The loss of funding for the hydrogen fuel facility is actually mostly good news.
Perhaps it will convince our transit systems to abandon the flawed hydrogen bus programs.
When you count all of the costs — capital costs for both fuel production and fueling facilities, plus the energy costs to produce the fuel — the cost of hydrogen fuel works out to more than $10 per gallon equivalent.
By contrast, battery electric buses can charge on local power lines for the equivalent of $1-$2 per gallon. Yes, you can conceal this cost with grants that help pay the cost — but that just means that we as taxpayers are paying all of the costs out of two or three pockets. The costs remain very high.
Think about the inefficiency. With 1000 kWh of electricity, you can make an electric bus travel 500 miles. That same 1,000 kWh, used to make hydrogen, would make about 20 kilograms of hydrogen. That would make the bus go more like 150 miles. It’s just inefficient to go from electricity to hydrogen back to electricity, when a battery electric bus can do the same job for a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the electricity.
This may be an opportunity to abandon the flawed hydrogen program, and do as thousands of other transit systems are doing around the world, moving to battery electric buses. They’ve gotten cheaper, the batteries last longer, and the range has improved. All of the arguments that made sense for hydrogen buses five years ago no longer make any sense at all.
Jim Lazar
Olympia
