An Italian study found the Battery Electric Buses tested have tank-to-wheel (TTW) efficiencies of 137 and 153.80kWh per 100km, while the two hydrogen FCEB models had average efficiencies of 310.24 and 335.75km per 100km respectively. Figures that are between two and 2.45 times lower than the battery buses.
“Data suggests that driving FCEBs is between 2.12 times to 2.56 times more expensive per km than driving a BEB"
@mackaj Hydrogen buses are cheaper overall. Also, the Italian is misleading people by paying a high price for hydrogen. When it is the same price as diesel, this argument goes away.
So Michael Tree thinks that hydrogen buses are cheaper because they only have to build one fueling station! 🙃
BEBs are normally charged back at the depot so that doesn't make any sense. Also he's quoting capex and ignoring opex where the Italians found hydrogen to be cost prohibitive.
Btw €13.80/kg isn't expensive, that's less than half the pump price of a kg of H2 in the USA.
@mackaj No surprise, you dismiss your own incompetence with dumb snark.
And again, you clearly don't read anything. It clearly points out that large orders are $7-9/kg. Retail is indeed a ripoff right now, but that is missing the point.
BEV charging infrastructure is also a joke. It is the biggest complaint by most owners.
And again, California picking hydrogen buses because is cheaper.
The retail price is the ONLY thing that matters to consumers. The wholesale price is irrelevant if they don't see any benefit from that.
BEVs charging infrastructure is an order of magnitude better than hydrogen.
And Metro are only buying hydrogen buses because it's costing just $918,000 of local money. The rest of the $88 million total cost are grants from state, federal and partners. You can buy anything you like when someone else is paying for it 😄
Bus companies are consumers too. They don't get to buy at wholesale prices.
Every charge point installed at home, or a mall, hotel, hospital, cinema, place of work, etc, etc — all these places and more are part of the "battery charging infrastructure", and they're cheap to deploy.
High power dedicated charging stations are more expensive but are used infrequently by most BEV owners who charge at home.
Bus companies are able to pay a wholesale price which is far lower than what consumers are seeing. Hydrogen should already be the same price as diesel/gasoline if it wasn’t for the lack of distribution capacity.
Putting a charging point everywhere will cost more than the same for hydrogen stations, because you need far fewer hydrogen stations. In fact, hydrogen stations will just directly replace gasoline/diesel stations, making the transition straightforward.
I cannot find any evidence that bus companies get privileged access to wholesale hydrogen prices. If you have some please share it.
Hydrogen's distribution capacity problem is going to stall further adoption unless it's fixed.
Comparing charge points to Hydrogen stations is a false equivalence. Charge point costs are distributed over the millions of home and business owners who own them. Hydrogen station costs are few, concentrated and monolithic by comparison.
Because the cost of infrastructure is lower, it will eventually be the superior solution. We are merely counting down the days until it becomes more practical. As it turns out, centralized solutions tend to be cheaper.
Thanks for the link. California have clearly worked out how to do it right. One of the few.
Electric infrastructure is distributed by nature though because it's required everywhere a plug is needed and it's more efficient to generate locally to avoid expensive long cables and line loses. Again, false equivalence. Electric infrastructure will always be more efficient and cheaper than hydrogen.
@mackaj Stop repeating cliches. You've already lost this debate. In the end, hydrogen buses will replace battery buses because they are cheaper. We didn't even get into how useless battery buses even are.
That's not what's happening elsewhere in the world where battery buses are replacing failed hydrogen and you know it, though you choose to ignore it.
We didn't even get into how dirty the hydrogen is that's powering the miniscule hydrogen bus adoption. SunLine—with their own electrolyzers—are a rare exception.
@mackaj As the saying goes, the laws of physics are the same no matter where you are. So if battery buses are a disaster in the US, then it must also be the case elsewhere. The only question is how far governments are going to hide that failure.
Meanwhile, hydrogen buses are doing the opposite of failing. Stories of such are likely coming from dishonest government officials:
Nothing to do with the laws of physics and everything to do with a country and government in thrall to a dominant fossil fuel industry with deep pockets and an army of lobbyists.
China has over 450k EV buses nationally, where cities like Shenzhen replaced all their ICE fleet with 16k EV buses. Works just fine for them.
Given 96% of hydrogen produced currently is dirty hydrogen from fossil fuels, switching to H2 for transport is NOT saving the planet.
@mackaj Because Philiadephia and Cologne are really part of the oil conspiracy...
Meanwhile, if you want talk about an economic conspiracy, you would look at China. In reality, the Chinese government has massive distorted the transportation sector via subsidies and loans. We have no idea how many buses are really sold, and which are even used. Same is true of all of their infrastructure spending. Case in point:
So some are struggling with infrastructure costs because of financial mismanagement. If they were hydrogen buses instead of electric they'd still be struggling to pay their staff and buy fuel to run them, so that's a daft comparison.
Using #hydrogen for transport is still dumb. Almost all H2 is dirty. Producing 'green' H2 is so energy intensive that if the electricity used is dirty the end-to-end process produces twice as much CO2 as H2 extracted from fossil fuels. It's totally insane.
@mackaj There's been very little subsidies given to hydrogen. So it is currently happening at a small scale. If it was scaled up, it would cost no more than diesel buses to own and run.
But the point is that despite vast subsidies for batteries, they are still nonviable. And China's numbers are totally suspect and there's a good chance nearly all of their battery buses are mothballed in secret.
Hydrogen subsidies haven't scaled because there's no point if the hydrogen available is dirty. That's just swapping one use of fossil fuel for another and does nothing to clean up the planet.
It makes no sense to put what little green hydrogen there is into transport and leave gray hydrogen alone to carry on polluting.
There's also a good chance nearly all their battery buses are still running as intended, despite conspiracy theories to the contrary.
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