Busse stehen rum, weil es keine Tanke gibt
Buses are sitting around because there is no gas station
[Translation via DeepL]
Potsdam/Cottbus – Brandenburg’s major cities are failing to convert their public transport systems to modern drive systems. Potsdam is waiting in vain for the electric buses it ordered. The Cottbus hydrogen fleet lacks a filling station.
Forty-six new hydrogen buses stand side by side at the Cottbusverkehr depot. Each vehicle cost €650,000, subsidized with a lot of taxpayer money. But the buses can’t run—they don’t have any hydrogen.
A filling station for the compressed gas is still under construction. But even its completion in the first half of 2026 will not help: the local energy company LEAG will not be able to deliver the electrolyzer for producing hydrogen from green electricity until next fall.
That is why, since July, buses have been supposed to be filled with “green” hydrogen from tanks. However, the Berlin-based contractor is still working on the “mobile filling station.” Neither the hydrogen supplier nor Cottbusverkehr will say whether and when it will go into operation. They say they are “in the final stages of coordination.”
The multi-million pound project in Aberdeen - involving 25 buses - was meant to be the future of clean public transportation, with the city billed as the global hub for hydrogen-powered buses. But the zero emissions vehicles are now being ditched…
The council announced on Thursday evening that it was to drop its hydrogen double-decker bus fleet in favour of electric vehicles…
The hydrogen buses have been out action since September 2024, due to problems with fuelling stations at Kittybrewster and Cove.
“Perfect is the enemy of good.” Use natural gas, clean enough!
Google AI:
“Perfect is the enemy of good” (attributed to Voltaire) means that an obsession with absolute perfection often prevents the completion of useful, functional, or “good” work. It highlights that chasing perfection leads to paralysis, missed deadlines, and lost opportunities, favoring instead the"make it, and then make it better" approach.
The cheapest hydrogen does indeed come from natural gas. Green hydrogen from electrolysis is much more expensive. Hydrogen from natural gas capturing carbon dioxide for sequestration is blue hydrogen, acceptable to some. But we do not know if sequestration will be permanent.
Natural gas is a cleaner fuel than diesel but still produces carbon dioxide. Not a green fuel.
It isn’t much of a secret. Hydrogen is almost always manufactured from natural gas. So oil companies have a natural economic interest in supporting hydrogen over alternative vehicle fuels like electricity which would cut into their sales.
If we fire up the wayback machine, recall that in the 1990s the US DOE had robust program supporting development of hybrid and battery electric vehicles. That all changed in 2001 when the new pro-fossil fuel administration pivoted focus and funding towards hydrogen vehicles as a “green” alternative. You may recall the POTUS announced in the State of the Union that children born today would grow up driving hydrogen cars. That’s how hard they were pushing it.
The problem with hydrogen is the math doesn’t math. The vast majority of hydrogen is manufactured from natural gas using an energy input (steam). So it will always be more expensive than using natural gas directly. Besides hydrogen, the process also generates carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. So it doesn’t make any sense from a climate perspective either.
A more expensive but environmentally friendly way is electrolysis, which generates hydrogen and oxygen. But burning hydrogen is only about 25% efficient, while using the electricity directly (like say in an EV) is more like 70% efficient or more. So it will never make economic sense, except perhaps for niche use cases.
On top of there is no distribution network. All that would have to be built out. Even if hydrogen were viable economically it would still make many years, if not decades.
This hasn’t stopped the oil companies from pushing it. Exxon is pushing Blue Hydrogen which is regular hydrogen plus carbon capture which makes it even more expensive. Chevron and BP and building hydrogen hubs, and so on. Occasionally, they are able to snooker some politicians into throwing a few bucks their way, but hydrogen is a way to divert money away from more practical alternatives.
Sounds to me like both of these cases aren’t a hydrogen problem. They’re management failures.
It’s no secret that there aren’t hydrogen filling stations on every corner. You have to build your own fueling station for your bus fleet, and you have to contract for a reliable source of the fuel.
Why did these folks buy busses without having the fuel situation worked out??
There’s no need to “wonder”, it can relatively easily be calculated. If the average bus runs at 15 mi/hr (including stops and other overhead of course) then you figure what the efficiency is at that speed and then divide out to see what size battery you need for X hours of operation. Add a little extra to account for variances and battery deterioration and there’s your number.
Let’s say it can do 1 mi/kWh at 15 mi/hr, so 13 hrs x 15 mi = 195 miles, and 195 mi x 1 kwH/mi = 195 kWh. Add 15% overage and you get a 224 kWh battery. I think that’s even smaller than the battery in the GMC Hummer EV (a horribly inefficient vehicle).
Empiric figures come from the Ebus Test yearly held in Germany under the coordination of the specialized magazine Omnibusspiegel. In 2018, the test focused on 18-meter articulated buses. Three manufacturers took up the challenge: Bozankaya Sileo, Solaris, VDL. Following three days of tests in real operations condition on Bonn’s streets, the Ebus Test team measures the consumption of the vehicles, used to provide an average value between the competitors…
Consumption was between 1.65 and 1.84 kilowatt hours per kilometer. Heating off but air conditioning on. Around 20 per cent of losses during charging operation should be taken into consideration. Based on this data, a 18-meter bus with 350 kWh of capacity can cover a range between 190 and 210 kilometres…
In 2019 the focus of Ebus Test was on 12-meter buses. This time, there were seven contenders on the starting blocks. The calculation of electric bus consumption was not easy, as temperatures were slightly above zero, so a considerable amount of the energy consumed went to heating. Also, not all vehicles were charged under the same conditions: some charging stations were located indoors, others outdoors.
Adding another bit to an already diversified mix, buses with a diesel-fuelled auxiliary heating system consumed less power than those whose ambient temperature control is entirely battery-powered. As is natural, diesel and power consumption levels are inversely proportionate to each other…
Vehicles heated with the help of an auxiliary fossil fuel heater consume from 110.5 kWh plus 20 litres of fuel to 144 kWh plus 6.4 litres. Power consumption on buses with full-electric heating, “diluted” over 100 km, stands in the range between 179 and 235 kWh. In other words, consumption is reported to span between 1 and 1.4 kWh/km on buses with fossil fuelled heating systems, and up to 2.35 on electrically heated ones.
That is to say: taking as a sample a solobus with (considerable) battery capacity of 300 kWh, range of the electric bus varies from 214 to 300 if diesel-heated and as low as 130 km if electrically-heated. A huge difference.