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

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

#401

Post by comte7092 »

rsynnott wrote: post #245
comte7092 wrote: post #29

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 m…

> 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.

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.

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

#402

Post by zejn »

kaibee wrote: post #105
giantrobot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 en…

I disagree it's a chicken-egg problem, nor is it not worth buying an EV (aka "going green").

You can charge an EV with electricity made from several different energy sources. You could even charge it with gas or diesel generator, if such a need would arise. You can't really fill an ICE car with home-brewed gas.

The real issue a) range and b) if your car use maps well to an EV's need to have it plugged in for several hours at a time.

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

#403

Post by sieabahlpark »

kelnos wrote: post #390
paganel wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no "green revolution" coming, just the powers that be taxing us, normal citizens, to the hell and the back if we'd still want to hang on to our gasoline-powered cars, which taxing policies will for sure bring about the revolution of people choosing to not travel anymore, because too expensive. That's the revolution that they're now putting in place. Also, bonus points to the "liberals" (including many of the…

I think it's a bit weird to blame people who bought Teslas for the current situation with Musk. That's a huge, bad-faith stretch of an argument.

[dead]

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

#404

Post by stainablesteel »

neves wrote: post #125

Why? Because Oil Companies are lobbying for inefficient hydrogen to delay a green revolution: 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 bene…

this is the best answer and it's not the only way they do it, they've become extremely sophisticated saboteurs of anything energy related through pure marketing alone

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

#405

Post by happosai »

dghughes wrote: post #374
neves wrote: post #125

Why? Because Oil Companies are lobbying for inefficient hydrogen to delay a green revolution: 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 bene…

My province has a hydrogen village powered by windmills no oil companies involved. https://frontierpowersystems.ca/hydrogen-village/

Where are all the details? All the articles of project seem to be pre-build.

How many MW of wind turbines? How big electrolyzer? How big energy storage? Investment cost? Running costs? Reliability?

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

#406

Post by bell-cot »

sagarm wrote: post #171
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 drove the TCO so high that ditching already paid for hybrid busses made sense?

Sticker price on a hybrid bus was a few $100K higher than on a conventional, the actual mileage wasn't all that much better, and the maintenance was considerably more expensive. My source didn't mention reliability - but it's a big enough system that they'd track that as cost, too.

("ditching already paid for" - probably not the case. Vs. leasing, or selling the hybrids on, or something.)

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

#407

Post by aeturnum »

manquer wrote: post #191
fraserharris wrote: post #119

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 tha…

The maintenance costs are only marginally higher per the report at $1.33 FCEB vs $1.15 BEB , $2.37 for Hybrids and $1.28 for Diesel (with additional public health costs for respiratory illnesses), the sample size(5x5) is too small to draw any meaningful conclusion on infrastructure costs or even reliability given the limited experience in operating anything not diesel. Economics of hydrogen in CA are also complicated…

I think the case for using hydrogen today is pretty weak, but a lot of the details for why it's a bad choice are (as you say) exacerbated by the one-off deploys of the technology. If you were testing gas busses and needed to truck gasoline in just for your busses you would expect the numbers to get worse too.

My view is that if you want a clean alternative today you'd go with electric and also the tech seems worth continuing to develop for other applications. I also think that public transit doesn't seem like it plays to the strengths (such as they are) of hydrogen.

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

#408

Post by Retric »

pfdietz wrote: post #396
Retric wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pure hydrogen is not found in meaningful quantities on earth. There’s a huge demand for hydrogen in industry and it’s almost exclusively met with steam methane reforming there’s some methane pyrolysis and a little green hydrogen but not much. If people could just drill for it, they would happier do so as being so light it’s easy to separate out from other gasses.

> Pure hydrogen is not found in meaningful quantities on earth. This is not necessarily true. A recent discovery in France could contain as much as 250 million metric tons of hydrogen (but that's a generous upper bound).

Sure there’s useful amounts of grey hydrogen but not enough for any kind of energy transition.

We’re talking about the useful energy from ~1 number power plant over its lifespan. So find ~1,000 such locations and that would be a big deal.

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

#409

Post by syncsynchalt »

chrisco255 wrote: post #337
timschmidt wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a car engineered to satisfy California's short lived requirement for auto manufacturers to make a zero emissions vehicle, hence the availability. Despite that, drivers loved it, and didn't want to give them back when GM cancelled the program (after lobbying the law repealed).

The car was engineered with 90s battery tech so it was plagued with problems that anyone who used such batteries in the 90s know existed: high self-discharge, memory effect, low energy density, voltage depression over time, and limited cycle life. These cars wouldn't last 2 years without needing their batteries replaced. That's why they never sold more than 600 of them.

"Memory effect" in the 1990s is an old wives' tale. It's a real condition discovered in the 1980s on satellite platforms with computer-controlled charging, but was identified and fixed quickly.

It never existed in consumer applications of NiCd batteries, especially as late as 1996.

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

#410

Post by Tade0 »

jimnotgym wrote: post #301
Tade0 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe, but a tank of hydrogen burnt through an ICE is much cheaper than either It's really not. Most of the hydrogen bus projects were killed by the surprising cost of fueling - approximately 4x the cost of electricity. And no wonder: just the energy wasted producing hydrogen and then using it in a fuel cell is enough to build a battery pack that will last the equivalent.

Is that the cost of the fuel itself, or the high cost of providing it in a world with little infrastructure?

At its best, generating hydrogen and then putting it through a fuel cell is less than 50% efficient, and that's discounting all the losses present both in BEVs and hydrogen cars.

Hydrogen combustion engines slash that efficiency in half.

Even if you handwave over the hardware required to do all that, the cost is double that of equivalent electricity.

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