batteries at the next century or so? What king of change do you expect on the future for it to not repeat the lessons we learned at the present?
Fossil fuels are on the way out because we do expect problems. Do you have something similar for EVs?
Efficiency is always a problem. EVs wouldn't exist if they weren't more efficient than ICE vehicles, but there is still a cost to EVs - power generation, manufacturing, waste .... A new technology could increase efficiency.
And Minsk in Belarus has more than 1000 electric buses, of which 150 to 180 are powered by supercapacitors rather than batteries!
Ah, I was going on the table in the article, which has Cologne at 35; it seem to be out of date, though.
There's a very large drop off after that one example
I'm surprised hybrids are so under-represented in this considerations.
Maybe I'm missing something but I would think at the scale of a bus, a hybrid is even more appealing than at the scale of a sedan.
Even locomotives and one or two earthmoving off-highway trucks have electric transmissions, making them series hybrids (With very small batteries not used for traction)
Hybrids are attractive when a short battery range is enough for daily use but you still do semi-frequent long-range driving. Rather than hauling around a heavy and expensive XL battery pack on your daily commute you haul around a tiny combustion engine. It's a great solution for people with range anxiety.
Buses have a completely different use case. They drive a well-known distance, and every day is practically identical. It is fairly easy to scale its battery pack to closely match the actual range needed. Running a true long-distance route like a Greyhound or Flixbus, which physically can't be battery-based yet? Just stick to diesel for now.
Hybrid buses were a huge win around cities before fully electric became viable and I expect they will continue to be important for rural routes.
Buses stop frequently so regenerative breaking is meaningful and crucially they avoid the horrible cloud of diesel particulates as they pull off. It was really noticeable as a cyclist. About 40% co2 savings over diesel in London.
I wonder if diesel electric locomotives are efficient at all.
I think the electric is for infinite torque to get lots and lots of cars moving. But to slow down, "electric" brakes are to bleed off power into resistor banks, not re-capture the electricity.
Meanwhile an electric bus actually has to be efficient, which means batteries and regenerative braking.
As I understand it, straight electric locomotives would use the 'dynamic' braking to send current back up the wires. Apparently this would make for entertaining economics-- a section of the rail network where most of the tonnage went downhill could produce a net negative power bill.
With diesel-electrics, there was nowhere to the braking power, so resistor grids were the order of the day. I wonder if it would be possible or worthwhile to outfit them with battery tenders to recapture the current with modern batteries and power-management circuitry.
An example of such a line is in Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ore_Line
> From Riksgränsen on the national border to the Port of Narvik, the trains use only a fifth of the power they regenerate. The regenerated energy is sufficient to power the empty trains back up to the national border.
Similar thing happens in Australia: https://www.jalopnik.com/these-electric-trains-never-need-re...
The twist: these trains aren't connected to the grid. They use regenerative braking to charge batteries when carting ore to the coast, and the batteries power the trip back to the mine.
IIRC there are mine trucks set up similarly in some locations, they're loaded at the top, regen downhill, and that's sufficient to power them back up the hill when empty.
Some diesel electric trains now have large batteries and can recapture the braking power. Though this is seen as a bonus; the primary goal of the batteries is generally to be able to switch off the engines in station to reduce local diesel emissions.
A diesel electric locomotive has no serious batteries, and no room for enough batteries to consume the energy of slowing down a train.
At least it can dump it as heat without also producing fine dust, like mechanical brakes do.
They can (and do) have room if they're designed from the ground up for it. The engines for diesel electric trains are so large because they need to be sized to drive power for peak energy (usually accelerating and hills). If the energy can be stored, the engines for hybrid locomotives themselves can (and are) smaller.
So far you're only seeing hybrid locomotives for trains that stop/start a lot (shunting trains and passenger rail). The cutover for freight will likely take decades because A) locomotive lifetimes are measured in decades and B) longer range freight usually has less stop/start, making it's economical delta less.
I would imagine long range freight would be more likely to have long stretches of uphill grade which would mess with the minimum battery size
Yeah, that could be a problem. Even modern trains often now have multiple locomotives (including in the middle of train sets) to deal with range/weight, so who knows. There’s no reason hybrid trains can’t have multiple locomotives or battery bank-cars for those situations.
As I mentioned above, the freight lines are very conservative with new tech and amortize equipment over decades (often to the point where many rail cars are unsafe, especially outdated tank cars), so even if it exists we won’t see it in practice for awhile yet.
On the other hand, pure electric trains seemingly have had regenerative braking for a hundred years.
I mean, hybrid buses are common. Dublin Bus’s fleet is about 900 conventional diesel, 300 plug-in hybrid, a trivial number of light hybrid (they never committed to these), and 150 electric. But hybrid buses also don’t seem to have a future (at least as urban buses); at least here the plan is to buy no more diesel or hybrid buses; the current fleet will age out.
>Regionalverkehr Köln (RVK) has become the largest operator of hydrogen fuel cell buses in Europe, with a fleet that reached 101 vehicles by late 2024 and is expected to grow to 160 by the end of 2025.
I mean, right from the second section of the article.
I'm not really sure there is any place for a discussion - you would need a whole new infrastructure for hydrogen powered buses, while keeping a lot of the downsides of fossil fueled air breathing vehicles (eq. air filters filters regardless of if you burn the hydrogen or use it in fuel cells).
With battery buses - you might need to slightly beef up the local transformer and installs some new wires and that's it.
Or even better, do what the city mass transit company does here in Brno, Czech Republic - get trolley busses with batteries, that charge from the overhead wires while on the way, so they can then continue to serve additional destinations past the terminus of road electrification.
It is also super handy for any road work, they just automatically stow their collectors and then once again under wires, deploy them. There is usually a small trough around the wires at this spot, guiding the 2 collectors to the 2 wires. As a result, the driver does not have to leave the vehicles when connecting or disconnecting from wired power.
And it looks super cool! :)
While I agree with you; just to be clear it's not "slightly" beef up the local transformer. If you imagine a medium sized depot with 50 buses stabled at any one time, and 300kW chargers (I believe you could go higher), that's 15MW peak which is not trivial to add in many cities overnight. You really need some sort of HV connection for that kind of load, the existing local LV distribution grid isn't going to handle it.
I do definitely think green hydrogen has a big future ahead of itself though. We still use an absolutely ridiculous about of H2 in industrial processes (especially fertilizers).
Europe could produce huge amounts of fertilizers in the summer in the future with all the excess solar and wind it has via this method.
It seems to me hydrogen skipped a step - focus on replacing hydrogen feedstocks in industrial processes directly with green hydrogen, instead of replacing stuff up the chain that can be done with batteries directly anyway.
Any decent sized installation will use current clamps at the local transformers to scale the charging rate up and down depending on other users in the local area.
Ie. in the evening whilst everyone has their ovens on, charging might only be 3 kW per bus, but then at 1am when everyone has gone to bed, it can be 30 kW per bus.
Using that approach, you can get far more capacity out of old infrastructure.
Unfortunately, some utility companies aren't amenable to that approach, and instead insist you pay to upgrade the infra, since to them it's a free upgrade.
Not really. Buses need to be charged whenever, not just overnight (it creates enormous logistical problems otherwise). A typical bus route running 5am to midnight say is not going to last with one charge, depending on length.
Also, if it is a cold night and everyone leaves electric heating/heat pumps on, what happens then? Noone can get to work the next day?
Regardless most urban transformers are not going to have 15MW of overnight capacity spare even on a good day. The largest LV substations might be 30MVA in the UK at least - they won't just have half capacity suddenly free.
Lots of busses are split shift. i.e. they drive from ~6:30am to ~9:30am and ~4pm to 7pm. This means that a significant portion of your bus fleet will be able to charge during the middle of the day when energy demand is relatively low and there's a ton of solar power.
As an aside, we have so far really dropped the ball on level 1 electric vehicle chargers at offices. As solar power and EV numbers increase, it's pretty obvious that we want more cars charging during the day and fewer charging at night.
Split shift is a stupid idea that needs to die. It only works for people who always work '9 to 5'. Work a different shift and you drive. Need to go shopping - just drive. Have a day off - drive to whatever you do. Going to church one sundap - drive. Have a kid who might get sick at school - you better drive everyday.
In cities with working public transport it aligns the schedules to accommodate the ridership. Which sucks a bit in the late evening when headways might become a bit long.
The absolutely largest peak is in the morning and then a smaller one in the afternoon.
So you might have a baseline like every 10 or 15 mins and then in rush hour it is every 3 or 5 mins.
again. Stupid. Complete nonescense that comes from people who drive themselves and think of transit as for 'lesser people'.
humans have places to be. They shouldn't wait for transit. and they mostly won't.
>we have so far really dropped the ball on level 1 electric vehicle chargers at offices
Our govt. really did a disservice to transition to EVs by slapping on a big tax to anyone even brushing against a charger at work: 120€/year
Where do you live that buses aren't running during most of the day? That just seems absurd to me. Buses in my city run at only slightly reduced (from the rush hour peak) intervals for the whole day
Agreed, I assume this is a very US centric viewpoint. Wherever I have been in Europe the schedule is basically the same throughout the day, with reduced frequency in the evenings. Potentially slightly higher at rush hours, but nothing dramatic.
Not sure why you are being downvoted.
The critical bit for infrastructure is generally peak load not simply is anyone using it for anything. A few solar panels and a few batteries on-sight can create a lot of freedom here.
City busses don’t need that much energy because as they don’t move quickly, the cargo is light, and regenerative breaking offsets stop and go.
Thats the genial thing about trolleybuses with batteries - there is alread a substantial city wide charging network, that is even distributed and enables on-the-go charging. :)
Sure, for regular battery buses without trolley collectors, indeed some new transformers might be needed. But even here, I wonder if you could make it somewhat distributed, with some charging happening at the line terminus where the drivers also often have to take a break anyway.
You wouldn't need 300kW chargers, though!
Battery buses have a battery capacity of around 400kWh. Assuming they are stabled for 6 hours overnight, that's only a charging power of 66kW. Suddenly your depot needs a connection with a peak capacity of 3.3MW instead of the proposed 15MW.
This can get significantly better in practice. There's a peak transit demand during commute hours, but that means there are quite a few unused buses in the middle of the day. Those can charge at the depot to take advantage of cheap daytime solar. A lot of bus routes are timed, with a waiting time of 5 to 10 minutes at the turnaround point. Place an overhead charger here, and the charging demand can be distributed across the day. As a bonus, this also reduced the battery capacity needed - and the associated lower weight reduces total energy demand as well.
Sure, bus depots are going to need beefy connections, but that's hardly an insurmountable obstacle. The ongoing rapid rollout shows that it simply isn't a such a big issue in practice.
You're oversimplifying on many angles.
Firstly you have charging losses - and you're assuming that you can charge at the same rate consistently over the cycle of the charge.
Secondly, doing it like that massively reduces operational flexibility. If buses are all late back (bad traffic for example) you would want to charge more aggressively than the 60kW. You can't so you're going to have buses that are low on charge the next day.
Finally, it's all a bit moot. In most areas you do not have 3MW of spare capacity on the LV network to suddenly plug into. You're going to need a new HV connection or dramatic LV grid reinforcement, so you might as well put a decent connection in at that point. The cost is basically the same, most of the cost is in permits and civils.
Your idea to place charging points at turnaround points is also not as feasible as you make out. It's incredibly hard to do that (TfL massively struggles to get planning for a simple toilet block for drivers at turnaround points) and they are not designed in a way to have buses in a certain exact position to charge often. And even if you could if buses are late they cannot skip the turnaround like now as they need to charge. This will cause massive cascading delays down the route for the rest of the day.
Grid connections are the reason rollout is so slow, at least in the UK. There is relatively plentiful funding for it but most depots are now completely maxed out in power availability - any spare capacity has already been used and the LV DNO queue is 10+ years for local reinforcement.
a lot of people like to laugh very, very loudly at the idea of upgrading the grid to handle EVs. simply remind them that at one point in time there was no grid at all. the grid is not some magical entity that cant be changed
It's a bit like the difference between building a new house, vs renovating an old one. Different skills are required and the renovation project can actually be more complex than new build.
Luckily, humans are rather expert water-boilers at this point in time.
> you would need a whole new infrastructure for hydrogen powered buses, while keeping a lot of the downsides of fossil fueled air breathing vehicles (eq. air filters filters regardless of if you burn the hydrogen or use it in fuel cells)
Australia kind-of already had 'hydrogen' infrastructure and supply chains already, in LPG or 'autogas'. LPG (or dual petrol/LPG) used to be a popular option for small vehicle fuel in Australia in the 2000s though has slowly declined due to petrol/electric hybrids coming along.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-19/lpg-cars-disappearing...
That said, it's possible to convert diesel engines to burn a 90% hydrogen/10% diesel mix, which could dramatically alter those numbers: https://www.unsw.edu.au/news/2024/08/converting-diesel-engin...
It shouldn't be too difficult to bring back 'autogas' infrastructure in Australia. And if we can, I don't see why others couldn't deploy it made sense to do so. Liquid/gas fuels make much more sense in very-low to moderate density areas with long distances between populated centres. Batteries make much more sense in high population density areas with relatively short trips.
Whilst I agree it's not as ideal as a true zero-emissions thing, it's certainly a stepping stone to greatly accelerate the decarbonisation of our fuels, by allowing many to convert internal combustion engines to use much cleaner fuels, without having to buy brand new vehicles.
Given that petrol and diesel these days are usually almost double the cost per litre of LPG in Australia, and that a lot of decently sized long range EVs are still very expensive in Australia, especially considering cost-of-living pressures and the distances many Aussies have to drive in rural and remote areas where EVs just aren't practical, I'm a little surprised LPG hasn't made a comeback.
Australia has since kicked off a project to construct a large green hydrogen generation plant in Western Australia, due to be producing by 2029 and fully operational by the end of 2031, so hydrogen could become a pretty big deal in by 2030.
https://research.csiro.au/hyresource/murchison-hydrogen-rene...
> many Aussies have to drive in rural and remote areas where EVs just aren't practical
I’m currently in rural NW NSW, and it seems to me that BEVs would be ideal out here once they get a bit cheaper. Plenty of sunlight. Plenty of rooftop solar — every second house and farm shed has solar panels already. Powering farm vehicles from local solar instead of imported diesel seems logical and inevitable really.
Battery and charging technology are getting better constantly. That low density niche won’t last long enough for hydrogen to compete, it’s going to be all EV soon enough.
Are those new in Brno? Can't remember them from the last time I was there, but sure sounds interesting
That started showing up maybe ~5 years ago ?
Googling a bit I found this article about the first series produced parcial trolley busses (eq. battery equiped) being delivered in 2018: https://www.bmhd.cz/aktuality/aktualita.php?1481
Since then it certainly expanded a lot & there are now regular lines that have the trolleybus go part of the line under its own power, like the recently introduced line to Soběšice: https://brnensky.denik.cz/zpravy_region/brno-mhd-prvni-linka...
Thanks to this you can go watch them stow/deploy their collectors at the Královo Pole nádraží stop at about any time during the day. :)
Do the poles fall off the wires a lot? Our trolley buses in Seattle have a bit of a problem with that. According to the folks I know in San Francisco, theirs do too. They're great otherwise though. Seattle's newer trolley buses can operate off the wire for about 3 miles/5 kilometers (on a LiFePO4 battery) which helps a bit.
I have seen it happen a few times, but it does not seem to happen very often. I don't think I ever saw it happen when riding a trolley bus - usually I saw a stopped trolleybus with the driver stepping out & reatacching the collector poles before driving away. Took a couple minutes at most.
It was usually in some tricky spots - trolley wires crossing streetcar wire on Konečného náměstí (yeah, we have both :) ) or on the top of the rather steep slope of the Kotlářská street next to the Natural sciences faculty of the Masaryk university.
I guess the new trolley busses with batteries and poles thatr can be stowed automatically might be even better for this - no need to fix the poles immediately, but wait for a regular stop or even the line terminus & just use the battery.
Also once when touring one of the trolleybus depos (the small one in Husovice) the local maintenance chief mentioned that the one roundabout wired for trolley buses (yes, that exists) is a pain to maintain & maybe they could scrap it in the future, with the busses crossing it on batteries instead. :)
Oof yeah I can see how a roundabout would cause a headache. I really enjoy the trolleybuses; there are some plans in place to expand the system, but not enough IMO.
We also have both streetcars and trolleybuses, and some strange junctions like the one at 5th and Jackson: https://maps.app.goo.gl/4TuLXmRLY5yK6HGJ6
There are some nice blog posts from a Seattle bus driver that go over some of the nerdy details of our system: https://www.nathanvass.com/blog/i-dont-know-what-a-trolley-i... https://www.nathanvass.com/blog/i-dont-know-what-a-trolley-i...
> you would need a whole new infrastructure for hydrogen powered buses, while keeping a lot of the downsides of fossil fueled air breathing vehicles (eq. air filters filters regardless of if you burn the hydrogen or use it in fuel cells).
Unless you burn the hydrogen, you aren't producing any emissions... unless you count water as an emission. Fuel cells don't produce any emissions.
Burning hydrogen though, does produce some emissions, however it's pretty minimal. I believe it's only NOx, and even then at far lower rates compared to gas vehicles. No CO2, CO, or any other stuff from gas or not-fully-burnt gas.
That said, I agree hydrogen has seemingly no place in something like buses. Frankly, the only places that I see hydrogen has any future is either going to be for planes and boats, or potentially for intermediate storage akin to batteries (i.e., create hydrogen with excess solar/wind power).
Fuel Cells have a lot in common to ICE. They require a significant balance of plant that helps provide air to the fuel cell, coolant for many of the components, electronics controller and significant electrical harnessing, bracketry for support, filters, coolant pump, air source, radiator... etc.
in one way it is a downside since its more parts and complication than maybe a pure EV architecture, but the similarities to ICE arch means that its an attractive option to transition to for both the OEMs and a tiered supply base used to working on ICE vehicles. If you can get economies of scale going and bring cost down for fuel cell its a great replacement for many (not all) ICE archs.
They are preferred solutions for larger vehicles because of the weight of lithium ion batteries. also because theyre optimized for power density while electric architectures excel with energy capacity/storage. But if you can implement infrastructure at the locations where these larger Class A vehicles are (or busses), then you dont care about capacity for the known universe's lightest (resting mass) fuel as much since H2 refuel times are fast.
You are correct about boats though, it is also a good solution set there. Planes will only work if we can achieve air cooled hydrogen fuel cells and eliminate the expensive and heavy balance of plant (Hysata).
I drove hydrogen Mirai, and it feels pretty much electric in every way but fueling. It drives off battery, no hybrid transmission, hydrogen is only there to charge the battery.
Don't fuel cells require air without any contaminants, thus air filters?
So you still need filters, this not for the exhaust, but for the intake.
Is that a real problem here? Air filters on ICE cars are easy and not that frequent. You need cabin air filters regardless for passengers, so changing those at the same time isn’t that much different. Filters are cheap unless fuel cell ones are super expensive for some reason.
The air purity requirements for fuel cells are rather demanding. Impurities will destroy them.
ICE air filter would destroy them in no time.
Hm, I looked up how much a Toyota mirai filter is and they’re quite expensive. $270 it looks like from a 3rd party? It’s every 36k miles though. Not every year/12k like a normal air filters.
Yes, hydrogen cars clean the air as your drive them.
There is a very to-the-point diagram called the Hydrogen Ladder [0] that classifies the usefulness of hydrogen by domain. The author makes a good case that, despite its versatility, hydrogen is almost always worse than some other clean technology for any use case. It’s hard to make, store, and use in a scalable/cheap way, and even generous estimates of future progress show a cost curve that requires subsidies basically forever.
Buses are classified as a “Most Uncompetitive” category. Electricity, whether wired or battery powered, is cheaper and easier to scale for the predicable everyday energy use of a city bus.
0: https://www.liebreich.com/hydrogen-ladder-version-5-0/
With some emphasis on the "almost" :
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/07/green-hydrogen-for-ener...
did the picture die or smth?
edit: no, even internet archive from a year ago shows no picture
"V5" article doesn't render (multiple browsers), try the older v4.1 version linked from it at the bottom (the faux "energy efficiency" graph).
Busses currently have big engines and fuel tanks (or motors and batteries).
That intuitively makes sense - obviously a big vehicle needs more energy than a small one like a car.
However, typical city bus routes spend most of their time under 30 mph, cutting aerodynamic drag by a whopping 90% compared to 70 mph highway cruising that a car does.
With more work on rolling resistance (buying super-good bearings and fancy tyre designs), regen round trip efficiency, and energy use of the passenger cabin (heat pump heating, double glazing), I could see busses needing similar size batteries to electric cars and still being able to do a full days city work.
In turn, that makes the energy source fairly irrelevant from both an economic and a social perspective.
As an example, most of Dublin Bus’s electric fleet have 450kWh batteries for a range of 320km. So, bigger than a car, but not as much as you’d expect given that the buses are 20 tonne fully laden and take a hundred passengers.
The low speed means they are using the power to accelerate against inertia, not to maintain speed against air resistance.
0.7 m/s^2 is a typical acceleration for a city bus - most people won't fall over whilst standing at that acceleration.
A city bus perhaps holds 50 70kg passengers = 3.5 tons of cargo, and a lightweight bus design is perhaps 6.5 tons (typical bus=10 tons). Total = 10 tons.
Peak Power required to accelerate 0.7 m/s^2 up to 30 mph = 93 kilowatts.
Which is car territory. The cheapest tesla model 3 has a 208 kilowatt motor, so would be plenty enough power.
That’s a small bus. Buses here take about 100 people and are 20 tonnes fully laden.
okay - well the motor from the cheapest Tesla will still do the job just fine.
The bus is constantly starting and stopping. Regen doesn't recapture it all. Power isn't the issue, energy is.
Also, current hybrid busses with not-so-heavy batteries weigh about 15 tons without cargo. You are way off.
Regen can capture during stopping most of the energy consumed during starting, if well designed, while in a non-electric bus all energy is lost.
The mass of the bus does not matter, only the energy lost due to mechanical friction or electrical resistance, both of which increase much more slowly than the mass for bigger buses.
This math is for future busses designed for city use - so batteries will be much smaller and therefore lighter, and the bus construction itself will be much lighter because, as you point out, with a city bus pulling away ~5 million times in its lifespan, the cost of energy lost when stopping and pulling away far exceeds the cost of upgrading the frame to aluminium and other weight saving measures.
Buses have been designed for city use for ages. The double deckers are not designed for motorway use.
Inertia that can then be recovered, which you can't with air resistance.
There is plenty of air resistance in a low speed bus, which is shaped like a brick and has huge frontal area. That is still a lot of air to push.
Sounds like there is room for improvement here too ?
I'm not sure how important double glazing is when you're opening the inner air volume to ambient air every few minutes, but maybe?
It's possible something could be done about that with air curtains, PVC strip curtains, etc.
Climate control energy varies widely depending on geography - and appropriate door energy saving approaches will probably depend on where the bus operates, and possibly even the season (ie. winter doors swapped for summer doors), or extra batteries added in summer/winter to account for the extra energy use.
The Zürich transportation company also evaluated if they should use hydrogen or electric buses. They decided on battery buses even though they can only run for half a day at the current capacity. Since drivers have a set limit of hours then can work it doesn't matter as much and capacities have only been going up.
I took some photos of the main garage for these new buses: https://sschueller.github.io/posts/74-eletric-bus-charging-s...
https://sschueller.github.io/posts/74-eletric-bus-charging-s...
Fundamentally battery buses are going to be cheaper to run. Regardless of initial outlay costs electricity that goes directly in with no conversion is achieving near 100% efficiency. Whereas with hydrogen that same electricity is being used to do electrolysis to get the hydrogen to begin with, compressing into fuel containers, travelling the fuel around the country and then pumping the fuel back in and then all the conversion losses from hydrogen to electricity to drive the vehicle. That chain is at best about 30% efficiency so its going to cost 3x as much at least.
While it gets you better fuel density for added vehicle complexity its pricey to run even when the infrastructure exists, which it currently doesn't. Hydrogen is notoriously difficult to store because its the smallest element in the periodic table it just wafts through whatever container we try to put it in too causing a constant loss of fuel.
There might be circumstances where its the right thing to do and the extra cost is worth it, public transport is unlikely to be that scenario. Its got value mostly for remote locations where the nearest electricity is quite far away, although the issue then becomes can you get the hydrogen there. If it never reaches proper economies of scale and infrastructure deployment it might always be a dead end and there really aren't that many people using vehicles so remote to have no access to electricity but are carrying fuel cells to get the range they need.
> same electricity is being used to do electrolysis
Nowhere in the world is electrolysis done at scale. Industrial hydrogen almost exclusively comes from steam methane reforming (SMR).
> Nowhere in the world is electrolysis done at scale.
Not yet. I know Siemens has some pilot plants running:https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/products-servi...
What do they do with the carbon?
either release to the atmosphere or inject into an oil well to increase well production.
So H2 fueled vehicles are just indirectly methane fueled, and not carbon-neutral.
Why not electrolyse water? It's not efficient, but if you use solar energy who cares? Set up a plant near the ocean and just let it run. All the inputs are essentially free.
Electrolysis uses a lot of electricity. Solar energy is not free, others pay money for the energy. What are you going to do with the hydrogen? It is better to use the electricity.
Green hydrogen only makes sense when everything is electrified and electricity is cheap. It might be needed for things like industrial heat or shipping where need fuel.
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From the article, "A second obvious theme is the prevalence of hydrogen buses in industrial regions and cities that bought into the hydrogen for energy narrative that’s falling apart now. Cologne, Aberdeen, Bolzano, Groningen/Drenthe, and Wuppertal are all trying to be hydrogen valleys, centers of the hydrogen economy’s industry. That’s going badly because it was always a bad idea, devoid of thermodynamic and economic reality."
I think the last sentence speaks alot to hydrogens place in the sustainable energy field. It sounds like a good idea but the applications always seem to struggle with reality.
I fail to understand how using elemental hydrogen for storing energy has ever sounded like a good idea for anyone.
What sounds like a good idea is using fuel cells instead of ICEs, but using hydrocarbons as fuel, not dihydrogen (also solid carbon is a possible fuel).
The use of hydrocarbons can be carbon-neutral and sustainable, by making them from carbon dioxide and water.
There have been various experiments with fuel cells using other fuels than dihydrogen, but the main roadblocks have been a lower power at a given size than with pure hydrogen and the need for more frequent maintenance, besides the main disadvantage common to all kinds of fuel cells for now, high cost, due to expensive catalysts or to components such as separators that must be replaced frequently.
Nevertheless, we know that it is possible to make cheap and performant fuel cells, as demonstrated by any living being that breathes air.
Hydrogen isn't chosen because it's the optimal technical solution (or even a solution at all). It's purpose is to prevent the transition to BEV technology (as a proposed alternative) and thereby protect the businesses making ICEs. It therefore can serve its purpose even if zero Hydrogen vehicles are made.
Of course this was all for the past 30 years. Since everyone can see with their eyes that BEVs work, Hydrogen's job is over.
Electric buses in the form of trolleybuses seems like the better option than either of these, although I do agree that battery buses beat hydrogen every day of the week.
Batteries are cheap. Installing lots of copper lines for trolley buses isn't. That's why trolley buses are pretty rare. Old idea, didn't really take that well. There are a handful of cities that have them. And they've had them for decades. Most of those cities now also have battery electrical buses to service all the areas where the cables don't go. Expanding the network of cables doesn't seem to have a very high priority. Installing chargers (in depots mostly) is much easier and cheaper. And it's not like batteries are that expensive.
With battery prices trending to 50$ per kwh, a decent size bus battery of 250kwh would cost about 12.5K. That's manufacturing cost, not purchase cost. But it drives the point home: long term batteries are going to dip even further. Far below 50$/kwh. It will drive down the cost of battery electric drive trains for everything with wheels to far below that of the traditional setup with ICE engines. And they don't need expensive fuel to run. Or a lot of engine maintenance and servicing.
Currently tens of thousands of electrical buses are produced per year. Most of them in China. Which is of course where they have lots of battery factories. It's a rapidly growing industry.
As a counterpoint, Prague is building new trolleybus lines at a somewhat regular pace after having abandoned them in the 70s.
Granted, these trolleybuses also have batteries and only spend about 1/2 of their journey under wires.
Yep, hybrid trolleys / battery trolleys are really cool, as they provide the flexibility of batteries to e.g. work around roadworks and blockage, but allow for a more distributed electricity consumption thanks to partially fixed routes / overhead lines.
The poles also make for convenient overhead charging docks, which you can add on a somewhat piecemeal manner. With some automated guidance, that means you can charge the buses at long-wait stops or when they wait to run the route back even though they're not a a depot, without the need for an "accessible" charging infrastructure (or the driver needing to move out, go open an electric cabinet, plug in a charge cable, then remember to unplug before going back out).
Trolly wires generally work out cheaper than batteries if you are running frequent service. Batteries work out better anyway though because they allow you to go around obsticals (roadwork, cars illegally parked in the land...)
> Batteries work out better anyway though because they allow you to go around obsticals (roadwork, cars illegally parked in the land...)
The pantographs of trolleybuses are often pretty long, so they can switch to the other lane to avoid obstacles.
Which does no good if the whole road is blocked.
Which is why many European cities have lanes reserved for public transportation, in order to prevent stupid car drivers to block the traffic.
Yeah this only reveals a snapshot of the current situation. The truth is that lithium ion has a few more decades of serious R&D and successfully mass produced commercial products on the market. Hydrogen fuel cells arent as fortunate; they still have a high production cost due to low volume, the supply chain has had a fraction of the investment of ICE and EV, and the regulatory environment is even less clear than EV around the world.
But the reality is our society is well on its way to fracturing the fossil fuel dominated infrastructure supporting us, and it wont just be electric to take a piece of the pie. Buses and other large vehicles like mining vehicles, semis, and many Class A vehicles will transition from their diesel engines to instead fuel cell, and not batteries. Battery technology is far too heavy to support vehicle and payload combinations at this level, and these applications prefer the high power density of fuel cells over the accessibility and storage capability of an EV only architecture. Hydrogen is a quicker refuel, and one can imagine a future where industrial sites and logistics warehouses that already have forklifts running on H2 will see the rest of their large work/fleet vehicles transition over to hydrogen as well.
Unfortunately, this premonition is probably at risk of being a few years off thanks to the current government situation.
Actually all the vehicles you mention are already available in battery electric form and typically already far more common than their hydrogen equivalents. Everything from mining trucks to scooters. Batteries are cheaper than fuel cells. And electricity is cheaper than hydrogen. You are right that there's a lot of potential for further cost reductions with battery electric through innovation and numerous paths for doing so.
With hydrogen there simply isn't any obvious path forward. Hydrolyzers are inching closer to their theoretical maximum efficiency. Same for fuel cells. A few percent improvements here a few percent there. End to end battery electric wastes far less electricity. So it's inherently cheaper to charge a battery than it is to fuel a hydrogen vehicle. This is a gap that cannot be bridged.
With batteries we're looking at steep increases in energy density by multiple factors, new chemistries based on commonly available materials, cost reductions, etc. They are already competitive now. But it's going to get far worse for hydrogen very quickly.
Simply put, hydrogen is dead as a door nail for anything with wheels. There's a lot of subsidized inertia in the market. But without subsidized hydrogen, there is no business case to use hydrogen. None whatsoever.
> Hydrogen is a quicker refuel
Only slightly. It's not that fast actually. The naive notion that you just slosh some hydrogen in a tank like you would with diesel is not based in reality. Pumping compressed gas through narrow hoses takes time and hydrogen has a lot of volume. 10-15 minutes to refuel a truck is pretty normal. Charging can take a bit longer; depending on the size of the charger. And there is a path to making that quite a bit faster.
Why so much waste?
Why would a factory invest in hydrogen fueled forklifts and their associated refueling infrastructure if they can get electric ones that just plug into a wall socket?
Unless research on hydrogen manages to upturn our foundational understanding of thermodynamics, hydrogen will be a waste of useful energy in most applications.
For further reference, check the "clean hydrogen ladder"
Often overlooked but electric buses are very heavy. Here in my small hometown they visibly started decaying the road infrastructure super fast in many places since they got introduced. Not impossible to patch up, but not a negligible cost of moving to the tech.
The US Government did a study in the 1950s and discovered that the damage done to a roadway by a car is proportional to the fourth power of its axle weight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
Hrm. Dublin bus has been replacing its fleet of diesel buses with electric. Both old and new are around 20 tonnes fully laden.
Imo hybrid trolleys are great. You don't need huge bess nor long charging times. The trolley will use wires in most areas and battery in less dense areas
Besides those working in the technology keeping themselves employed, I'm really confused who is supporting hydrogen.
The infrastructure to support it is far more complex than our current petroleum network, and hydrogen is less safe than petroleum, while at the same time, electric is safer and requires just 10% of the infrastructure as petroleum.
It reaaalllly just feels like scientists and fossil fuel grifters still propping up hydrogens dead xorpse
My impression is it's auto and fuel companies putting out this unworkable alternative to current technologies so they can appear to be concerned about climate change without having to actually stop making money, also if it does work they can crack the petro chemicals to get hydrogen out and people who point out it's basically as dirty as ICE engines will look like pedants.
The scientists are just there because if you give them the opportunity to work on hard technical challenges, they'll take it. The morality is much greyer than the ones being paid to contrive models with the initial goal of "higher CO2 is actually good for everybody."
I am surprised that biogas (methane) buses are not mentioned in the comparison, they are already running in lots of places.
https://www.europeanbiogas.eu/biogas-buses-better-value-elec...
Hydrogen is difficult to store. But it enjoys the square-cube law. If you increase the size of a tank by a factor of 2 in all 3 dimensions, the capacity increases by a factor of 8, but the cost only by a factor of 4.
Hydrogen has some huge advantages over other green options. But, also some huge disadvantages. If you want to diminish the disadvantages, you need to exploit the square-cube law, and that means you need huge scale.
In other words, hydrogen is a non-starter for cars. It has a very low chance of success for buses, but not zero. It could work very well for trains. And it could work extremely well for electricity generation at city scale.
Storage is just part of the problem with hydrogen. The process of generating hydrogen has never been cost-effective. It's just not possible to make hydrogen cheaply right now. Solar energy, on the other hand, gets so cheap that it won't make sense to produce hydrogen with it, then transport it to a city and convert it to electricity. We should just send the electricity directly.
> It could work very well for trains.
Only if you completely ignore overhead wires. Electrifying main rail corridors is a no-brainer, and batteries are more than sufficient for short last-mile spurs.
The hydrogen economy hasn't made since to me from when I first heard about it 15+years ago. It's one of the clearest examples of academics not understanding how business works.
The hydrogen economy has had a lot of not very subtle backing from the gas industry, which is fully aware that they would have no problem selling hydrogen cracked out of natural gas if it ever took off.
The battery economy has had a lot of very not subtle backing from the government.
And they were right. Well done governments! Cheaper transport, cleaner air, less resource extraction, more flexible demand for electricity which allows more renewables (another government backed success story) which in turn means cheaper power and cleaner air.
And this is serving the nefarious purpose of?
Hydrogen makes sense as a chemical feedstock for methanol and ammonia. It also scales well to grid energy storage, because you can add hundreds of GWhs at a time, and the technology is mature (Moss Bluff opened in 1983). You wouldn't use hydrogen in vehicles, because methanol is easy to make, and is a much better fuel for non-aero applications. Shipping is moving to methanol for that reason.
Hydrogen also makes sense as a reducing agent replacing coal for producing steel and other metals, where it makes possible the production of metals with less impurities.
The hydrogen economy never had anything to do with academics. It's a fallback plan by the oil industry.
With battery powered scooters, battery powered mopeds, battery powered quadricycles, battery powered cars and battery powered buses zipping around I believe big oil and power corporations keep up investing into the hydrogen complex system just as an additional avenue to sustaining their representatives in politics. Who can contribute offsetting all of those investments by keeping up the flood of public subsidies to gas, diesel and all other revenue streams of their sponsors.
Ireland is investing heavily in green energy production at the moment, building two facilities to split water with excess wind energy. I guess the idea is to capture what can't be used at time of generation and make money from it.
The idea is for "heavy transport" and "aviation" sectors to use these. Are there any hydrogen planes?
Perhaps they mean turning it into ammonia through haber-bosch but that requires even further energy.
Hydrogen buses limp at an EROI of 0.5 to 1.5.
Losses via Gibbs free energy (237 kJ/mol to split H2O) and compression (20% of H2’s 120 MJ/kg.)
Barely cash in on the H2-O2 reaction (ΔH = -285.8 kJ/mol).
Battery buses, powered by lithium-ion cells, hit EROI of 2 to 4.
Redox heavy lithium mining (150 MJ/kg) drags it all down.
Charge-discharge losses (90% Coulombic efficiency)+ 5-10% capacity fade after 1000 cycles.
All trails diesel’s 5-10 EROI and 46 MJ/kg density.
By your own calculation EROI of Battery buses should be about 15-30 (taking diesel EROI as given as it has no source) if you actually apply the vehicle's efficiency; ~85% efficiency for E2E diesel-generator-to-EV. While diesel bus would be around ~21% effiency.
Source/explainer: https://youtu.be/6c94vRmbM6Y?si=WmCvyB6uKJT7TWZ7&t=444
Is that hydrogen EROI number assuming lowest energy hydrogen? Or something like electrolysis?
Incomplete because of https://dialog.hochbahn.de/bus-in-zukunft/neue-brennstoffzel... and https://www.hochbahn.de/de/presse/pressemitteilungen/brennst... and https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/hamburg/Hamburger-Hochbahn-st...
(jooze tränntzläyshun zörvizzäss!)
TL;DR: Hamburgs mobility provider is trying it again, after failure in 2019 with 5 Busses, with 5 Busses (Fuel-Cell) again, this time allegedly 'mass production ready'.
With the intent of max. 10% of the fleet based on this ¹, or similar, in 2030, which is their target for carbon neutrality.
Got a little bit more range, refuels faster (in 15 minutes), than the few hours E-Busses (currently) need.
Regarding infrastructure this has to be seen in the context of Hamburg wanting to be a hydrogen hub, because of its harbour, shipping, processing and such.
Shrug? We'll see...
¹ actually the Hamburger Hochbahn isn't the only provider, about the other half comes from VHH ( https://vhh-mobility.de ) which don't use or intend to use hydrogen, instead going for battery electric exclusively. Which in the context of 'Hydrogen Hub Hamburg' mentioned above, seems logical, because they operate lines far out of that also.
There's a few companies and labs in Germany who still manage to somehow sell hydrogen as a "local innovation" to government grants every now and then... Hydrogen busses, hydrogen trams, hydrogen trains. It never sticks, unsurprisingly.
Yah well... „Grüner Wasserstoff“ aus Hamburg: Senat weicht der Frage nach den Kosten aus
https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/hamburg-bei-gruenem-wasserstoff-...
shrug Who am I to judge? ;->
I think there's a risk of "it's too soon to say here" when deciding on fuel vs battery Vs hydrogen. The problem is that this is a highly complex dynamic system with different people experiencing different externalities.
Reasons answering this question is difficult are, for example:
- given the demands for highly valuable electricity and alternative use cases, why do we insist on using it in locomotion?
- given marginal electricity pricing, everyone is subsidising cleaner air in cities for the benefit of air quality of only those living in cities
- might electric buses be prevalent because of smaller up front costs to infrastructure, and not because it's the right thing longer term?
- if electrification of transport in general was a bad idea (first bullet) then how does this change the economics of hydrogen given the longer run access to SMR sourced hydrogen from longer term fossil fuel extraction?
- how sure are we that we are solving a co2 climate crisis with the actions we are taking?
This all in the context of "greening" our economies when all the dirty industry and carbon emissions are exported to China, out of sight but not out of the true equation. And then there's the destruction of industrial capacity in Europe carried out by green agendas, all in favour of the Chinese Communist Party longer term.
I think this "debate" is largely irrelevant: China has decided that locomotion will be (battery) electric. That is the largest scale you can get, so any effects of scale for an alternative will at best be as large as the battery electric one.
And then there are the variety of other disadvantages that come with hydrogen: - significant leakage and high greenhouse factor - heavy support equipment need (both for storage and for usage)
About the only advantage of hydrogen (vs. lithium-ion batteries) is gravimetric energy density (where it's about a factor of 300). But even volumetric energy density differs only be a factor of 5-10. (Both numbers ignore that the storage thing will add significant weight). And those are _already_ not limiting for locomotion needs.
- how sure are we that we are solving a co2 climate crisis with the actions we are taking?
The thing here is yes: Even if we would generate the energy for the locomotion completely with fossil fuel! Large plants are significantly more efficient (10-35% vs up to 60%) and it would be _much_ simpler to, e.g. think about carbon capture if we had tens of thousand CO2 emitters rather than a billion. But we are not doing that!
use electricity to make hydrogen to fieed the car, vs just use thne electricity you were going to use anyway to directly charge the car. Less losses.
And trolleybuses are better than both :P
I like how ChatGPT thinks it would take at least five tower cranes to constuct that little shed/shelter.