We need a holistic approach to sustainable transportation - it starts with energy stations
There has been a debate about hydrogen’s role in transportation since the 1990s. As nearly always happens with major new technologies, there was a burst of initial enthusiasm, followed by disillusion when it took longer to happen than first hoped, then a more measured view as people worked out how it could be made to happen.
The fact that hydrogen is now at the third stage is borne out by the biggest names in the industry publicly committing to it for the first time. So far this year, the bosses of Daimler, the world’s biggest truck maker and Bosch, the world’s biggest automotive supplier, have both said that hydrogen will be the solution for heavy trucks within a decade. They are in a pretty good position to know what is going to be manufactured from 2030, as they will be the ones doing more of the manufacturing than anyone else.
So why are they so confident? There are a number of factors that make a fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) a compelling solution when you compare it to a battery-electric (BEV) truck:
Mass compounding: a 44-tonne HGV would need an extra five tonnes of batteries, cutting the payload by 20%. That is a huge amount of extra cost to the operators – and a 20% increase in HGVs to move the same amount of freight. A fuel-cell truck reduces that weight penalty, and Viritech’s unique integration of fuel cells removes it entirely.
Recharging: Charging rates are going up, which is great news for Porsche Taycan owners, but not much use to HGV drivers. Even at 150KW, it would still take hours to charge a large battery electric (BEV) truck. Most operators don’t have the luxury of leaving their hugely expensive asset stranded at a charging post every few hours.
Charging Capacity: Even those operators who can leave the truck to charge still need reliable access to fast-charge electricity. While trucks only account for 1.3% of the vehicles on UK roads, they account for 15% of motorway mileage, and 18% of road fuel. While a dozen trucks can fill up with diesel at the same time, 12 trucks all charging at 150KW would put a huge strain on the local electricity grid. To put that into perspective, The Financial Times recently reported that three boroughs in West London may have to block all housing developments of more than 25 units until 2035, due to the electricity network approaching its limits. Given that an average house uses 8-10KW per day (ukpower.co.uk), the chances of recharging a fleet of trucks in West London look pretty slim.
Charging Reliability: Plenty of Tesla owners have bought the product as much for the reliable charging network as for the car itself – and with all the horror stories around EVs running out of juice because of non-functioning charging stations, who can blame them? Again, truck operators just can’t afford unscheduled downtime, so they need to know the charger they are heading for is going to be working.
However, the FCEV revolution will not happen by itself – we need to do a much better job of building out the hydrogen refuelling infrastructure than the BEV industry has managed so far. The answer is a holistic approach to energy. Hydrogen can actually enable BEVs – a hydrogen energy station could both refuel fuel cell cars, and generate electricity to recharge BEVs at peak times – and even be available to balance grid-supply when subject to the intermittency of renewable energy. But why would hydrogen want to help out BEVs? After all, Chelsea does not lend players to Arsenal.
The answer is that fuel cells and batteries are not in competition. BEVs are fine for smaller vehicles (cars up to at least the size of a Golf, and vans up to about 3.0 tonnes), while FCEVs are ideal for larger vehicles. Like a Venn diagram, there is a shaded degree of overlap, but there are quite enough unshaded areas to keep both camps busy.
The point of a fuel-cell is that it is an excellent way of generating electricity. Whether that electricity then powers a car directly, recharges a battery, or is fed into the electricity grid does not really matter. The big problem with hydrogen refuelling stations is the classic “chicken and egg”: building a refuelling station is only viable when there are enough vehicles to use the fuel, and people don’t want to buy the vehicles until the refuelling infrastructure is in place. However a hydrogen refuelling station is the egg that can breed a whole flock. It can refuel BEVs, and it can supply the grid as well.
Indeed, hydrogen energy stations could help compensate for the fluctuations in renewable energy generation. It is entirely possible to use wind turbines to generate hydrogen at times of low electricity demand (say 4am), which can then be used to generate electricity at periods of high demand (e.g. 7pm).
The criticism of renewable power is that it is intermittent, and sometimes in the wrong place (there is often not enough transmission capacity to take power from a wind-farm in Scotland to a housing estate in London). Hydrogen addresses those concerns: it is basically stored electricity that can be used wherever and whenever it is needed.
The key to the adoption of fuel cell vehicles is actually to stop thinking exclusively about the challenges of fuel cells. It is true that fuel cells are currently expensive because they are new technology made in low volumes. However, the one thing we can be absolutely confident of is that big manufacturing companies, like Bosch, are very good at taking new products and engineering out their costs. There is nothing in a fuel cell that means it has to remain expensive forever.
The real challenge is to conceive a new energy system, in which hydrogen acts as the enabler for a net-zero future. The drawbacks of the formula “Renewable energy plus batteries equals zero emissions” are often pointed out: renewables are intermittent, while batteries are heavy, hard to scale and consume a lot of raw materials. Hydrogen is Jeeves to batteries’ Wooster: it can fill in the gaps of intermittent production, it is extremely light and completely scalable – it is perfectly possible to run a 700 MW gas-fired power station on zero-carbon hydrogen. It also needs far less raw material – just electrolysers to turn water into hydrogen and carbon fibre to store the hydrogen in tanks. That is not material-free, but it is far less material-intensive than manufacturing lithium-ion batteries. From an ethical perspective, no materials need to come from mines or countries we would rather not do business with and those that are required can be completely re-cyclable.
From a purely nationalistic perspective, hydrogen also gives the UK the chance to retake the lead in automotive engineering. Having invented lithium-ion batteries in the 1980s in Oxford, the UK is badly lagging in battery production. We have one medium-sized plant in Sunderland (supplying Nissan) plus one battery gigafactory under construction. Hydrogen gives us the opportunity to leapfrog batteries and build a globally competitive FCEV infrastructure. We are already the world leader in offshore wind and electrolysers (thanks to ITM Power in Sheffield) that turn electricity into hydrogen. We now need to build the same position in FCEV powertrains and hydrogen storage. With the UK’s strengths in powertrain engineering and carbon fibre structures (e.g. the carbon fibre wings for Airbus are all made in the UK), this is a race we can win.
The overarching requirement is a systems approach. Rather than thinking about the FCEV question, we have to think about the electrification question. By using hydrogen to create a robust zero-carbon electricity network, we will solve the problem of hydrogen refuelling for FCEVs.
The law of unintended consequences bedevils all political policy: a government (hopefully) starts out with a well-intentioned policy that ends up having very different outcomes to the ones originally intended. Building a network of hydrogen energy stations could have some very desirable intended consequences – now that really would be a radical change.
