> 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 benefit. By diverting badly needed clean power, green hydrogen vanity projects may even slow down the energy transition. And the subsidy regimes that are being put in place could become self-perpetuating. As Gernot Wagner and Danny Cullenward recently warned, “hydrogen could become the next corn ethanol”, a ruinously inefficient and environmentally damaging creature of subsidies that are too big to kill.
Do you have actual knowledge of their motives? Or is this speculation, confidently stated as fact?
Another possible motive, mentioned in the the paragraph you quote, is that the oil companies see an energy transition coming and are trying to get aboard the hydrogen train to diversify their future revenue sources. And that sounds like a reasonable motive; the sort of thing that people who don't see themselves as evil villains – i.e. the supermajority of people – could embrace.
I work for an oil and gas company. It has been specifically stated by my company that they are seeking support for hydrogen as a fuel because it adds value to their gas reserves - natural gas is roughly 75% hydrogen on a molar basis.
The idea is to stimulate demand for "green-ish" hydrogen (that is by grid-connected electrolysis); once demand for the hydrogen is there, it can be supplied by blue hydrogen. The O&G companies aren't super keen on green hydrogen made by dedicated renewables off grid, and they LOVE the approach of "we'll start off with grey hydrogen then we'll move to blue and green in the future".
This is very specifically a strategy to increase the amount of natural gas that can move from resources to possible reserves to probable reserve to proven reserves. That's how you increase the value of your company, which is how you get a fat bonus as a CEO.
You don't get a fat bonus by telling the truth or being right.
The current US administrations moves against renewables should make you realize how powerful the oil gas lobby is. They got some pushback from local politicians so were slowed down but the way they started they were looking to end all wind and solar for a false promise of nuclear tomorrow.
Given how hard and how long the fossil fuel industry has been fighting tooth and nail to suppress science, kill public and private projects, and fund bogus studies, all to avoid ever losing even a fraction of their ironclad control of the energy market, I think it's fair to deny them the benefit of the doubt at this point.
If they're saying or doing something that would stand in the way of or compete with the existing rise of renewable energy, even without any specific evidence, I believe it is fully justified to say they are doing it for selfish reasons that will harm literally every other human being on the planet.
It’s why we don’t have rail in the US like you see in Europe. At one point in time we had a ton of rail and streetcar networks but these groups destroyed it all because it was a threat to their business. For oil companies, so is hydrogen.
One can extract hydrogen from fossil fuels. So if a hydrogen break through is coming, they already have a cheap source for the material.
Not really green though...
"trying to get aboard the hydrogen train to diversify their future revenue sources" sounds very close to what op claims. For them, the goal is to get aboard, not to get to a destination.
Are you sure the hydrogen storage is still active? That page does say "This project has been operating autonomously since 2009" but the projects page on the same site lists the hydrogen village as lasting from 2008-2010 https://frontierpowersystems.ca/projects/. Frontier Power Systems is also a "wind-diesel" provider - so they certainly aren't separated from oil companies (though this doesn't automatically mean their intentions aren't genuinely to reduce fossil fuel usage as GP was saying, they even seem to be doing battery storage systems now).
Checking further into the projects list, the first project in Ramea for "wind-hydrogen-diesel" (first time I've seen that one) demonstration is listed as lasting longer but this article notes it hardly ever ran because "issues were experienced with the storage aspect of the project" i.e. the hydrogen storage https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/ramea-w... I didn't exhaustively check the project list but, of the ones I did, I didn't see an active wind-hydrogen systems. Only active wind-battery or wind-diesel systems. WEICan also has active wind+battery systems running on Prince Edward Island https://www.weican.ca/ (click view details for the specifics) but no hydrogen.
Maybe all of that is in same way inaccurate and there are actually great details of the hydrogen storage success. Unfortunately I can't find any such details saying "that's the case and here is the data about how successful it has been for the last decade", just the above info saying it was tried for a short period, didn't work out, and other system types are currently in place.
Not just to delay, but they're hope is that they'll be able to control it when it happens. Oil companies move fluids, using pipes and tankers. Hydrogen is a fluid. They want to keep doing what they've been doing. Electricity doesn't fit into their M.O.
There's no "green revolution". Just different compromises and tradeoffs, and practical considerations for roll-out times (including for solar, wind, and batteries - no free lunch.
It seems to me like green fundamentalist see nothing but enemies and subterfuge everywhere. Hydrogen, biofuel, nuclear, switching from oil to natural gas where possible, the list goes on.
I don't have enough of an opinion to comment on anyone of them individually, but I notice a really striking pattern where every time the idea of alternative energy sources are brought up that are not wind or solar, whoever brings it up is accused of sabotaging the energy transition in some way or another.
I mean, read the current top sibling comment to yours. Someone who worked at an oil & gas company confirmed that this was their strategy.
Now, I don't think these people are sitting in their carved-out mountain lair, scheming to destroy the world; I'm sure they don't see themselves as villains. But they are making deliberate decisions to protect their business models and bottom line by adopting -- and, importantly, lobbying for -- technology that is polluting and emits greenhouse gases.
Sure are lots of HN software developers that confidently know everything about everything in this thread.
I enjoy HN a lot when the subject is software or software adjacent. I find myself avoiding the comments section in actual engineering topics, though. You'd never catch an electrical engineer claiming to be an expert on whatever the flavor of the month is in development but every developer is an expert when it comes to all things that are even tangentially related to electric fields.
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
Just not true. Lots of oil companies have a vested interest in renewables now. A lot of the infrastructure for offshore oil is being redeployed for offshore wind.
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 techies in here) helping bring forward guys like Musk, they did that by purchasing and aggressively marketing for his vehicles, they've actually empowered him and brought him into his actual position of power.
" Because Oil Companies are lobbying for inefficient hydrogen to delay a green revolution"
well NO, contrary to popular belief. there is no such things because
1. Oil is scarce resource that not every country have
2. since not every country has, they must import it with expensive trade deficit meaning that Oil alternative or replacement is very much needed
since country like china,south korea and japan that has massive economy dependant on oil for their survival, hydrogen tech would come out of necessity but they are not because its not feasible
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 than Diesel.
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 given our on-off approach to hydrogen infrastructure[2] for both personal and commercial vehicles but there is some progress on commercial side at least last year [1].
Hydrogen is not everyone but there are use cases for it.
The uptime (i.e. the refueling time) is an key factor [4]. Battery operated vehicles need a lot of downtime for charging thus you will need more vehicles for the same coverage. Fast charging can help but impacts battery life and thus TCO.
All green public transit are expensive. It is not a easy choice for administrators, should they improve coverage/ service frequency etc for their residents who need transit the the most or better air quality and less noise pollution for all of them.
Remember Fuel Cells are far cleaner for the air much more than BEV also, because it needs oxygen from the air FCs purify the air to do so. Kind of like having a big vacuum on the road in addition to not emitting direct pollutants[3]
[3] Ignoring tire dust, it is problem for all vehicles of course, that is independent of propulsion systems
[4] Even for personal vehicles it can be a decision factor when considering going green, as an owner of a Mirai with no easy access to EV charging stations I have benefited from being to refuel like a gar car.
If I'm reading that right the Battery Electric busses had the lowest maintenance costs? The need to charge is a potential issue, but at the same time busses do lots of low speed stop and go where battery systems are most efficient. As long as the bus has enough capacity for an entire day and can be recharged overnight it seems like an ideal solution, minus of course the up-front cost of the bus. Lower fuel costs, no noxious pollutants, less noise, lower maintenance, there is a lot to love.
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.
I get the impression they've had similar results in London. They've had ~20 hydrogen busses for a while but apparently are expensive like £500k per bus plus you need to find hydrogen.
On the other hand battery seems to be cracking along: "over 1,600 zero-emission buses currently in service, and TfL aims to have a fully zero-emission bus fleet by 2030, accelerating plans with increased government funding."
Only two years? They operated hydrogen buses from 2006 to 2010 and then got some more in 2011 and 2019. There are budget line items for new buses in 2023 and 2024 that I assume got bought
I'm not going to dispute your numbers with diesel versus EV reliability, but I have to think the simplicity of an EV drivetrain will win that battle in the next version or two.
The reliability speaks to the technology immaturity. I agree with the inevitability of the EV drivetrain + charging off the existing distribution network being more reliable than competing technologies.
It’s hard to imagine it not. And also kudos and crazy respect for all the thousands of engineers that poured their work into making combustion engines as efficient and reliable as they are. A true marvel of humanity, and something to be respected even as we leave it behind.
Based on personal experience my guess is that the unreliability would be in the battery not the drive train.
Or more precisely put, batteries are a sort of black box they ether work or they don't work but either way you are not going to be able to open one up and find out why. that is, they are a high cost unrepairable item on the vehicle and this is a huge liability.
Limerick City in Ireland has electric double decker buses. They are dead quiet and it's a total treat to be a pedestrian without the buses passing by and blowing my ears off.
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.
What about electric cars wasn't "viable" in 2003? That was the year Toyota released their all electric RAV4 in California...
Unlike hydrogen, there was already whole highly-developed system for production and distribution of electricity.
Also, you're mistaken about my "made up narrative". I'm not claiming electric cars were mass market, I'm strongly implying there were forces at work fighting against that very thing!
The parent commenter to you never claimed that electric cars were already viable or mass market, I would say the implication is that it was very obvious to the car industry at the time that EVs would be viable and even affordable extremely soon.
The Nissan Leaf was only 7 years away in 2003. In automotive technology terms that's like a single generation's worth of refresh for a typical vehicle. The Chevy Volt also launched the same year as the first mass-market plug-in hybrid.
As an example, the current 2025 Honda Odyssey is essentially the same car that began deliveries in 2017 with only minor changes.
So really what we are talking about here is an auto industry that knew that EVs were going to hit the market, like, really soon. Nissan sold over 100,000 Leafs between 2010 and 2019 which is pretty amazing for a first generation mass market new drivetrain product.
It absolutely was. In the event that breakthroughs happened and it became viable faster than expected, the backup plan was to get the hydrogen from fossil fuels to make sure the industry would still get its cut.
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 many spare busses may be kept at any time (defined by the ratio of peak vehicle usage vs the size of the overall fleet), doubling the size of the fleet blows this ratio out of the water.
3. It doesn’t matter what BYD offers or what’s possible in China, US transit agencies are required (FTA regs again!) to buy busses made in the US. American manufacturers do have somewhat decent battery electric products, but they are clearly not at the leading edge. With the proterra banktrupcy, there are limited competent suppliers in the market. To a large degree, gillig et al do get to decide what gets pushed into the market.
> 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.
They keep falling for it because fixed route busses are the one use case where hydrogen could theoretically make sense. The bus can fill up far faster than it could recharge an equivalent battery. The bus gets lighter and more efficient as it uses fuel. And crucially, it can always fill up at the same place, which really ought to be the central depot where all the buses in that network return to.
But inevitably with these projects, the fueling station is instead where some random gas station used to be or in an industrial park or near a harbor, purely because that’s what made sense to the hydrogen supplier, who is probably hoping other customers will come along, even though they won’t.
And that’s before the high risk of the hydrogen supplier throwing in the towel, at which point the next nearest fueling station might be ridiculously far away.
If hydrogen buses are to have any future, it will have to be more centrally managed from end to end and it would probably still need some public funding to get off the ground. In the end, a lot places won’t bother with all of that when electric buses are “plug and play”.
> The bus gets lighter and more efficient as it uses fuel.
This argument is weak. To get any kind of reasonable energy density you have to compress hydrogen to 10,000psi. The tanks to contain a gas at that pressure are heavy enough that the weight of gas inside is almost negligible. Especially in ground vehicles which aren't hugely sensitive to weight.
The tank weighs at least 10x what the hydrogen weighs, so yes it’s relatively little per trip, but it does add up over the lifetime of the vehicle and I thought it was worth mentioning. Same goes for very high voltage in BEVs. There’s weight savings to be had by maximizing voltage which allows you to reduce the thickness of the wiring. But the savings are small compared to the weight of the battery.
Aren't buses with a fixed route also a great candidate for battery swap solutions? As all the buses are managed by the same company, I would be curious to know if there are any hidden issues with this approach: while an bus is riding with a battery, the replacement battery gets charged, and when necessary you just swap the battery.
Maybe. There are certainly companies doing this, such as SUN Mobility and BYD. But I think battery swapping will remain fairly niche, unless and until a few standardized battery shapes, sizes, and connectors emerge. Fixed route buses might be able to rely on custom solutions but that will of course increase the price and make it less tenable for the long-term.
Would it be so hard to manufacture your own hydrogen on-site with the $20k plug and play electrolysis setups they sell to labs and industries? You can just plug into a high wattage outlet and let it work when the grid is at low demands
You can't drill for oil & refine it at a bus depot but for the case of hydrogen maybe the assumption that fuel has to come from a supplier can be challenged
I don't see any benefits from economies of scale for electrolysis
Hydrogen would probably be delivered on a trailer and maybe hauled by an electric vehicle. Ultimately I think it makes more sense if hydrogen could be produced in a more distributed way.
Do you think it could be useful for farm or construction vehicles?
I blame the transit agency for those missteps though - it doesn't have to be like that.
Take for example CUMTD (mtd.org), the transit agency serving Champaign-Urbana, a college town in Illinois with about 200k people. It's an excellent bus system, everyone in the city loves it, the people running the place always embrace new technology, and they actually have a hydrogen plant setup in their depot and the plant is powered 100% by solar energy: https://mtd.org/inside/projects/zero-emission-technology/
Huh. I kind of thought that batteries had comprehensively won in this market, tbh.
I still can't quite get used to the electric buses. A 20 tonne double-decker bus should sound like it might explode at any moment; it is unnatural for them to move around more or less silently.
Batteries have won this so hard (if you ignore CNG busses, which have existed forever and are "almost as good as hydrogen could be") - because even when they hadn't won it, you just needed more busses.
Is it nice if the bus can do a driver's entire shift without a recharge? Sure! But if it can't, you just design the route so that the driver can switch busses and buy another bus. That means the technology problem is now a money problem.
Busses are also already quite heavy, so battery weight doesn't affect them as much as it might in a small car.
The stop-start nature of city busses makes them a real low hanging fruit for battery electrification, benefiting from instant torque to start and regen to stop and, as you say, fixed known routes within larger fleets.
The only nation that seems to have capitalised on this basic fact is China which bootstrapped its EV industry on busses, pulling ahead from 2010 and hitting 90% of global market share for EV busses in 2020, and now a big exporter.
> 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 operator was late in applying for planning permission for the substations required to charge them. With the result that for about a year, there were about a hundred of them stored and unusable.
Many bus routes have a 5-10ish min break at some point (usually the main station) in the route. If you can utilize those ten minutes to do a top-up, you can go a lot further on the same sized battery.
> That means the technology problem is now a money problem.
This is such an odd insight. Most problems in the world can be described as a "money problem", and it's usually the problem that problem solvers are pushing up against.
> That means the technology problem is now a money problem.
And not even a horrible one. A bus that is driven half as much per day will wear out (about) half as fast. Which means, although you do have to buy twice as many buses up front, the number of buses you have to replace per year won't change.
So in the steady state, the cost of buses isn't actually that much worse.
There is still some penalty for needing more buses, though. For example, you have to pay more to store buses. Also some maintenance is more of a function of time than mileage driven. And you're tying up more capital, which may mean more bonds or opportunity costs.
It's a lot of infrastructure investment but the per-mile running costs are so much lower that it should eventually pay off, especially as buses get cheaper when volume ramps up.
As someone who has witnessed EV buses in person, I think the local pollution and to a lesser extent noise benefits are really great for cities that have or want to move more toward human-friendly streetscapes. They just eliminate so much bus engine stench that just can't be good for breathing in.
It also seems to me that they have to be a lot more reliable. I have seen so many broken down buses with the engine compartment open on the side of the road in my lifetime.
> (if you ignore CNG busses, which have existed forever and are "almost as good as hydrogen could be")
In most of the US yes, in dense big cities they're still quite a bit worse (especially if they run at night too) because they're very noisy compared to electric or hydrogen.
I live in such a place where the buses were all CNG and are now shifting to electric. Unfortunately the switch isn't going too quickly, but every time an electric bus goes by the peace and quiet is blissful. I think every new bus they buy is electric, but I get that they don't want to throw out all of the existing CNG stock.
CNG buses were about a 10-year experiment in Toronto. There were a number of bus terminals where CNG vehicles were prohibited, either due to clearance or because of the associated explosion risk.
A second batch of buses were converted to diesel so that the fuelling station could be decommissioned.
In Tompkins County we were early adopters of the electric bus, at least for the American market. We bought them from a startup which had trouble with the structural aspects and eventually they fell apart
Five months before the company filed for bankruptcy, Proterra's CEO was appointed to the President’s Export Council (PEC), "the principal national advisory committee on international trade."
Thanks for your insight. The amount of damage that Proterra did to the overall BEB adoption rates should not be underestimated. I work with many agencies and so many of them are running from BEBs toward FCEBs in large part because of their, or sister agency, experience with Proterra buses.
> We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time.
This process happened in Madrid a few years ago. It's an incredible quality-of-life improvement for everyone in the city. Diesel buses were phased out a few years ago. The newer hybrid CNG buses are uncannily quiet, and some lines in the city core, where distances are smaller and speed is slower, are fully electric.
Yup, wasn’t being entirely serious. They’ve gotten progressively quieter over the last few decades; when I was a kid, they really did sound like they were within seconds of complete failure when going up a hill. The electric ones are a shock the first time you get on one, though - very futuristic.
Busses are not going to be quiet. Around here we have pretty cool "Van Hool ExquiCity" trolley busses and they can glide gracefully at slow speeds, but when they are hurtling down patched up streets they are not much quieter than the traditional busses.
Transit agencies don't have the technical expertise to distinguish truth from lies in cleantech marketing. They aren't the only ones, see the over-inflated valuations of both Nikola and Tesla as two (very different) stories of companies successfully lying to investors and the general public about the magical capabilities of their novel transportation platforms.
They kind of do, though. Most transit agencies hire consultants to plan out these transitions, and the consultants have expertise in the different technologies and can present the pros and cons. However, the decisions stemming from this information can often be dictated by the transit agency's governing board, which cares less about this fat report that they just paid for and cares more for the hydrogen interests whispering in their ears.
>Weight: a bus which can carry 20 persons and has a range of 2 km (1.2 mi) requires a flywheel weighing about 3 tons.
>The flywheel, which turns at 3000 revolutions per minute, requires special attachment and security—because the external speed of the disk is 900 km/h (560 mph).
>Driving a gyrobus has the added complexity that the flywheel acts as a gyroscope that will resist changes in orientation, for example when a bus tilts while making a turn, assuming that the flywheel has a horizontal rotation axis.
So you have a giant blender than can travel one mile in a straight line before needing to be recharged
I personally think Battery buses with SAE J3105 'docking' points at key stops (basically, the stops that are used to loiter to set timing, rather than leaving as soon as possible) is a better solution than the cost of stringing OHL through every major road in a city.
Readit News
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 benefit. By diverting badly needed clean power, green hydrogen vanity projects may even slow down the energy transition. And the subsidy regimes that are being put in place could become self-perpetuating. As Gernot Wagner and Danny Cullenward recently warned, “hydrogen could become the next corn ethanol”, a ruinously inefficient and environmentally damaging creature of subsidies that are too big to kill.
Another possible motive, mentioned in the the paragraph you quote, is that the oil companies see an energy transition coming and are trying to get aboard the hydrogen train to diversify their future revenue sources. And that sounds like a reasonable motive; the sort of thing that people who don't see themselves as evil villains – i.e. the supermajority of people – could embrace.
The idea is to stimulate demand for "green-ish" hydrogen (that is by grid-connected electrolysis); once demand for the hydrogen is there, it can be supplied by blue hydrogen. The O&G companies aren't super keen on green hydrogen made by dedicated renewables off grid, and they LOVE the approach of "we'll start off with grey hydrogen then we'll move to blue and green in the future".
This is very specifically a strategy to increase the amount of natural gas that can move from resources to possible reserves to probable reserve to proven reserves. That's how you increase the value of your company, which is how you get a fat bonus as a CEO.
You don't get a fat bonus by telling the truth or being right.
If they're saying or doing something that would stand in the way of or compete with the existing rise of renewable energy, even without any specific evidence, I believe it is fully justified to say they are doing it for selfish reasons that will harm literally every other human being on the planet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
It’s why we don’t have rail in the US like you see in Europe. At one point in time we had a ton of rail and streetcar networks but these groups destroyed it all because it was a threat to their business. For oil companies, so is hydrogen.
https://frontierpowersystems.ca/hydrogen-village/
Checking further into the projects list, the first project in Ramea for "wind-hydrogen-diesel" (first time I've seen that one) demonstration is listed as lasting longer but this article notes it hardly ever ran because "issues were experienced with the storage aspect of the project" i.e. the hydrogen storage https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/ramea-w... I didn't exhaustively check the project list but, of the ones I did, I didn't see an active wind-hydrogen systems. Only active wind-battery or wind-diesel systems. WEICan also has active wind+battery systems running on Prince Edward Island https://www.weican.ca/ (click view details for the specifics) but no hydrogen.
Maybe all of that is in same way inaccurate and there are actually great details of the hydrogen storage success. Unfortunately I can't find any such details saying "that's the case and here is the data about how successful it has been for the last decade", just the above info saying it was tried for a short period, didn't work out, and other system types are currently in place.
How many MW of wind turbines? How big electrolyzer? How big energy storage? Investment cost? Running costs? Reliability?
Hydrogen leaks everywhere.
There's no "green revolution". Just different compromises and tradeoffs, and practical considerations for roll-out times (including for solar, wind, and batteries - no free lunch.
I don't have enough of an opinion to comment on anyone of them individually, but I notice a really striking pattern where every time the idea of alternative energy sources are brought up that are not wind or solar, whoever brings it up is accused of sabotaging the energy transition in some way or another.
Benefit of doubt has it's place but this is just naivety or outright trolling.
Now, I don't think these people are sitting in their carved-out mountain lair, scheming to destroy the world; I'm sure they don't see themselves as villains. But they are making deliberate decisions to protect their business models and bottom line by adopting -- and, importantly, lobbying for -- technology that is polluting and emits greenhouse gases.
I enjoy HN a lot when the subject is software or software adjacent. I find myself avoiding the comments section in actual engineering topics, though. You'd never catch an electrical engineer claiming to be an expert on whatever the flavor of the month is in development but every developer is an expert when it comes to all things that are even tangentially related to electric fields.
Batteries are pretty messy for the environment. And carrying a ton (1000 kg) with your car, just to be able to move, is a bit too much.
Also, bonus points to the "liberals" (including many of the techies in here) helping bring forward guys like Musk, they did that by purchasing and aggressively marketing for his vehicles, they've actually empowered him and brought him into his actual position of power.
well NO, contrary to popular belief. there is no such things because
1. Oil is scarce resource that not every country have
2. since not every country has, they must import it with expensive trade deficit meaning that Oil alternative or replacement is very much needed
since country like china,south korea and japan that has massive economy dependant on oil for their survival, hydrogen tech would come out of necessity but they are not because its not feasible
if hydrogen is feasible in mass scale, trust me someone in Asia would already make it
The results are broken down into 4 volumes, each covering 6 months. You can read them here: https://www.actransit.org/zebta
Economics of hydrogen in CA are also complicated given our on-off approach to hydrogen infrastructure[2] for both personal and commercial vehicles but there is some progress on commercial side at least last year [1].
Hydrogen is not everyone but there are use cases for it.
The uptime (i.e. the refueling time) is an key factor [4]. Battery operated vehicles need a lot of downtime for charging thus you will need more vehicles for the same coverage. Fast charging can help but impacts battery life and thus TCO.
All green public transit are expensive. It is not a easy choice for administrators, should they improve coverage/ service frequency etc for their residents who need transit the the most or better air quality and less noise pollution for all of them.
Remember Fuel Cells are far cleaner for the air much more than BEV also, because it needs oxygen from the air FCs purify the air to do so. Kind of like having a big vacuum on the road in addition to not emitting direct pollutants[3]
[1] https://www.portofoakland.com/port-of-oakland-celebrates-hyd...
[2] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/zero-e...
[3] Ignoring tire dust, it is problem for all vehicles of course, that is independent of propulsion systems
[4] Even for personal vehicles it can be a decision factor when considering going green, as an owner of a Mirai with no easy access to EV charging stations I have benefited from being to refuel like a gar car.
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.
On the other hand battery seems to be cracking along: "over 1,600 zero-emission buses currently in service, and TfL aims to have a fully zero-emission bus fleet by 2030, accelerating plans with increased government funding."
Or more precisely put, batteries are a sort of black box they ether work or they don't work but either way you are not going to be able to open one up and find out why. that is, they are a high cost unrepairable item on the vehicle and this is a huge liability.
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.
Unlike hydrogen, there was already whole highly-developed system for production and distribution of electricity.
Also, you're mistaken about my "made up narrative". I'm not claiming electric cars were mass market, I'm strongly implying there were forces at work fighting against that very thing!
The Nissan Leaf was only 7 years away in 2003. In automotive technology terms that's like a single generation's worth of refresh for a typical vehicle. The Chevy Volt also launched the same year as the first mass-market plug-in hybrid.
As an example, the current 2025 Honda Odyssey is essentially the same car that began deliveries in 2017 with only minor changes.
So really what we are talking about here is an auto industry that knew that EVs were going to hit the market, like, really soon. Nissan sold over 100,000 Leafs between 2010 and 2019 which is pretty amazing for a first generation mass market new drivetrain product.
I’m only semi-joking.
https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Allinol
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 many spare busses may be kept at any time (defined by the ratio of peak vehicle usage vs the size of the overall fleet), doubling the size of the fleet blows this ratio out of the water.
3. It doesn’t matter what BYD offers or what’s possible in China, US transit agencies are required (FTA regs again!) to buy busses made in the US. American manufacturers do have somewhat decent battery electric products, but they are clearly not at the leading edge. With the proterra banktrupcy, there are limited competent suppliers in the market. To a large degree, gillig et al do get to decide what gets pushed into the market.
BYD makes electric buses in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_K_series
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.
But inevitably with these projects, the fueling station is instead where some random gas station used to be or in an industrial park or near a harbor, purely because that’s what made sense to the hydrogen supplier, who is probably hoping other customers will come along, even though they won’t.
And that’s before the high risk of the hydrogen supplier throwing in the towel, at which point the next nearest fueling station might be ridiculously far away.
If hydrogen buses are to have any future, it will have to be more centrally managed from end to end and it would probably still need some public funding to get off the ground. In the end, a lot places won’t bother with all of that when electric buses are “plug and play”.
This argument is weak. To get any kind of reasonable energy density you have to compress hydrogen to 10,000psi. The tanks to contain a gas at that pressure are heavy enough that the weight of gas inside is almost negligible. Especially in ground vehicles which aren't hugely sensitive to weight.
Although yes, agreed, a few kilos makes little difference to a bus.
You can't drill for oil & refine it at a bus depot but for the case of hydrogen maybe the assumption that fuel has to come from a supplier can be challenged
I don't see any benefits from economies of scale for electrolysis
Do you think it could be useful for farm or construction vehicles?
Take for example CUMTD (mtd.org), the transit agency serving Champaign-Urbana, a college town in Illinois with about 200k people. It's an excellent bus system, everyone in the city loves it, the people running the place always embrace new technology, and they actually have a hydrogen plant setup in their depot and the plant is powered 100% by solar energy: https://mtd.org/inside/projects/zero-emission-technology/
I still can't quite get used to the electric buses. A 20 tonne double-decker bus should sound like it might explode at any moment; it is unnatural for them to move around more or less silently.
Is it nice if the bus can do a driver's entire shift without a recharge? Sure! But if it can't, you just design the route so that the driver can switch busses and buy another bus. That means the technology problem is now a money problem.
Busses are also already quite heavy, so battery weight doesn't affect them as much as it might in a small car.
The only nation that seems to have capitalised on this basic fact is China which bootstrapped its EV industry on busses, pulling ahead from 2010 and hitting 90% of global market share for EV busses in 2020, and now a big exporter.
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 operator was late in applying for planning permission for the substations required to charge them. With the result that for about a year, there were about a hundred of them stored and unusable.
This is such an odd insight. Most problems in the world can be described as a "money problem", and it's usually the problem that problem solvers are pushing up against.
And not even a horrible one. A bus that is driven half as much per day will wear out (about) half as fast. Which means, although you do have to buy twice as many buses up front, the number of buses you have to replace per year won't change.
So in the steady state, the cost of buses isn't actually that much worse.
There is still some penalty for needing more buses, though. For example, you have to pay more to store buses. Also some maintenance is more of a function of time than mileage driven. And you're tying up more capital, which may mean more bonds or opportunity costs.
Good article on this topic.
It's a lot of infrastructure investment but the per-mile running costs are so much lower that it should eventually pay off, especially as buses get cheaper when volume ramps up.
As someone who has witnessed EV buses in person, I think the local pollution and to a lesser extent noise benefits are really great for cities that have or want to move more toward human-friendly streetscapes. They just eliminate so much bus engine stench that just can't be good for breathing in.
It also seems to me that they have to be a lot more reliable. I have seen so many broken down buses with the engine compartment open on the side of the road in my lifetime.
In most of the US yes, in dense big cities they're still quite a bit worse (especially if they run at night too) because they're very noisy compared to electric or hydrogen.
I live in such a place where the buses were all CNG and are now shifting to electric. Unfortunately the switch isn't going too quickly, but every time an electric bus goes by the peace and quiet is blissful. I think every new bus they buy is electric, but I get that they don't want to throw out all of the existing CNG stock.
A second batch of buses were converted to diesel so that the fuelling station could be decommissioned.
https://www.ithaca.com/news/ithaca/tcat-pulls-all-electric-b...
Established bus manufacturers make good electric buses now but we don't have the money to buy replacements.
> We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time.
I hope you're using "should" as in "that's what I'm accustomed to" rather than "that's how it ought to be"... right? :-D
Personally I feel like quieting buses would be a huge step toward making day-to-day city life more pleasant.
Deleted Comment
>Disadvantages
>Weight: a bus which can carry 20 persons and has a range of 2 km (1.2 mi) requires a flywheel weighing about 3 tons.
>The flywheel, which turns at 3000 revolutions per minute, requires special attachment and security—because the external speed of the disk is 900 km/h (560 mph).
It's truly a mystery why they never caught on
>Driving a gyrobus has the added complexity that the flywheel acts as a gyroscope that will resist changes in orientation, for example when a bus tilts while making a turn, assuming that the flywheel has a horizontal rotation axis.
So you have a giant blender than can travel one mile in a straight line before needing to be recharged
Flows > stocks, overhead wire for the win!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_electric_bus#Chargin...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J3105
4GJ of stored energy, dischargeable in eight seconds.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_139