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

cleantechnica.com

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

#101

Post by ianburrell »

cf100clunk wrote: post #39

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. Propan…

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.

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

#102

Post by astura »

a1o wrote: post #60
bell-cot wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in SE Michigan, one local transit authority ditched its new hybrid busses and returned to diesel ~15 years ago - because the TCO for the hybrid busses was so much higher that fixing the hole in their budget proved impossible.

What is TCO?

Total Cost of Ownership.

It includes fuel & upkeep costs.

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

#103

Post by bluGill »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #100
bluGill wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No bus route should be more than 15 minutes between full and empty. That is you start at some station, go 15 minutes, then turn around and go back. There are many systems that attempt to do more, but there is no point: people have places to be: on the bus is not on that list. That 15 minutes means an average of 7 minutes, now they walk to some other express bus that gets them nonstop (at faster speeds) to someplace,…

There are two critical aspects to the bus routing problem. One is that no matter how well you design your system, there is always variance in the arrival times of a bus at any given stop. If you expect people to switch buses, then you need to account for this variance, and this means adding buffers. Nothing makes people stop using buses faster than missing your connection because your bus was late. The other aspect i…

I'm coming from a different perspective: regardless of all else (all those issues you raised are very real), people need to get where they are going in a reasonable amount of time. Most bus service fails to account for that, but if you can't get people there in a reasonable amount of time there is no point in trying.

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

#104

Post by AnthonyMouse »

bluGill wrote: post #97
thfuran wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any bus route anywhere that never goes more than 15 minutes from the depot?

Not that I know of - but there shouldn't be.

How do you get somewhere which is 20 minutes from the depot, or in general between any two points that are more than 15 minutes apart?

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

#105

Post by kaibee »

giantrobot wrote: post #10
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #4

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.

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 hydro…

> 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?

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

#108

Post by potato3732842 »

bobthepanda wrote: post #21
rsynnott wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

I think it depends more on the regulatory climate.

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

#109

Post by calibas »

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.

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

#110

Post by adrian_b »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #82
kittoes wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but you lose 100% in the case of combustion...

That's efficiency, not range. Suppose hilly terrain reduces range by a third for electric vehicles and half for diesel. The diesel bus just fills up twice as often. The electric bus needs a 50% bigger battery in order to finish the same route without stopping to charge, and then it becomes 70% because it has to lug the bigger battery up the hills. You can just... do that, but that doesn't mean it's not a thing you ha…

It is impossible for a hilly terrain to reduce the range by a third for well-designed electric buses.

The efficiency of regenerative braking increases with the power of the vehicle. The electric efficiency should be well over 90%, perhaps even 95%. The mechanical losses will lower the total efficiency to much smaller values, but even so, the total efficiency should be over 80%.

A bus with an ICE will consume 5 times more extra energy for climbing the hill and it will also consume energy while going downhill.

Values like a 50% greater battery are unrealistic, and a heavier battery adds much less to the consumption than by how much it is heavier, even when going up the hill (because most of the extra energy consumption is also recovered).

In a certain city, it may happen that the bus routes are so long that batteries are not competitive with ICEs, at least for now. However, the presence of hills in any city can only make electric buses more advantageous, not less advantageous, due to much greater cost savings for fuel and maintenance. Buses with ICEs that are operated on hilly routes also need extra maintenance, besides increased fuel costs. Well-designed electric buses do not care whether they are operated in conditions requiring higher torque.

Like I have said, I have lived in cities with hills and with electric trolley buses and there was no doubt that the trolley buses were superior to buses with ICEs exactly on the routes that were going up and down over hills.

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