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.)
mmooss 4 hours ago [-]
> The biggest hydrogen bus fleet seems to be 35 vehicles
From the OP:
Cologne is one of the few relatively good news stories for hydrogen bus fleets. Regionalverkehr Köln (RVK) has become the largest operator of hydrogen fuel cell buses in Europe, with a fleet that reached 101 vehicles by late 2024 and is expected to grow to 160 by the end of 2025.
spacebanana7 3 hours ago [-]
Still, their point was directionally correct. London has 1397 electric buses and Moscow has over 2300.
Germany has this recurring fixation on hydrogen for whatever reason. Even when Tesla had already long hit the mainstream market, German car manufacturers were still arguing against EVs in favor for hydrogen-powered cars that would theoretically be vastly superior. Well, we all know how that turned out for Mercedes, BMW, and the so on.
mmooss 2 hours ago [-]
If people followed that reasoning, there would be few EVs now because EVs had been tried for decades without success; so were airplanes and AI.
If people quit as easily as you say hydrogen car manufacturers should, we wouldn't have much of anything.
philjohn 44 minutes ago [-]
Yes - but Hydrogen vehicles have not proven to match or even beat EV's in a lot of key metrics that matter.
The biggest one is efficiency. 40% efficient is one figure I saw, versus 80% for EV's.
Yes, you can refill quicker, but time to "refuel" EV's is dropping precipitously as well, and it's just all around safer than tanking around highly combustible liquid gas.
grapesodaaaaa 6 minutes ago [-]
Let’s not forget that the highly combustible liquid gas either needs to be stored with complicated cooling or under immense pressure (feel free to disprove me if I haven’t kept up with technology).
It can be done safely, but adds a lot of complexity on top of all the complexity needed for ICE engines.
Your points are also great.
kleiba 44 minutes ago [-]
Right. But at some point, you should acknowledge reality. That's why I'm not currently trying to collect VC money for a new start-up on BetaMax recording technology.
atoav 21 minutes ago [-]
Reasons I can think of for that fixation are:
1. Germany's existing industrial capacity in terms of machining is a much closer match to hydrogen than to EVs. So in short it is wishful thinking mixed with a kind of self-preservation.
2. There seems to be a (somewhat unfounded) worry about energy storage when it comes to EVs, that many German technologists think is easier to handle and solve with hydrogen.
3. Germans culturally have a slight tendency to be fascinated by intricate and complex systems (which can also be a bad thing, see bureaucracy). Electric vehicles are conceptionally very simple, so the opposite. Hydrogen is a little bit more involved.
mmooss 2 hours ago [-]
Nobody doubts EVs are more popular now. You should see the numbers for ICE buses too. The discussion is about the future.
rsynnott 2 hours ago [-]
Ah, I was going on the table in the article, which has Cologne at 35; it seem to be out of date, though.
api 9 hours ago [-]
Where I live in the US my kids still take “cheese buses” to school that haven’t changed a bit. They’re diesel and you can hear them blocks away. When they pull up with their air brakes going off and their diesel shifting to idle it sounds like one of those spice miner things from Dune going to work.
If they ever go electric I’m not sure how we’ll know it’s time to take the kids out. Won’t be able to hear them coming.
deepsun 4 hours ago [-]
You'll see the bus on your phone / home hub. Like ridezoom company does, you see whenever your kid checked in/out of the bus, and the bus itself on a map.
linedgolyi 2 hours ago [-]
Hopefully in a way not tied to some commercial third party. People should be able to reliably go to public school without having to accept an arbitrary third party contract
SoftTalker 8 hours ago [-]
My school district has some that are electric and they are quite noisy also. sounds like gear noise mainly, so they must have a reduction gear or some sort of transmission. They also still have air brakes so you hear the compressor and the PSSSSHT of air when they stop.
Androider 7 hours ago [-]
It wasn't easy, but the bus company managed to make their EV leak oil and need gear maintenance.
Angostura 3 hours ago [-]
They’ll simply use ice-cream van style chimes :)
linedgolyi 2 hours ago [-]
There's a similar danger with very quiet and/or electric cars where people near the school barely hear them coming and need more attention to keep themselves safe. Avoiding an older gas or diesel car is practically automatic as you can hear their speed, acceleration and location comparatively far away. I think EV manufacturers have added some sort of noise to low speed driving, but I haven't heard anything beyond one being right behind me
amarcheschi 1 hours ago [-]
I had a silent moped and I had to pass near a school when kids finished school to get to university. It was absolutely dangerous if I was going at a sane speed (less than the limit). I learnt to get very slow before approaching that
CraigJPerry 2 hours ago [-]
I thought they all had AVAS fitted? Are there markets where this isn’t the case?
linedgolyi 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe? Problem is either that it can be and is always disabled by driver, or it's very quiet, because I as a healthy man in their 20s, hear the pavement tire noise before any other noise, and the car is already really close at that point
sightbroke 9 hours ago [-]
> If they ever go electric I’m not sure how we’ll know it’s time to take the kids out. Won’t be able to hear them coming.
I'm sure they'll just have an app.
0xDEAFBEAD 7 hours ago [-]
How about playing a ditty just like an ice cream truck?
dugditches 9 hours ago [-]
>Regionalverkehr Köln (RVK) has become the largest operator of hydrogen fuel cell buses in Europe, with a fleet that reached 101 vehicles by late 2024 and is expected to grow to 160 by the end of 2025.
I mean, right from the second section of the article.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 7 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised hybrids are so under-represented in this considerations.
Maybe I'm missing something but I would think at the scale of a bus, a hybrid is even more appealing than at the scale of a sedan.
Even locomotives and one or two earthmoving off-highway trucks have electric transmissions, making them series hybrids (With very small batteries not used for traction)
m463 4 hours ago [-]
I wonder if diesel electric locomotives are efficient at all.
I think the electric is for infinite torque to get lots and lots of cars moving. But to slow down, "electric" brakes are to bleed off power into resistor banks, not re-capture the electricity.
Meanwhile an electric bus actually has to be efficient, which means batteries and regenerative braking.
hakfoo 4 hours ago [-]
As I understand it, straight electric locomotives would use the 'dynamic' braking to send current back up the wires. Apparently this would make for entertaining economics-- a section of the rail network where most of the tonnage went downhill could produce a net negative power bill.
With diesel-electrics, there was nowhere to the braking power, so resistor grids were the order of the day. I wonder if it would be possible or worthwhile to outfit them with battery tenders to recapture the current with modern batteries and power-management circuitry.
> From Riksgränsen on the national border to the Port of Narvik, the trains use only a fifth of the power they regenerate. The regenerated energy is sufficient to power the empty trains back up to the national border.
The twist: these trains aren't connected to the grid. They use regenerative braking to charge batteries when carting ore to the coast, and the batteries power the trip back to the mine.
rsynnott 2 hours ago [-]
Some diesel electric trains now have large batteries and can recapture the braking power. Though this is seen as a bonus; the primary goal of the batteries is generally to be able to switch off the engines in station to reduce local diesel emissions.
nine_k 4 hours ago [-]
A diesel electric locomotive has no serious batteries, and no room for enough batteries to consume the energy of slowing down a train.
At least it can dump it as heat without also producing fine dust, like mechanical brakes do.
morsch 4 hours ago [-]
On the other hand, pure electric trains seemingly have had regenerative braking for a hundred years.
rsynnott 2 hours ago [-]
I mean, hybrid buses are common. Dublin Bus’s fleet is about 900 conventional diesel, 300 plug-in hybrid, a trivial number of light hybrid (they never committed to these), and 150 electric. But hybrid buses also don’t seem to have a future (at least as urban buses); at least here the plan is to buy no more diesel or hybrid buses; the current fleet will age out.
sschueller 2 hours ago [-]
The Zürich transportation company also evaluated if they should use hydrogen or electric buses. They decided on battery buses even though they can only run for half a day at the current capacity. Since drivers have a set limit of hours then can work it doesn't matter as much and capacities have only been going up.
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! :)
martinald 9 hours ago [-]
While I agree with you; just to be clear it's not "slightly" beef up the local transformer. If you imagine a medium sized depot with 50 buses stabled at any one time, and 300kW chargers (I believe you could go higher), that's 15MW peak which is not trivial to add in many cities overnight. You really need some sort of HV connection for that kind of load, the existing local LV distribution grid isn't going to handle it.
I do definitely think green hydrogen has a big future ahead of itself though. We still use an absolutely ridiculous about of H2 in industrial processes (especially fertilizers).
Europe could produce huge amounts of fertilizers in the summer in the future with all the excess solar and wind it has via this method.
It seems to me hydrogen skipped a step - focus on replacing hydrogen feedstocks in industrial processes directly with green hydrogen, instead of replacing stuff up the chain that can be done with batteries directly anyway.
londons_explore 8 hours ago [-]
Any decent sized installation will use current clamps at the local transformers to scale the charging rate up and down depending on other users in the local area.
Ie. in the evening whilst everyone has their ovens on, charging might only be 3 kW per bus, but then at 1am when everyone has gone to bed, it can be 30 kW per bus.
Using that approach, you can get far more capacity out of old infrastructure.
Unfortunately, some utility companies aren't amenable to that approach, and instead insist you pay to upgrade the infra, since to them it's a free upgrade.
martinald 8 hours ago [-]
Not really. Buses need to be charged whenever, not just overnight (it creates enormous logistical problems otherwise). A typical bus route running 5am to midnight say is not going to last with one charge, depending on length.
Also, if it is a cold night and everyone leaves electric heating/heat pumps on, what happens then? Noone can get to work the next day?
Regardless most urban transformers are not going to have 15MW of overnight capacity spare even on a good day. The largest LV substations might be 30MVA in the UK at least - they won't just have half capacity suddenly free.
adgjlsfhk1 7 hours ago [-]
Lots of busses are split shift. i.e. they drive from ~6:30am to ~9:30am and ~4pm to 7pm. This means that a significant portion of your bus fleet will be able to charge during the middle of the day when energy demand is relatively low and there's a ton of solar power.
As an aside, we have so far really dropped the ball on level 1 electric vehicle chargers at offices. As solar power and EV numbers increase, it's pretty obvious that we want more cars charging during the day and fewer charging at night.
linedgolyi 2 hours ago [-]
>we have so far really dropped the ball on level 1 electric vehicle chargers at offices
Our govt. really did a disservice to transition to EVs by slapping on a big tax to anyone even brushing against a charger at work: 120€/year
Retric 7 hours ago [-]
The critical bit for infrastructure is generally peak load not simply is anyone using it for anything. A few solar panels and a few batteries on-sight can create a lot of freedom here.
City busses don’t need that much energy because as they don’t move quickly, the cargo is light, and regenerative breaking offsets stop and go.
smeeger 30 minutes ago [-]
a lot of people like to laugh very, very loudly at the idea of upgrading the grid to handle EVs. simply remind them that at one point in time there was no grid at all. the grid is not some magical entity that cant be changed
discardable_dan 8 hours ago [-]
Luckily, humans are rather expert water-boilers at this point in time.
cenamus 1 hours ago [-]
Are those new in Brno? Can't remember them from the last time I was there, but sure sounds interesting
Kirby64 9 hours ago [-]
> 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).
Unless you burn the hydrogen, you aren't producing any emissions... unless you count water as an emission. Fuel cells don't produce any emissions.
Burning hydrogen though, does produce some emissions, however it's pretty minimal. I believe it's only NOx, and even then at far lower rates compared to gas vehicles. No CO2, CO, or any other stuff from gas or not-fully-burnt gas.
That said, I agree hydrogen has seemingly no place in something like buses. Frankly, the only places that I see hydrogen has any future is either going to be for planes and boats, or potentially for intermediate storage akin to batteries (i.e., create hydrogen with excess solar/wind power).
vegavis 5 hours ago [-]
Fuel Cells have a lot in common to ICE. They require a significant balance of plant that helps provide air to the fuel cell, coolant for many of the components, electronics controller and significant electrical harnessing, bracketry for support, filters, coolant pump, air source, radiator... etc.
in one way it is a downside since its more parts and complication than maybe a pure EV architecture, but the similarities to ICE arch means that its an attractive option to transition to for both the OEMs and a tiered supply base used to working on ICE vehicles. If you can get economies of scale going and bring cost down for fuel cell its a great replacement for many (not all) ICE archs.
They are preferred solutions for larger vehicles because of the weight of lithium ion batteries. also because theyre optimized for power density while electric architectures excel with energy capacity/storage. But if you can implement infrastructure at the locations where these larger Class A vehicles are (or busses), then you dont care about capacity for the known universe's lightest (resting mass) fuel as much since H2 refuel times are fast.
You are correct about boats though, it is also a good solution set there. Planes will only work if we can achieve air cooled hydrogen fuel cells and eliminate the expensive and heavy balance of plant (Hysata).
deepsun 4 hours ago [-]
I drove hydrogen Mirai, and it feels pretty much electric in every way but fueling. It drives off battery, no hybrid transmission, hydrogen is only there to charge the battery.
vardump 7 hours ago [-]
Don't fuel cells require air without any contaminants, thus air filters?
So you still need filters, this not for the exhaust, but for the intake.
Kirby64 7 hours ago [-]
Is that a real problem here? Air filters on ICE cars are easy and not that frequent. You need cabin air filters regardless for passengers, so changing those at the same time isn’t that much different. Filters are cheap unless fuel cell ones are super expensive for some reason.
vardump 6 hours ago [-]
The air purity requirements for fuel cells are rather demanding. Impurities will destroy them.
ICE air filter would destroy them in no time.
Kirby64 6 hours ago [-]
Hm, I looked up how much a Toyota mirai filter is and they’re quite expensive. $270 it looks like from a 3rd party? It’s every 36k miles though. Not every year/12k like a normal air filters.
7e 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, hydrogen cars clean the air as your drive them.
londons_explore 8 hours ago [-]
Busses currently have big engines and fuel tanks (or motors and batteries).
That intuitively makes sense - obviously a big vehicle needs more energy than a small one like a car.
However, typical city bus routes spend most of their time under 30 mph, cutting aerodynamic drag by a whopping 90% compared to 70 mph highway cruising that a car does.
With more work on rolling resistance (buying super-good bearings and fancy tyre designs), regen round trip efficiency, and energy use of the passenger cabin (heat pump heating, double glazing), I could see busses needing similar size batteries to electric cars and still being able to do a full days city work.
In turn, that makes the energy source fairly irrelevant from both an economic and a social perspective.
rsynnott 2 hours ago [-]
As an example, most of Dublin Bus’s electric fleet have 450kWh batteries for a range of 320km. So, bigger than a car, but not as much as you’d expect given that the buses are 20 tonne fully laden and take a hundred passengers.
maxerickson 8 hours ago [-]
The low speed means they are using the power to accelerate against inertia, not to maintain speed against air resistance.
londons_explore 7 hours ago [-]
0.7 m/s^2 is a typical acceleration for a city bus - most people won't fall over whilst standing at that acceleration.
A city bus perhaps holds 50 70kg passengers = 3.5 tons of cargo, and a lightweight bus design is perhaps 6.5 tons (typical bus=10 tons). Total = 10 tons.
Peak Power required to accelerate 0.7 m/s^2 up to 30 mph = 93 kilowatts.
Which is car territory. The cheapest tesla model 3 has a 208 kilowatt motor, so would be plenty enough power.
rsynnott 2 hours ago [-]
That’s a small bus. Buses here take about 100 people and are 20 tonnes fully laden.
londons_explore 2 hours ago [-]
okay - well the motor from the cheapest Tesla will still do the job just fine.
7e 4 hours ago [-]
The bus is constantly starting and stopping. Regen doesn't recapture it all. Power isn't the issue, energy is.
Also, current hybrid busses with not-so-heavy batteries weigh about 15 tons without cargo. You are way off.
londons_explore 2 hours ago [-]
This math is for future busses designed for city use - so batteries will be much smaller and therefore lighter, and the bus construction itself will be much lighter because, as you point out, with a city bus pulling away ~5 million times in its lifespan, the cost of energy lost when stopping and pulling away far exceeds the cost of upgrading the frame to aluminium and other weight saving measures.
VectorLock 7 hours ago [-]
Inertia that can then be recovered, which you can't with air resistance.
7e 4 hours ago [-]
There is plenty of air resistance in a low speed bus, which is shaped like a brick and has huge frontal area. That is still a lot of air to push.
BlueTemplar 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds like there is room for improvement here too ?
VectorLock 7 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure how important double glazing is when you're opening the inner air volume to ambient air every few minutes, but maybe?
londons_explore 6 hours ago [-]
It's possible something could be done about that with air curtains, PVC strip curtains, etc.
Climate control energy varies widely depending on geography - and appropriate door energy saving approaches will probably depend on where the bus operates, and possibly even the season (ie. winter doors swapped for summer doors), or extra batteries added in summer/winter to account for the extra energy use.
amsha 3 hours ago [-]
There is a very to-the-point diagram called the Hydrogen Ladder [0] that classifies the usefulness of hydrogen by domain. The author makes a good case that, despite its versatility, hydrogen is almost always worse than some other clean technology for any use case. It’s hard to make, store, and use in a scalable/cheap way, and even generous estimates of future progress show a cost curve that requires subsidies basically forever.
Buses are classified as a “Most Uncompetitive” category. Electricity, whether wired or battery powered, is cheaper and easier to scale for the predicable everyday energy use of a city bus.
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.
londons_explore 8 hours ago [-]
> same electricity is being used to do electrolysis
Nowhere in the world is electrolysis done at scale. Industrial hydrogen almost exclusively comes from steam methane reforming (SMR).
deanishe 7 hours ago [-]
> Nowhere in the world is electrolysis done at scale.
either release to the atmosphere or inject into an oil well to increase well production.
class3shock 9 hours ago [-]
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.
occz 8 hours ago [-]
Electric buses in the form of trolleybuses seems like the better option than either of these, although I do agree that battery buses beat hydrogen every day of the week.
jillesvangurp 2 hours ago [-]
Batteries are cheap. Installing lots of copper lines for trolley buses isn't. That's why trolley buses are pretty rare. Old idea, didn't really take that well. There are a handful of cities that have them. And they've had them for decades. Most of those cities now also have battery electrical buses to service all the areas where the cables don't go. Expanding the network of cables doesn't seem to have a very high priority. Installing chargers (in depots mostly) is much easier and cheaper. And it's not like batteries are that expensive.
With battery prices trending to 50$ per kwh, a decent size bus battery of 250kwh would cost about 12.5K. That's manufacturing cost, not purchase cost. But it drives the point home: long term batteries are going to dip even further. Far below 50$/kwh. It will drive down the cost of battery electric drive trains for everything with wheels to far below that of the traditional setup with ICE engines. And they don't need expensive fuel to run. Or a lot of engine maintenance and servicing.
Currently tens of thousands of electrical buses are produced per year. Most of them in China. Which is of course where they have lots of battery factories. It's a rapidly growing industry.
dvdkon 2 hours ago [-]
As a counterpoint, Prague is building new trolleybus lines at a somewhat regular pace after having abandoned them in the 70s.
Granted, these trolleybuses also have batteries and only spend about 1/2 of their journey under wires.
masklinn 4 minutes ago [-]
Yep, hybrid trolleys / battery trolleys are really cool, as they provide the flexibility of batteries to e.g. work around roadworks and blockage, but allow for a more distributed electricity consumption thanks to partially fixed routes / overhead lines.
The poles also make for convenient overhead charging docks, which you can add on a somewhat piecemeal manner. With some automated guidance, that means you can charge the buses at long-wait stops or when they wait to run the route back even though they're not a a depot, without the need for an "accessible" charging infrastructure (or the driver needing to move out, go open an electric cabinet, plug in a charge cable, then remember to unplug before going back out).
j_4 3 hours ago [-]
Often overlooked but electric buses are very heavy. Here in my small hometown they visibly started decaying the road infrastructure super fast in many places since they got introduced. Not impossible to patch up, but not a negligible cost of moving to the tech.
dangerlibrary 3 hours ago [-]
The US Government did a study in the 1950s and discovered that the damage done to a roadway by a car is proportional to the fourth power of its axle weight.
Hrm. Dublin bus has been replacing its fleet of diesel buses with electric. Both old and new are around 20 tonnes fully laden.
Moldoteck 3 hours ago [-]
Imo hybrid trolleys are great. You don't need huge bess nor long charging times. The trolley will use wires in most areas and battery in less dense areas
fifilura 7 hours ago [-]
I am surprised that biogas (methane) buses are not mentioned in the comparison, they are already running in lots of places.
Yeah this only reveals a snapshot of the current situation. The truth is that lithium ion has a few more decades of serious R&D and successfully mass produced commercial products on the market. Hydrogen fuel cells arent as fortunate; they still have a high production cost due to low volume, the supply chain has had a fraction of the investment of ICE and EV, and the regulatory environment is even less clear than EV around the world.
But the reality is our society is well on its way to fracturing the fossil fuel dominated infrastructure supporting us, and it wont just be electric to take a piece of the pie. Buses and other large vehicles like mining vehicles, semis, and many Class A vehicles will transition from their diesel engines to instead fuel cell, and not batteries. Battery technology is far too heavy to support vehicle and payload combinations at this level, and these applications prefer the high power density of fuel cells over the accessibility and storage capability of an EV only architecture. Hydrogen is a quicker refuel, and one can imagine a future where industrial sites and logistics warehouses that already have forklifts running on H2 will see the rest of their large work/fleet vehicles transition over to hydrogen as well.
Unfortunately, this premonition is probably at risk of being a few years off thanks to the current government situation.
jillesvangurp 2 hours ago [-]
Actually all the vehicles you mention are already available in battery electric form and typically already far more common than their hydrogen equivalents. Everything from mining trucks to scooters. Batteries are cheaper than fuel cells. And electricity is cheaper than hydrogen. You are right that there's a lot of potential for further cost reductions with battery electric through innovation and numerous paths for doing so.
With hydrogen there simply isn't any obvious path forward. Hydrolyzers are inching closer to their theoretical maximum efficiency. Same for fuel cells. A few percent improvements here a few percent there. End to end battery electric wastes far less electricity. So it's inherently cheaper to charge a battery than it is to fuel a hydrogen vehicle. This is a gap that cannot be bridged.
With batteries we're looking at steep increases in energy density by multiple factors, new chemistries based on commonly available materials, cost reductions, etc. They are already competitive now. But it's going to get far worse for hydrogen very quickly.
Simply put, hydrogen is dead as a door nail for anything with wheels. There's a lot of subsidized inertia in the market. But without subsidized hydrogen, there is no business case to use hydrogen. None whatsoever.
> Hydrogen is a quicker refuel
Only slightly. It's not that fast actually. The naive notion that you just slosh some hydrogen in a tank like you would with diesel is not based in reality. Pumping compressed gas through narrow hoses takes time and hydrogen has a lot of volume. 10-15 minutes to refuel a truck is pretty normal. Charging can take a bit longer; depending on the size of the charger. And there is a path to making that quite a bit faster.
Rygian 4 hours ago [-]
Why so much waste?
Why would a factory invest in hydrogen fueled forklifts and their associated refueling infrastructure if they can get electric ones that just plug into a wall socket?
Unless research on hydrogen manages to upturn our foundational understanding of thermodynamics, hydrogen will be a waste of useful energy in most applications.
For further reference, check the "clean hydrogen ladder"
wuming2 7 hours ago [-]
With battery powered scooters, battery powered mopeds, battery powered quadricycles, battery powered cars and battery powered buses zipping around I believe big oil and power corporations keep up investing into the hydrogen complex system just as an additional avenue to sustaining their representatives in politics. Who can contribute offsetting all of those investments by keeping up the flood of public subsidies to gas, diesel and all other revenue streams of their sponsors.
kumarski 7 hours ago [-]
Hydrogen buses limp at an EROI of 0.5 to 1.5.
Losses via Gibbs free energy (237 kJ/mol to split H2O) and compression (20% of H2’s 120 MJ/kg.)
Barely cash in on the H2-O2 reaction (ΔH = -285.8 kJ/mol).
Battery buses, powered by lithium-ion cells, hit EROI of 2 to 4.
Redox heavy lithium mining (150 MJ/kg) drags it all down.
All trails diesel’s 5-10 EROI and 46 MJ/kg density.
f_devd 3 hours ago [-]
By your own calculation EROI of Battery buses should be about 15-30 (taking diesel EROI as given as it has no source) if you actually apply the vehicle's efficiency; ~85% efficiency for E2E diesel-generator-to-EV. While diesel bus would be around ~21% effiency.
The hydrogen economy hasn't made since to me from when I first heard about it 15+years ago. It's one of the clearest examples of academics not understanding how business works.
masklinn 2 minutes ago [-]
The hydrogen economy never had anything to do with academics. It's a fallback plan by the oil industry.
XorNot 8 hours ago [-]
The hydrogen economy has had a lot of not very subtle backing from the gas industry, which is fully aware that they would have no problem selling hydrogen cracked out of natural gas if it ever took off.
m101 2 minutes ago [-]
The battery economy has had a lot of very not subtle backing from the government.
TL;DR: Hamburgs mobility provider is trying it again, after failure in 2019 with 5 Busses, with 5 Busses (Fuel-Cell) again, this time allegedly 'mass production ready'.
With the intent of max. 10% of the fleet based on this ¹, or similar, in 2030, which is their target for carbon neutrality.
Got a little bit more range, refuels faster (in 15 minutes), than the few hours E-Busses (currently) need.
Regarding infrastructure this has to be seen in the context of Hamburg wanting to be a hydrogen hub, because of its harbour, shipping, processing and such.
Shrug? We'll see...
¹ actually the Hamburger Hochbahn isn't the only provider, about the other half comes from VHH ( https://vhh-mobility.de ) which don't use or intend to use hydrogen, instead going for battery electric exclusively. Which in the context of 'Hydrogen Hub Hamburg' mentioned above, seems logical, because they operate lines far out of that also.
detaro 2 days ago [-]
There's a few companies and labs in Germany who still manage to somehow sell hydrogen as a "local innovation" to government grants every now and then... Hydrogen busses, hydrogen trams, hydrogen trains. It never sticks, unsurprisingly.
LargoLasskhyfv 1 days ago [-]
Yah well... „Grüner Wasserstoff“ aus Hamburg: Senat weicht der Frage nach den Kosten aus
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.)
From the OP:
Cologne is one of the few relatively good news stories for hydrogen bus fleets. Regionalverkehr Köln (RVK) has become the largest operator of hydrogen fuel cell buses in Europe, with a fleet that reached 101 vehicles by late 2024 and is expected to grow to 160 by the end of 2025.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_emission_buses_in_London
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_buses_in_Moscow
If people quit as easily as you say hydrogen car manufacturers should, we wouldn't have much of anything.
The biggest one is efficiency. 40% efficient is one figure I saw, versus 80% for EV's.
Yes, you can refill quicker, but time to "refuel" EV's is dropping precipitously as well, and it's just all around safer than tanking around highly combustible liquid gas.
It can be done safely, but adds a lot of complexity on top of all the complexity needed for ICE engines.
Your points are also great.
1. Germany's existing industrial capacity in terms of machining is a much closer match to hydrogen than to EVs. So in short it is wishful thinking mixed with a kind of self-preservation.
2. There seems to be a (somewhat unfounded) worry about energy storage when it comes to EVs, that many German technologists think is easier to handle and solve with hydrogen.
3. Germans culturally have a slight tendency to be fascinated by intricate and complex systems (which can also be a bad thing, see bureaucracy). Electric vehicles are conceptionally very simple, so the opposite. Hydrogen is a little bit more involved.
If they ever go electric I’m not sure how we’ll know it’s time to take the kids out. Won’t be able to hear them coming.
I'm sure they'll just have an app.
I mean, right from the second section of the article.
Maybe I'm missing something but I would think at the scale of a bus, a hybrid is even more appealing than at the scale of a sedan.
Even locomotives and one or two earthmoving off-highway trucks have electric transmissions, making them series hybrids (With very small batteries not used for traction)
I think the electric is for infinite torque to get lots and lots of cars moving. But to slow down, "electric" brakes are to bleed off power into resistor banks, not re-capture the electricity.
Meanwhile an electric bus actually has to be efficient, which means batteries and regenerative braking.
With diesel-electrics, there was nowhere to the braking power, so resistor grids were the order of the day. I wonder if it would be possible or worthwhile to outfit them with battery tenders to recapture the current with modern batteries and power-management circuitry.
> From Riksgränsen on the national border to the Port of Narvik, the trains use only a fifth of the power they regenerate. The regenerated energy is sufficient to power the empty trains back up to the national border.
The twist: these trains aren't connected to the grid. They use regenerative braking to charge batteries when carting ore to the coast, and the batteries power the trip back to the mine.
At least it can dump it as heat without also producing fine dust, like mechanical brakes do.
I took some photos of the main garage for these new buses: https://sschueller.github.io/posts/74-eletric-bus-charging-s...
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 do definitely think green hydrogen has a big future ahead of itself though. We still use an absolutely ridiculous about of H2 in industrial processes (especially fertilizers).
Europe could produce huge amounts of fertilizers in the summer in the future with all the excess solar and wind it has via this method.
It seems to me hydrogen skipped a step - focus on replacing hydrogen feedstocks in industrial processes directly with green hydrogen, instead of replacing stuff up the chain that can be done with batteries directly anyway.
Ie. in the evening whilst everyone has their ovens on, charging might only be 3 kW per bus, but then at 1am when everyone has gone to bed, it can be 30 kW per bus.
Using that approach, you can get far more capacity out of old infrastructure.
Unfortunately, some utility companies aren't amenable to that approach, and instead insist you pay to upgrade the infra, since to them it's a free upgrade.
Also, if it is a cold night and everyone leaves electric heating/heat pumps on, what happens then? Noone can get to work the next day?
Regardless most urban transformers are not going to have 15MW of overnight capacity spare even on a good day. The largest LV substations might be 30MVA in the UK at least - they won't just have half capacity suddenly free.
As an aside, we have so far really dropped the ball on level 1 electric vehicle chargers at offices. As solar power and EV numbers increase, it's pretty obvious that we want more cars charging during the day and fewer charging at night.
Our govt. really did a disservice to transition to EVs by slapping on a big tax to anyone even brushing against a charger at work: 120€/year
City busses don’t need that much energy because as they don’t move quickly, the cargo is light, and regenerative breaking offsets stop and go.
Unless you burn the hydrogen, you aren't producing any emissions... unless you count water as an emission. Fuel cells don't produce any emissions.
Burning hydrogen though, does produce some emissions, however it's pretty minimal. I believe it's only NOx, and even then at far lower rates compared to gas vehicles. No CO2, CO, or any other stuff from gas or not-fully-burnt gas.
That said, I agree hydrogen has seemingly no place in something like buses. Frankly, the only places that I see hydrogen has any future is either going to be for planes and boats, or potentially for intermediate storage akin to batteries (i.e., create hydrogen with excess solar/wind power).
in one way it is a downside since its more parts and complication than maybe a pure EV architecture, but the similarities to ICE arch means that its an attractive option to transition to for both the OEMs and a tiered supply base used to working on ICE vehicles. If you can get economies of scale going and bring cost down for fuel cell its a great replacement for many (not all) ICE archs.
They are preferred solutions for larger vehicles because of the weight of lithium ion batteries. also because theyre optimized for power density while electric architectures excel with energy capacity/storage. But if you can implement infrastructure at the locations where these larger Class A vehicles are (or busses), then you dont care about capacity for the known universe's lightest (resting mass) fuel as much since H2 refuel times are fast.
You are correct about boats though, it is also a good solution set there. Planes will only work if we can achieve air cooled hydrogen fuel cells and eliminate the expensive and heavy balance of plant (Hysata).
So you still need filters, this not for the exhaust, but for the intake.
ICE air filter would destroy them in no time.
That intuitively makes sense - obviously a big vehicle needs more energy than a small one like a car.
However, typical city bus routes spend most of their time under 30 mph, cutting aerodynamic drag by a whopping 90% compared to 70 mph highway cruising that a car does.
With more work on rolling resistance (buying super-good bearings and fancy tyre designs), regen round trip efficiency, and energy use of the passenger cabin (heat pump heating, double glazing), I could see busses needing similar size batteries to electric cars and still being able to do a full days city work.
In turn, that makes the energy source fairly irrelevant from both an economic and a social perspective.
A city bus perhaps holds 50 70kg passengers = 3.5 tons of cargo, and a lightweight bus design is perhaps 6.5 tons (typical bus=10 tons). Total = 10 tons.
Peak Power required to accelerate 0.7 m/s^2 up to 30 mph = 93 kilowatts.
Which is car territory. The cheapest tesla model 3 has a 208 kilowatt motor, so would be plenty enough power.
Also, current hybrid busses with not-so-heavy batteries weigh about 15 tons without cargo. You are way off.
Climate control energy varies widely depending on geography - and appropriate door energy saving approaches will probably depend on where the bus operates, and possibly even the season (ie. winter doors swapped for summer doors), or extra batteries added in summer/winter to account for the extra energy use.
Buses are classified as a “Most Uncompetitive” category. Electricity, whether wired or battery powered, is cheaper and easier to scale for the predicable everyday energy use of a city bus.
0: https://www.liebreich.com/hydrogen-ladder-version-5-0/
edit: no, even internet archive from a year ago shows no picture
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/07/green-hydrogen-for-ener...
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.
Nowhere in the world is electrolysis done at scale. Industrial hydrogen almost exclusively comes from steam methane reforming (SMR).
Not yet. I know Siemens has some pilot plants running:https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/products-servi...
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.
With battery prices trending to 50$ per kwh, a decent size bus battery of 250kwh would cost about 12.5K. That's manufacturing cost, not purchase cost. But it drives the point home: long term batteries are going to dip even further. Far below 50$/kwh. It will drive down the cost of battery electric drive trains for everything with wheels to far below that of the traditional setup with ICE engines. And they don't need expensive fuel to run. Or a lot of engine maintenance and servicing.
Currently tens of thousands of electrical buses are produced per year. Most of them in China. Which is of course where they have lots of battery factories. It's a rapidly growing industry.
Granted, these trolleybuses also have batteries and only spend about 1/2 of their journey under wires.
The poles also make for convenient overhead charging docks, which you can add on a somewhat piecemeal manner. With some automated guidance, that means you can charge the buses at long-wait stops or when they wait to run the route back even though they're not a a depot, without the need for an "accessible" charging infrastructure (or the driver needing to move out, go open an electric cabinet, plug in a charge cable, then remember to unplug before going back out).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
https://www.europeanbiogas.eu/biogas-buses-better-value-elec...
But the reality is our society is well on its way to fracturing the fossil fuel dominated infrastructure supporting us, and it wont just be electric to take a piece of the pie. Buses and other large vehicles like mining vehicles, semis, and many Class A vehicles will transition from their diesel engines to instead fuel cell, and not batteries. Battery technology is far too heavy to support vehicle and payload combinations at this level, and these applications prefer the high power density of fuel cells over the accessibility and storage capability of an EV only architecture. Hydrogen is a quicker refuel, and one can imagine a future where industrial sites and logistics warehouses that already have forklifts running on H2 will see the rest of their large work/fleet vehicles transition over to hydrogen as well.
Unfortunately, this premonition is probably at risk of being a few years off thanks to the current government situation.
With hydrogen there simply isn't any obvious path forward. Hydrolyzers are inching closer to their theoretical maximum efficiency. Same for fuel cells. A few percent improvements here a few percent there. End to end battery electric wastes far less electricity. So it's inherently cheaper to charge a battery than it is to fuel a hydrogen vehicle. This is a gap that cannot be bridged.
With batteries we're looking at steep increases in energy density by multiple factors, new chemistries based on commonly available materials, cost reductions, etc. They are already competitive now. But it's going to get far worse for hydrogen very quickly.
Simply put, hydrogen is dead as a door nail for anything with wheels. There's a lot of subsidized inertia in the market. But without subsidized hydrogen, there is no business case to use hydrogen. None whatsoever.
> Hydrogen is a quicker refuel
Only slightly. It's not that fast actually. The naive notion that you just slosh some hydrogen in a tank like you would with diesel is not based in reality. Pumping compressed gas through narrow hoses takes time and hydrogen has a lot of volume. 10-15 minutes to refuel a truck is pretty normal. Charging can take a bit longer; depending on the size of the charger. And there is a path to making that quite a bit faster.
Why would a factory invest in hydrogen fueled forklifts and their associated refueling infrastructure if they can get electric ones that just plug into a wall socket?
Unless research on hydrogen manages to upturn our foundational understanding of thermodynamics, hydrogen will be a waste of useful energy in most applications.
For further reference, check the "clean hydrogen ladder"
Losses via Gibbs free energy (237 kJ/mol to split H2O) and compression (20% of H2’s 120 MJ/kg.)
Barely cash in on the H2-O2 reaction (ΔH = -285.8 kJ/mol).
Battery buses, powered by lithium-ion cells, hit EROI of 2 to 4.
Redox heavy lithium mining (150 MJ/kg) drags it all down.
Charge-discharge losses (90% Coulombic efficiency)+ 5-10% capacity fade after 1000 cycles.
All trails diesel’s 5-10 EROI and 46 MJ/kg density.
Source/explainer: https://youtu.be/6c94vRmbM6Y?si=WmCvyB6uKJT7TWZ7&t=444
(jooze tränntzläyshun zörvizzäss!)
TL;DR: Hamburgs mobility provider is trying it again, after failure in 2019 with 5 Busses, with 5 Busses (Fuel-Cell) again, this time allegedly 'mass production ready'.
With the intent of max. 10% of the fleet based on this ¹, or similar, in 2030, which is their target for carbon neutrality.
Got a little bit more range, refuels faster (in 15 minutes), than the few hours E-Busses (currently) need.
Regarding infrastructure this has to be seen in the context of Hamburg wanting to be a hydrogen hub, because of its harbour, shipping, processing and such.
Shrug? We'll see...
¹ actually the Hamburger Hochbahn isn't the only provider, about the other half comes from VHH ( https://vhh-mobility.de ) which don't use or intend to use hydrogen, instead going for battery electric exclusively. Which in the context of 'Hydrogen Hub Hamburg' mentioned above, seems logical, because they operate lines far out of that also.
https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/hamburg-bei-gruenem-wasserstoff-...
shrug Who am I to judge? ;->