Hydrogen vs. Battery Buses: A European Transit Reality Check

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! :)

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.)

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? ;->

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.

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.