Hydrogen Bus Fail

Recharge: “French city drops order for 51 hydrogen buses after realising electric ones six times cheaper to run.” In the French city of Montpellier and its environs, a two-yr-old project to operate a fleet of hydrogen buses has just been canceled. The “€29m…Montpellier Horizon Hydrogen project—which included the construction of a small solar-powered green-hydrogen plant—had been announced by EDF subsidiary Hynamics in December 2019.” Funding of €18m was sourced from regional, national + European funds, plus another €8.9m from the French sovereign fund Caisse des Dépôts. In US dollars, this totaled over $29 million at current exchange rates. “But Michaël Delafosse, the mayor of the Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole (an administrative region centred on the city of Montpellier)…elected in June 2020, last week decided to cancel the project on the grounds of cost.” The problem was that all that funding supported only the initial investment, not the ongoing operations. “Green hydrogen is an inherently inefficient and expensive solution for road transport as it requires renewable electricity for electrolysis to create the H₂, more power to compress the gas, which needs to be stored in large tanks, an expensive filling station is required to pump the stored hydrogen into a vehicle, where a fuel cell converts the H₂ back into electricity.” Simply put, it is ‘much more efficient and cheaper to pump the renewable electricity directly into a vehicle battery.’ For road transport at most scales, I have decided that my infatuation with hydrogen was only a passing fancy. As an aside, “China is currently the world leader in electric buses, with more than 500,000 on the country’s roads.” And I salute the electric buses we have in our fair city of Bellingham.