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Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?

• guerby 2y ago
  Linked also an interesting read : https://cleantechnica.com/2024/12/22/heat-pumps-for-electric-buses-blow-another-meme-out-of-water/ https://cleantechnica.com/2024/12/22/heat-pumps-for-electric...
• anenefan 2y ago
  I have flagged for the 403 - Forbidden - at a site level.
• ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  The obvious answer is that government incentives and policies are corrupted by fossil fuel interests. The article only makes this claim via a link to another article: > the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium (CUTRIC), is riddled with conflicts of interest and bias toward hydrogen. In which they reveal gas pipeline companies and fuel cell manufacturers are members of that org and on its board.
  • giantrobot 2y ago
    The mechanism through which fossil fuel interests work is "grey hydrogen" which is hydrogen produced through processing of fossil sources with no eye towards carbon capture. Grey hydrogen is as polluting as just burning the fossil feedstock but works with an established hydrogen infrastructure. This lets the producers "green wash" their production pipeline by stating in a lies-through-omission manner that their hydrogen is "clean burning". See no carbon out of the tailpipe! It's clean! It's the same lie as EVs claiming to be "green" in places where fossil fuel sources dominate electricity production. It's just moving the tailpipe somewhere else rather than eliminating it entirely. There's also "blue" hydrogen that's manufactured with fossil fuels but claims/intends to capture the carbon produced in the process. It can still feed into a hydrogen infrastructure so fossil fuel companies love it due to the same greenwashing. The only carbon neutral hydrogen is "green" hydrogen which uses a renewable source and electrolysis of water to generate hydrogen. But even that is wildly less efficient on net than just using renewables to charge battery EVs. Electrons are far easier to move long distances than hydrogen or hydrogen feedstocks (including water).
    • kaibee 2y ago
      > It's the same lie as EVs claiming to be "green" in places where fossil fuel sources dominate electricity production. This is just anti-ev propaganda. First, its kind of a chicken-egg situation: 'its not worth going green for the power grid, all the cars are still ICE' 'oh its not worth building EV cars, the power grid is dirty anyway'. Second, there are lifecycle analyses that show that even if your powergrid is entirely fossil fuels, EVs are still a win. This is because powerplants are really efficient in ways that a car engine can't be because of scale/weight. iirc the only exception was if your power-grid was still like 50%+ coal?
      • AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        Not only that, it's completely the opposite: One of the biggest impediments to adding more renewables to the grid is aligning generation with load. EVs are rolling energy storage devices. Put EV chargers in workplaces with a setting that says "just make sure the battery has at least 100 miles of charge by quitting time" and you get a full 300 mile charge from 100% renewable energy whenever it's available, still enough to come back tomorrow if it's cloudy today, and a discount for using the charger where that's what happens. Then you not only charge the EVs from entirely renewable generation, most of them can curtail their load for about a week because typical EVs have around seven times the average commute in total range, and then when renewable generation is at 25% of normal, the capacity added to charge EVs can be directed to less flexible loads because the demand from EVs can be easily delayed for the right price. Their existence is what makes a grid with a higher percentage of renewables even work.
      • giantrobot 2y ago
        > This is just anti-ev propaganda. It's not. I'm not in any was opposed to EVs. Assuming so is a bit ridiculous on your part. There's a marketing push to cast EVs as green no matter the prevailing sources of utility power. EVs can be green (like hydrogen) if they're charged from renewables. They also get greener over time since they're as green as their charging source. In the short term EVs are just moving their emissions from tail pipes to smoke stacks. Contrary to the marketing around them.
• genev 2y ago
  Sadly my town of Santa Cruz is going through this right now: https://lookout.co/carmageddon-when-will-santa-cruz-metros-new-hydrogen-buses-be-road-ready https://lookout.co/carmageddon-when-will-santa-cruz-metros-n...
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Geez. > Metro gets about one or two buses every week or so, and that it typically takes around four months of testing before they are put into service. The lengthy testing process is necessary because the Volkswagen Environmental Mitigation Trust, one of the funders of the Metro’s initiative, requires the agency to destroy one of its existing buses before putting a new one on the road
• rsynnott 2y ago
  Huh. I kind of thought that batteries had comprehensively won in this market, tbh. I still can't quite get used to the electric buses. A 20 tonne double-decker bus should sound like it might explode at any moment; it is unnatural for them to move around more or less silently.
  • bombcar 2y ago
    Batteries have won this so hard (if you ignore CNG busses, which have existed forever and are "almost as good as hydrogen could be") - because even when they hadn't won it, you just needed more busses. Is it nice if the bus can do a driver's entire shift without a recharge? Sure! But if it can't, you just design the route so that the driver can switch busses and buy another bus. That means the technology problem is now a money problem. Busses are also already quite heavy, so battery weight doesn't affect them as much as it might in a small car.
    • rsynnott 2y ago
      > But if it can't, you just design the route so that the driver can switch busses and buy another bus Oof, that's a huge 'just' in many cases. That said, current electric buses have sufficient range that this mostly isn't an issue. The unnervingly silent double-deckers I mention have a claimed range of 320km, which, at least here, is sufficient. The big problem with Dublin's electric buses, ridiculously, was that the operator was late in applying for planning permission for the substations required to charge them. With the result that for about a year, there were about a hundred of them stored and unusable.
      • bobthepanda 2y ago
        This depends a lot on local climate and topography. Seattle has kind of been a bust with them because the hills really reduce the amount of charge, and on top of that the existing bus depots are already full, so switching to electric only would mean having to find and locate space for more bus depots, which is quite difficult.
• jpm_sd 2y ago
  Transit agencies don't have the technical expertise to distinguish truth from lies in cleantech marketing. They aren't the only ones, see the over-inflated valuations of both Nikola and Tesla as two (very different) stories of companies successfully lying to investors and the general public about the magical capabilities of their novel transportation platforms.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • ryantgtg 2y ago
    They kind of do, though. Most transit agencies hire consultants to plan out these transitions, and the consultants have expertise in the different technologies and can present the pros and cons. However, the decisions stemming from this information can often be dictated by the transit agency's governing board, which cares less about this fat report that they just paid for and cares more for the hydrogen interests whispering in their ears.
• WalterBright 2y ago
  The electric airplane is another myth. There is no known battery technology, or one on the horizon, that can provide a large enough power/weight to make them practical. The investors are getting bilked.
  • titzer 2y ago
    > to make them practical. ..practical to replace commercial airliners, sure. There have been plenty of slow electric planes. In the future, net-zero air travel can only be done by producing jet fuel in a carbon neutral way.
  • myself248 2y ago
    They're great for trainers. Short hops with immediate control, low maintenance and operating cost, and you can save the magneto/ignition/etc workload for a different lesson series.
    • WalterBright 2y ago
      I can see that. Although managing the engine is a major part of learning to fly.
      • marcosdumay 2y ago
        So, make electric airplanes the initial license, reduce the amount of hours to get it, and have an entire course on monomotors before pilots can deal with combustion airplanes.
      • myself248 2y ago
        Exactly. Flying the airplane is the first 90% of flying, managing the engine is the other 90%. So it helps to set one aside while you work on the other.
  • thijson 2y ago
    I thought they might make sense for trainer aircraft that flight schools would use.
• 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  Because people are allergic to hybrids and I don't know why "Electric is short range, fuel is expensive, guess I have to pick one" The ideal drivetrain was invented over 20 years ago by Toyota and apparently nobody but me and Honda noticed it!
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • mschuster91 2y ago
    > The ideal drivetrain was invented over 20 years ago by Toyota and apparently nobody but me and Honda noticed it! The problem is hybrid drivetrains are complex. You don't save anything on the complexity of a combustion engine and exhaust train (over 1000 individual parts that have to be machined at extremely low tolerances), but add a more complex transmission (it needs to be able to work with two distinct inputs) and an electric drivetrain on top of that. It is worth it in terms of energy efficiency and acceleration stats since even a small electric motor can supply a lot of torque at low speeds until the high-horsepower combustion engine catches up (virtually all modern cars have a turbocharger that needs time to spin up), but it's technically challenging to actually build into a modern car design - unlike 90s cars with ample space available to stuff components in, in a modern car every cubic centimeter is accounted for due to crash resistance.
    • jshier 2y ago
      As a simple driver of cars, I've never understood why no one has mass produced an EV with a built-in generator. That would avoid the complexity of the hybrid drive train, allow easy plugin and short range electric-only travel, and could even be offered as an optional attachment. So what am I missing? Is the efficiency gained by the generator offset by losses through the EV system?
      • torginus 2y ago
        Most BYD PHEVs work like that - with the additional option of connecting the engine directly to the wheels via a clutch at highway speeds. I think Honda has a similar system.
• comte7092 2y ago
  Why do transit agencies keep falling for hydrogen busses? From the perspective of the US, it’s pretty simple: 1. Transit agencies have no way to reasonably validate what the future holds. From the standpoint of today, a hydrogen bus can be expected to replace a diesel bus 1 to 1, while battery electric is a 2 to 1 replacement. This might not be a huge issue except: 2. FTA regulations have strict requirements on how many spare busses may be kept at any time (defined by the ratio of peak vehicle usage vs the size of the overall fleet), doubling the size of the fleet blows this ratio out of the water. 3. It doesn’t matter what BYD offers or what’s possible in China, US transit agencies are required (FTA regs again!) to buy busses made in the US. American manufacturers do have somewhat decent battery electric products, but they are clearly not at the leading edge. With the proterra banktrupcy, there are limited competent suppliers in the market. To a large degree, gillig et al do get to decide what gets pushed into the market.
  • xnx 2y ago
    > US transit agencies are required (FTA regs again!) to buy busses made in the US BYD makes electric buses in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_K_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_K_series
  • rsynnott 2y ago
    > With the proterra banktrupcy, there are limited competent suppliers in the market. Do the conventional bus manufacturers in the US not make electric buses? All of the electric buses here are made by the transport authority’s traditional manufacturers.
    • comte7092 2y ago
      US manufacturers absolutely make electric busses, but when you’re talking about global trends/capabilities in the market, you have to keep in mind that the core competency of most suppliers on the US market is still diesel drivetrains, their EV products are new/secondary.
• cf100clunk 2y ago
  Look into propane (a.k.a. LPG or Autogas). If the goal is anything-but-diesel-or-gasoline/petrol, the use of propane (a fossil fuel that is a byproduct of oil and gas refining) is a well-understood, well-implemented practice. I am not advocating for propane as a primary solution, but rather as part of the journey towards truly clean vehicle emissions and the ramp-down of heavily polluting fossil fuel refining. Propane and the equipment to operate engines with it are available today, and we have the knowledge going back over a century to implement it successfully. BTW, I wish I could find the article from the 1970s discussing how Ford Motor Company engineers had converted a brand-new 1960s Lincoln to propane and ran it with 100% synthetic motor oil, never changing the oil or filter. After 500,000 miles of daily use, they stripped the engine down to its parts and found it to be shiny and not exhibiting the expected amount of wear seen in usual engines of those years with much lower mileage. I'd have to pour through old magazines for that story, but life gets in the way, so let's treat my recollection as apocryphal.
  • gwbas1c 2y ago
    A local airport shuttle service converted some of their vans to propane. They told me the benefit is that they go about 3-4x longer between oil changes. (I suspect they aren't brave enough to go 500,000 miles.)
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • bolognafairy 2y ago
    I tell you hwat!
  • ianburrell 2y ago
    There isn't any point to propane now. Electric busses got good enough to do the job. Propane reduces pollution, but the goal is to reduce CO2 emissions. Buying propane means buying electric in decade or two.
  • neRok 2y ago
    LPG had its chance here in Australia in the 2000's, but it didn't work out [1]. Subsidised conversions were offered back then, which many people took up on their 80's+90's model cars, but it probably led to the early demise of many of those cars. By the late 2000's there were factory cars selling with LPG "gas" systems, but they weren't as good as the petrol variants [2]. By 2011 you could get "liquid injection" models, which were as good [3]. But like the first article states, people with "large" cars were shifting to SUV's and dual cabs by that stage, and a lot of them were 4cyl petrol/petrol-turbo/hybrid/turbo-diesel, so their fuel efficiency was comparatively decent. Also in 2011, the government introduced fuel-tax on to LPG, which it had been exempt/discounted on previously. So the price went up, and all of a sudden it wasn't as economical. So that put it in to a death-spiral, especially when many servo's started getting rid of it due to low demand. Now people with LPG cars have "range anxiety" [4]. Where I live (Perth, Western Australia), you are basically stuck in the metro area if you are LPG only. It also means there's a ton of ~2008-2012 LPG Falcons for sale second-hand at good price, but no one wants to buy them. Out of curiosity, I just went and looked up some data for where I live - the Perth metro (source [5]); Year Month Fuel c/L avg Servos $cost / 100km for Ford Falcon sedan (UNO) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 2010 Dec LPG 69.4 216 @ 15L = $10.4 (gas model) ULP 128.0 298 @ 10L = $12.8 (petrol model) 2019 Dec LPG 89.0 147 @ 15L = $13.4 (gas model) LPG 89.0 147 @ 12L = $10.7 (LPi model) ULP 144.9 387 @ 10L = $14.5 (petrol model) 2024 Dec LPG 133.9 46 @ 12L = $16.1 (LPi model) ULP 172.7 436 @ 10L = $17.3 (petrol model) ULP 172.7 436 @ 6L = $10.4 (Falcon Ecoboost 4cyl 2L turbo) Dsl 178.5 437 @ 9L = $16.1 (Ford Territory SUV 2.7L TD) [1] https://www.fleetcare.com.au/news-fleettorque/fuel-cards/what-ever-happened-to-lpg https://www.fleetcare.com.au/news-fleettorque/fuel-cards/wha... [2] https://www.smh.com.au/national/running-the-rule-over-lpg-options-20090214-gdtd7r.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/running-the-rule-over-lpg-op... [3] https://www.drive.com.au/reviews/ford-falcon-ecolpi-lpg-review/ https://www.drive.com.au/reviews/ford-falcon-ecolpi-lpg-revi... [4] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-19/lpg-cars-disappearing-from-roads-gas-renewable-fuel-vehicles/102236128 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-19/lpg-cars-disappearing... [5] https://www.fuelwatch.wa.gov.au/retail/historic https://www.fuelwatch.wa.gov.au/retail/historic
• javiramos 2y ago
  Please also electrify garbage trucks
  • drdirk 2y ago
    Here in Barcelona Spain they are electric!
    • javiramos 2y ago
      I recently visited Barcelona — it is a fantastic city. A perfect intersection of amazing food, friendly people, vibrant culture, great weather. Is life in Barcelona as good as it seems from the outside?
• hatthew 2y ago
  > Fuel cell buses do produce sufficient waste heat, but here’s the problem: it’s exceptionally expensive heat. Every degree of warmth comes from hydrogen — a fuel that’s costly to produce, store, and transport. Unlike diesel, heating with hydrogen’s waste heat is technically easy but economically painful. Isn't waste heat pretty much free by definition?
  • hannob 2y ago
    Within one technology, that'd be true. But not if you have the option to choose another technology that produces a lot less waste heat.
    • hatthew 2y ago
      Yeah, I just find the framing very weird. It's talked about as if it's somehow worse than diesel. But then isn't the issue that hydrogen fuel is less economical than diesel in general, regardless of whether the fuel is used for locomotion or for passenger heating? In the context of passenger heating specifically, waste heat is either free for both diesel and hydrogen, or equally non-free for both. Also the article appears to be arguing for electric instead of hydrogen buses, but for some reason seems to try to frame "winter range" as being an issue for hydrogen buses specifically, and then says "electric buses face a different challenge" -- winter range. I feel like there are two separate points that can be made: - Hydrogen fuel is more costly than diesel or electric (not even sure how true this is, but it's what the article seems to indirectly imply). - Hydrogen fuel doesn't have winter range issues the way electric buses do, but regardless electric is still better for other reasons.
      • ryantgtg 2y ago
        Hydrogen fuel (gray) is often about $8-10/kg, which is about an 80% increase in costs per mile over diesel. Green hydrogen is like $14/kg. Additionally, agencies are experiencing vapor losses of fuel, which results in an overall increase in fuel costs. These losses can occur in different circumstances, but often occur after fueling when the gaseous fuel left in the hose (that cannot be returned to the liquid tank) evaporates. One agency reported double the cost of fuel due to these losses. Anyway, yeah I think the argument in the article was that this waste heat isn't "free" because you're paying such a premium for it via the fuel costs.
• egypturnash 2y ago
  Opening image: ChatGPT. I'm just gonna assume the rest of the article is from the same source and close this tab.
• jillesvangurp 2y ago
  That goes for anything hydrogen and wheels pretty much. It's actually pretty simple to figure out. Making hydrogen takes energy. You lose some of the energy making the hydrogen. This is not a fixable problem. At least not unless you break the laws of thermodynamics. When you have created hydrogen, you lose more energy compressing the energy. Then you have to transport it to wherever it's going to be pumped into the vehicle ... both of which take more energy. Then it goes into a fuel cell, which loses more energy. All these losses multiply. And if you know your maths, you know that multiplying numbers smaller than 1 means the result gets smaller and smaller. These losses are significant. And we're comparing it with putting the energy into a battery directly. It has inherently better round trip energy. Even if hydrolyzers, and the infrastructure to store, compress, and transport hydrogen were free (which they are not), using hydrogen would still be more expensive than that. Because it wastes more of the energy that goes in. So, in addition to the energy losses, you also need to deal with infrastructure cost. On top of regular energy infrastructure. Anyway, that's all theory. For practice, just look at market price of hydrogen. Most of that stuff is of the dirty grey hydrogen variety creating that wastes a lot of methane. So much, that it would be cleaner to just use the hydrogen in a combustion engine in the bus and you'd have less CO2 emissions. Expending more methane to make hydrogen to have less emissions makes no logical sense. If you are using grey hydrogen, it is more expensive per mile than methane. Nothing can change that. If you are using green hydrogen, it is more expensive per mile than battery electric. Nothing can change that either. That's just physics and simple economics. Yes there are some innovations in this space happening that reduce the gap a little. But it's never going to be enough. Right now it's not even close. Unless somebody is subsidizing the hydrogen fuel, you'd be paying way more per mile than with diesel. And not just a little bit. And a common reason to switch from diesel to BEV is that it actually costs way less per mile than diesel. So, instead of saving money, you are spending more money. Subsidies are hiding the true cost of hydrogen. That's the only reason there are some vehicles on the road. As soon as the subsidies dry up, hydrogen transport use cases evaporate. There are of course plenty of other use cases where hydrogen is needed that make much more economical sense. Using scarce and expensive hydrogen for transport is a poor use of resources. The utopian world where we have vast amounts of hydrogen surpluses does not exist.
  • boplicity 2y ago
• aagd 2y ago
  Also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybus
  • andix 2y ago
    Trolleybusses are surprisingly expensive to operate. Battery electric busses seem to be much cheaper to operate and often good enough.
    • fuzzmz 2y ago
      There's also a sort-of-middle-ground here. There are trolleybusses which also have batteries, and can operate as regular busses where no overhead power is available. Basically you get continuous charge on parts of the route, while also being able to operate in other areas. Granted, this works for cities which already have trolleybus infrastructure in place.
      • andix 2y ago
        With modern battery electric busses there is usually no need to charge while driving. Drivers need breaks, fast charging during the break time is enough. Fast charging infrastructure is much simpler to install and cheaper than overhead wires.
• tim333 2y ago
  There are some hydrogen busses working in the UK. >34-bus expansion, jointly funded by Brighton & Hove Buses and Surrey County Council, bringing their total hydrogen fleet to 54 vehicles – the largest hydrogen bus operation in the UK. https://drivinghydrogen.com/2025/02/04/hydrogen-buses-34-new-double-deckers-start-service-in-brighton-hove/ https://drivinghydrogen.com/2025/02/04/hydrogen-buses-34-new... I'm not sure how cost effective it is compared to battery though.
• andix 2y ago
  Answer to the question: political reasons and lobbying. Hydrogen is produced by the big oil and gas companies. By pushing hydrogen vehicle instead of battery electric vehicles they stay in business. They market hydrogen as a green alternative to oil, although most hydrogen is currently produced from fossil sources, and this won't change soon (next 10 years).
• dathinab 2y ago
  Don't know, but in Germany 100% corruption. To be clear no necessary corruption of the people in agencies themself, - but of the people consulting them - and/or influential investors in a sunk cost fallacy where they think they still can save their investments - again often a place they ended up in due to corruption, not necessary them themself being corrupt but other which gave them wrong consultancy Even when I looked into the topic around 14~ years ago it was very clear that hydrogen will likely not be a competitive technology for cars "in general", through maybe somewhat competitive in some niche (i.e. trucks). But the thing is if you considered marked dynamics back then it never looked long side promising. As whatever wins outside of the niche (batteries) will get so much more traction weather it's infrastructure or science investments. Now the question is what kind of corruption? Russian Money (and any other natural gas exporter, but in Germany mainly Russian Money) Again not necessary Russia directly going to people and bribing them. But mainly by using co-investments, potentially with obfuscated source, to convince people that a lot of other reliable investors are investing into it and therefor you should, too. Which, with a bit of more direct corruption, is quite an efficient strategy to push investments into a specific direction. Because the more you convince ("in general" independent) investors to invest into hydrogen the more they will lobby for hydrogen themself. Now the key question here is why would Russia want to convince countries to use hydrogen as a "green future technology"? Because why it technically looks like it can work, _it practically does not_! This isn't even about hydrogen cars by themself. But about hydrogen production, the simplest cheapest way to produce hydrogen is from natural gas in a non green way. While you can produce it green it has a pretty bad efficiency and exiting (and long term planed!!!) infrastructure is barely enough to move the hydrogen usage from other industries which do not it anyway to green methane. And while lobbyist go on and on about how it's just a question to spin up the infrastructure it not only doesn't seem to happen even ~14 years ago it didn't seem that likely and today it's very clear it won't happen because it makes no sense. I mean sure e.g. Australia will likely produce a ton of green Hydrogen in the future, but again in comparison of what is needed to move all trucks & busses etc. to it it's not that relevant. This doesn't mean there is no use ever for green hydrogen (like mentioned various existing industries need hydrogen). But today you can very clearly say it doesn't make sense for PKWs (full stop) and due to constant battery improvements in all areas and high investments into future improvements and not having reached a wall in science in that are it has moved from "it might make sense for some decades for trucks" to, nah, seems dump for trucks, too. So to sum up: - It seems doable enough so that (potentially corrupt) lobbyist can be convincing. - Russia spend a ton of money in co-investing into research to push research in the EU and especially Germany in that direction. Implicitly making it look like a good investment deal. - Then a lot of people which can influence political decisions got stuck with it as they are worried about losing their investment and worse, having missed the window to get a foothold into the actual future technologies. - Then this people using their vast influence, including e.g. the "Springer Verlag" (most influential new publisher in Germany). - Leading to a loop where more people get mislead into tinging it's good and invest themself, and then lobby for it and then worry to lose their investment so now lobby against any of it's competition. - And even companies and politicians not stuck in that loop in any way might thing it's not "viable" and as such don't push against that nonsense.
• m463 2y ago
  that site never loads for me - 403 forbidden
  • anenefan 2y ago
    I would guess like myself you are denied due to geolocation. I'm in Australia using an Australian ISP. I could load a proxy but due to so many anonyphobic sites or scripts via their API that really try hard to detect and deny proxies, I am not that engaged with a news item to go to the trouble. Also looking at my earlier comment in this tread also pointing out the 403, apparently some people don't like me mentioning that -- I guess I can wonder how long before onion and nearly impossible to load links will be OK at HN.
  • deleted 2y ago
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• manchego 2y ago
  I'm just waiting for flywheel powered buses to make a return: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrobus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrobus
  • Ericson2314 2y ago
    Cool :) but reminds me that all energy storage is scary and an accident waiting to happen. Flows > stocks, overhead wire for the win!
    • NikkiA 2y ago
      I personally think Battery buses with SAE J3105 'docking' points at key stops (basically, the stops that are used to loiter to set timing, rather than leaving as soon as possible) is a better solution than the cost of stringing OHL through every major road in a city. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_electric_bus#Charging https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_electric_bus#Chargin... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J3105 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J3105
      • seb1204 2y ago
        Reading about this and matching it up with what I see in some more recent electric truck and ferry charging videos I feel this is almost historic tech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megawatt_Charging_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megawatt_Charging_System
    • rsynnott 2y ago
      Think that’s bad? Look at this thing! https://www.en-former.com/en/mammoth-flywheel-for-irelands-grid-stability/ https://www.en-former.com/en/mammoth-flywheel-for-irelands-g... 4GJ of stored energy, dischargeable in eight seconds.
  • askvictor 2y ago
    I'm currently reading "The Windup Girl" set in a mostly-post-fossil-fuel future, where most energy storage is springs.
• calibas 2y ago
  Back in 2003, President George W. Bush announced the Hydrogen Fuel Initiative. At the time, people criticized the effort as an attempt by the oil industry to shift attention away from electric cars. The oil industry knew that hydrogen power wasn't going to be viable anytime soon, while electric cars were already a direct threat to their profits, so they pushed the US government towards hydrogen power. Not to disparage the talented scientists and engineers working on hydrogen power, but now that 20 years have passed I believe it was designed to fail.
  • yummypaint 2y ago
    It absolutely was. In the event that breakthroughs happened and it became viable faster than expected, the backup plan was to get the hydrogen from fossil fuels to make sure the industry would still get its cut.
    • analog31 2y ago
      Isn't that the only plan right now? Is commercially viable hydrogen being made from any process other than the shift reaction?
      • yummypaint 2y ago
        Back when the Bush admin was hyping this stuff they managed to get the media to talk mostly about electrolysis of water using solar power. They would talk about how only water comes out the tailpipe, and the symmetry of being able to reuse water to make more fuel was extremely appealing to the credulous minds of the public. Nothing has really changed either, 20 years later and laypeople still don't have better information about this technology...
    • chrisco255 2y ago
      You realize you can just as easily (if not more so) produce electricity with fossil fuels, right?
  • isametry 2y ago
    See also: the plot of Cars 2. I’m only semi-joking. https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Allinol https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Allinol
• me_me_me 2y ago
  [dead]
• ninalanyon 2y ago
  Because the US is in thrall to the oil companies.
• fraserharris 2y ago
  AC Transit (eg: East San Francisco Bay) performed a detailed 2 year study (July 2020 - June 2022) comparing newer Hydrogen Fuel Cell & Battery -powered buses to existing Diesel, Fuel Cell, & Hybrid -powered buses, 5 of each type. The key results are the Hydrogen Fuel Cells have significantly more expensive infrastructure, fuel, and maintenance costs than Battery. However, both technologies are still less reliable than Diesel. The results are broken down into 4 volumes, each covering 6 months. You can read them here: https://www.actransit.org/zebta https://www.actransit.org/zebta
  • int0x29 2y ago
    Only two years? They operated hydrogen buses from 2006 to 2010 and then got some more in 2011 and 2019. There are budget line items for new buses in 2023 and 2024 that I assume got bought
  • AtlasBarfed 2y ago
    I'm not going to dispute your numbers with diesel versus EV reliability, but I have to think the simplicity of an EV drivetrain will win that battle in the next version or two.
    • fraserharris 2y ago
      The reliability speaks to the technology immaturity. I agree with the inevitability of the EV drivetrain + charging off the existing distribution network being more reliable than competing technologies.
      • formerly_proven 2y ago
        idk these sound like very specific problems they had. The chargers had an availability of only 23% because of a recurring issue with the power modules failing. In a later volume they also again attribute a lot of unavailability to the same chargers: > The BEB fleet operated at 66% availability with more than half of the total days related to retrofit of the charger cabling and programming by the OEM. I guess you could say this is due to immature technology but honestly I don't see 75% of HPC chargers being offline for maintenance at any given time. This is probably just bad luck with a vendor. If you look at the road calls the BEB is by far the most reliable one, causing one road call out of 45. It was also the cheapest per mile by a long stretch.
• gblargg 2y ago
  https://archive.is/G6I98 https://archive.is/G6I98 (for those not wanting to enable JavaScript)
• neves 2y ago
  Why? Because Oil Companies are lobbying for inefficient hydrogen to delay a green revolution: https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/carbon-notes-5-green-hydrogen-the https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/carbon-notes-5-green-hydrog... > The members of the hydrogen coalition are all obviously incumbent fossil fuel and petrochemical interests looking for a bridge to the new era. If realized, their ambitious hydrogen projects may overload the available supply of green power, for little real benefit. By diverting badly needed clean power, green hydrogen vanity projects may even slow down the energy transition. And the subsidy regimes that are being put in place could become self-perpetuating. As Gernot Wagner and Danny Cullenward recently warned, “hydrogen could become the next corn ethanol”, a ruinously inefficient and environmentally damaging creature of subsidies that are too big to kill.
  • askvictor 2y ago
    Not just to delay, but they're hope is that they'll be able to control it when it happens. Oil companies move fluids, using pipes and tankers. Hydrogen is a fluid. They want to keep doing what they've been doing. Electricity doesn't fit into their M.O.
    • somat 2y ago
      I don't know what you are talking about, electricity is a fluid.
      • marshray 2y ago
        The only sense in which "electricity" could be said to be fluid is in its definition. There's no such physical quantity, it's just a vague term for a variety of phenomena.
        • kelipso 2y ago
          Maybe he was talking about aether theory of electricity lol.
        • somat 2y ago
• londons_explore 2y ago
  If hydrogen busses really were going to have a lower operational cost per mile in 2050, then some company would be offering to lease busses for $X per mile to transit operators, fuel included, for a 25 year lease. They'd make a loss initially, but big profits later. That approach turns this technology maturation and cost risk into a market, and those with most expertise can then put their own money on the line to help everyone make the right decision.
• abetancort 2y ago
  Buy diesel buses and forget about all this green nonsense, it's a big lie from the electric industry.
• scojjac 2y ago
  Battery is silly for buses, IMO. Invest in streetcars (electrified fixed-route buses) and be done with it. Streetcar lines represent continued investment, and are therefore more attractive to developers, unlike bus routes that can be changed on a whim. And they've been around for longer. Cut the red tape on building them and on zoning if you want to see serious results.
  • dalyons 2y ago
    The lines are very expensive to install and maintain. You could just buy double or triple the number of “silly” EV buses and be way ahead.
    • scojjac 2y ago
      I addressed that. High price is an artificial problem caused primarily by red tape, from tariffs to environmental studies to rolling over to NIMBYs over neverending hearings. We had electric streetcars in small towns in the early 1900s in the US. Small towns in other countries have them today. Buses suck. People don't like riding them as much as trains and streetcars. Bus lines do not attract the same kind of investment that streetcars can. Attracting denser development along routes improves ridership AND tax base, which helps balance out the cost. I think we will massively regret BEV as the solution to ICE vehicles. They don't handle temperature extremes well and I believe people are overly optimistic about recycling them.
      • elric 2y ago
        IMO it's totally fine for buses to keep using ICE for many years to come. There are orders of magnitude fewer buses than cars, they are already pretty fuel efficient, and everything that makes public transport more expensive is very bad in my opinion. If we had zero cars in a city, but 10k diesel buses, the city would still be better than if it had 100k cars and 500 electric buses. I'm making up these numbers, of course. Point being: sure, electrify everything eventually, but let technology improve and let prices go down to the point that it makea sense for public transport. Right now, an extra diesel bus would do more good than replacing a diesel bus with an electric one in many cities.
• emchammer 2y ago
  How are these buses refueled? Is it just like pouring gasoline into a normal car with a handle from the pump? Or is it an airtight pump like filling a scuba tank?
  • seb1204 2y ago
    Scuba tank, the filling process takes several minutes I heard, think 15+ for a car. The tanks in cars are around 800 bar, reinforce carbon fibre with a bladder inside. To fill it the compressor station has to deliver higher pressure, I recall 1200 bar but not sure about it. Also hydrogen has the oddity to produce heat when expanding, which means the filling process needs to be actively cooled. Considering current CCS and future MCS charging ports and their speed I think the hydrogen lost another advantage if it ever had a refuelling time advantage.
• LatteLazy 2y ago
  People keep falling for the myth that this can be solved at a personal level or even national level. People keep falling for the myth that we are making progress (we’re not). Hydrogen powered busses are just a specific case of a much much larger communication/coordination issue…
• someonehere 2y ago
  Almost every Shell station in San Francisco, remodeled and added hydrogen refueling stations about two or three years ago. Now they sit idle or turned off. If green energy were a money making business, the oil companies would get into it tomorrow.
• sholladay 2y ago
  They keep falling for it because fixed route busses are the one use case where hydrogen could theoretically make sense. The bus can fill up far faster than it could recharge an equivalent battery. The bus gets lighter and more efficient as it uses fuel. And crucially, it can always fill up at the same place, which really ought to be the central depot where all the buses in that network return to. But inevitably with these projects, the fueling station is instead where some random gas station used to be or in an industrial park or near a harbor, purely because that’s what made sense to the hydrogen supplier, who is probably hoping other customers will come along, even though they won’t. And that’s before the high risk of the hydrogen supplier throwing in the towel, at which point the next nearest fueling station might be ridiculously far away. If hydrogen buses are to have any future, it will have to be more centrally managed from end to end and it would probably still need some public funding to get off the ground. In the end, a lot places won’t bother with all of that when electric buses are “plug and play”.
  • alsodumb 2y ago
    I blame the transit agency for those missteps though - it doesn't have to be like that. Take for example CUMTD (mtd.org), the transit agency serving Champaign-Urbana, a college town in Illinois with about 200k people. It's an excellent bus system, everyone in the city loves it, the people running the place always embrace new technology, and they actually have a hydrogen plant setup in their depot and the plant is powered 100% by solar energy: https://mtd.org/inside/projects/zero-emission-technology/ https://mtd.org/inside/projects/zero-emission-technology/
  • VBprogrammer 2y ago
    > The bus gets lighter and more efficient as it uses fuel. This argument is weak. To get any kind of reasonable energy density you have to compress hydrogen to 10,000psi. The tanks to contain a gas at that pressure are heavy enough that the weight of gas inside is almost negligible. Especially in ground vehicles which aren't hugely sensitive to weight.
    • psd1 2y ago
      Tell that to Colin Chapman! Although yes, agreed, a few kilos makes little difference to a bus.
• kumarski 2y ago
  https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/the-hydrogen-myth-presentation/655176 https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/the-hydrogen-myth-prese...
• bawolff 2y ago
  Why battery-electric busses though. Seems like trolleys are the ideal solution.
  • rsynnott 2y ago
    There’s a lot of infrastructure cost there.
• from-nibly 2y ago
  Because governments are not buying hydrogen busses. They are buying votes and terms. Just like public companies don't sell stuff they sell shares. Just like private equity doesn't buy companies they buy loans they can disappear by defaulting a company.
• fifilura 2y ago
  I am surprised there is no mention of CNG/biogas buses. They are very common here in Sweden. The engine is more or less the same as a gasoline/diesel engine. The biogas can be (and is) locally produced by food/farming waste or similar but can also run on fossile gas. And for the buses it is no problem to carry the somewhat bulky cylinders on the roof.
  • ZeroGravitas 2y ago
    There's also biofuels. In Norway until recently the biofuel mixing requiremnts were doing as much to avoid CO2 in passenger cars as EVs, though EVs grew so they're about twice as effective now. Still a powerful complementary strategy. https://robbieandrew.github.io/EV/img/avoided_emissions.svg https://robbieandrew.github.io/EV/img/avoided_emissions.svg
    • fifilura 2y ago
      The mix the Swedish populist government removed for lower gas prices.
• jimnotgym 2y ago
  I can't agree with the underlying idea of this article at all. 1) hydrogen buses must be more expensive than electric. I don't see how that is true. Hydrogen uses an ICE that is much cheaper to purchase than batteries + motor. Of course early stage niche designs might be more expensive, but that doesn't mean that it will be more expensive at scale 2) somehow the hydrogen fuel must be a long way from the bus depot, because it was in one case. Bus depots often have their own diesel, why couldn't they have hydrogen? 3) it is much quicker to refuell a hydrogen vehicle than a battery vehicle. Superchargers can recharge a piddly car battery in 20 minutes. How much larger would they need to be to recharge a bus and how long would it take? How big a grid connection would you need to have 100 buses on charge overnight. It doesn't sound trivial at all 4) depreciation. An electric car depreciates very quickly because the battery lifetime is short. Think of how many batteries a bus would need, and write that down over 3 years. A hydrogen bus would have a similar lifetime to a diesel however 5) JCB who make earth moving and farm equipment realised that batteries would never have the energy density for those uses has gone all-in on hydrogen and has demonstrators of its main machines, a hydrogen bowser that can be brought to the field and a very compact hydrogen plant with solar panels that can allow a major user like a bus company to make their own hydrogen on site. 6) hydrogen can be produced using surplus electricity, making good use of renewables by storing the energy. I would say that rather than transport operators demonstrating naive thinking, they have demonstrated their own. I'm also suprised by the people on here think that this must be the result of advicacy from the petrochemical industry, then going on to shill for the electric vehicle industry themselves. The electric car industry is only alive due to subsidy, and is only just alive at that.
  • elric 2y ago
    > hydrogen buses must be more expensive than electric Fuel cells are presumably more expensive than battery packs. The former are barely produced, while the latter are made in gigafactories. You can't just fill up the gas tank with hydrogen, it will leak out and/or cause a violent reaction with oxygen. > somehow the hydrogen fuel must be a long way from the bus depot You can't just store hydrogen in a tank and call it a day. Again, it leaks through everything and is rather reactive. Maybe it could be stored on site, but even then it'll still need to get there. > it is much quicker to refuell a hydrogen vehicle than a battery vehicle Not intrinsically. Buses could be built with swappable battery packs. > allow a major user like a bus company to make their own hydrogen on site. How many solar panels and how much water you need to power those 100 buses you mention? Hydrolysis isn't very efficient. > hydrogen can be produced using surplus electricity, making good use of renewables by storing the energy In theory, maybe. In practice, it is difficult to store at scale.
• jimnotgym 2y ago
  How much power does it take to charge a bus in a reasonable amount of time? I heard 100kw. If I have 100 buses charging overnight at 100kw I guess I need 10Mw grid connection? Is that an easy thing to get to a city bus depot in the US. In the UK I believe that would require moving to a location with a HV line and building a sub-station.
  • olau 2y ago
    If you charge the buses over night, then you don't need 100 kW. I think the battery sizes are something like 100-300 kWh. So with 9 hours of charging, you need only perhaps 30 kW at the most. Anecdotally, the town I live in invested in probably around 100 buses. They did build a new depot with charging stations. Batteries are coming down in price, so if getting a good grid connection is a problem, you can put in a buffering battery. The comfort of the BEV buses is much better than the old diesel buses, by the way, and they are much less noisy in the city.
    • jimnotgym 2y ago
      Ok so you still need 3MW or with a buffering battery as big as your fleet you could spend half the day charging the batteries. So you still need what, 1.5MW? Or is it half that. It is still a grid connection that is larger than you could easily find in an old inner city bus depot, I would have thought?
  • D_Alex 2y ago
    No, that is not right. The correct answer is "it depends", but let's run some indicative numbers on data for Boston: On average and excluding the minority of routes with dedicated lanes (which may be best run on diesel), the Boston metro buses are in use for 6.6 hours per day, covering on average 53 miles. A full size electric bus uses electricity at a rate of approx 2 kWhr/mile. So, on average the bus would have around 17 hours to charge up with 106 kWhrs of juice, and this averages out to about 6.2 kW. On average. However, the smart thing to do would be to charge the buses when the power costs the least, say between 10 pm and 8 am, so you'd need ~10 kW/bus, maybe ~1MW for the 100 bus fleet. Not difficult.
• fredgrott 2y ago
  things are changing they found a way to decouple the membrane in producing hydrogen which significantly decreases the cost see https://www.science.org/content/article/new-type-water-splitter-could-make-green-hydrogen-cheaper https://www.science.org/content/article/new-type-water-split... In production in probably 5 years from now...
• deleted 2y ago
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• acc_297 2y ago
  A good professor convinced me hydrogen was a dead end some years ago. But to be fair busses and trains and other public transit that does fixed routes every day is the perfect bench for any clean energy drive train that needs real world testing. Also public money should never be overly shy of coordinating with companies who are trying to in good faith to solve our climate crisis. Some discussion on this thread about hydrogen being a poison pill promoted by oil interests which I don’t really know about. Electric bus programs have been broadly successful and no doubt have contributed in a real way to our understanding of that technology.
  • grandempire 2y ago
    > Also public money should never be overly shy of coordinating with companies who are trying to in good faith to solve our climate crisis. I think it’s the opposite. Public money should be conservative spends on things we know work. Let the startups try the risky bets. As this has been reversed a lot of cities have gotten taken for a ride. For example “self driving car lanes”.
• ThinkBeat 2y ago
  Toyota is testing a hydrogen combustion engine. https://www.toyota-europe.com/news/2022/prototype-corolla-cross-hydrogen-concept https://www.toyota-europe.com/news/2022/prototype-corolla-cr...
  • pornel 2y ago
    This is a dead-end. Like all ICE engines, it still emits NOx pollution that cities want to get rid of. It is even less efficient than hydrogen fuel cells. It combines energy-inefficiency of ICE with the energy-inefficiency of hydrogen generation and distribution. Hydrogen is a worse fuel than gasoline, so these engines are more complex and deliver less power. Such engines in busses would be more expensive to run, more expensive to maintain, and still have tail-pipe emissions.
• Beijinger 2y ago
  This is propaganda. I can find you a dozen websites and statements from University professors, why gas, electricity or hydrogen is doomed from the beginning. And I can find another dozen, why they are the future. "stuck with 19 buses that they have to drive a long way to refuel at great overall expense, something I wrote about this week." This seems like a problem that can be solved, but it is a hen and egg problem. Not enough refusing options, system less attractive. Electric cars had this too. I wonder why city buses have this problem. I am not aware that city buses use regular gas station, I always assumed that they get refilled in their "home base". This would make the refueling infrastructure not very challenging. Is hydrogen the future for cars? Manufacturers haven’t given up on it yet https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/is-hydrogen-the-future-for-cars-manufacturers-havent-given-up-on-it-yet/4020674.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/is-hydrogen-the-future-f...
  • frollogaston 2y ago
    This isn't comparable to the EV charging station problem, because at least there's already electricity everywhere and you don't need to convert to hydrogen on top of that.
• deleted 2y ago
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• esjeon 2y ago
  I don't get why Americans are hating on hydrogen fuel cells so much, but in Korea, half of the eco-friendly bus market is basically on hydrogen (note: the gov uses all kinds of weird terms and stats, so I really can't nail down the actual number). There are lots of electric buses, but they're too heavy and not great for the tight corners and hills that are everywhere in Seoul. FCEVs are lighter and more powerful, so bus drivers seem to prefer them over BEVs. However, hydrogen buses are about twice as expensive as battery buses from China.
  • blablabla123 2y ago
    Somehow the technology "stack" seems to have way more sharp edges, from hydrogen diffusing out of the storage tanks up to inefficient generation. However I think a lot of those have been solved and cars are already in the 3rd generation. IMHO hydrogen is the most foolproof way to store cheap solar energy.
• deleted 2y ago
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