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British Columbia, Canada has a long history with hydrogen for transportation and its continued failures. Ballard Power, the fuel cell manufacturer that switched from lithium-ion batteries to the losing technology in 1989, is based in the Vancouver area. Whistler, the famed ski and mountain bike resort with its 1.6 kilometer vertical elevation and two mountains, tested hydrogen buses for the 2010 Winter Olympics, only to ditch them in relief in 2014.

A whole ecosystem of companies has sprung up around Ballard. Companies like HTEC are getting government money to build gas stations like the one in Quebec City, where a gas station was purchased for $5.2 million that was out of service for a full third of the hours of the four-year trial, and hydrogen was purchased by about $500 per year was subsidized. kilograms for those years. HTEC also operates the five hydrogen fueling stations in BC, making the province the only jurisdiction in North America besides California where many Toyota Mirais are suffering fueling problems on a significant scale. This year, HTEC secured $20.5 million in additional government funding to purchase and operate a small fleet of hydrogen vehicles for ports and other freight transportation in the Lower Mainland. That’s going to end badly simply because they don’t even have to be competitive with battery electric trucks because they’ve been given so much money. The results will be distorted.

Westport Fuel Systems has wasted millions of taxpayer dollars working on hydrogen internal combustion engines, a non-solution that remarkably has even lower end-to-end efficiency than hydrogen fuel cells, and thus comes with much higher operating costs. Greenlight Innovation specializes in the design and manufacture of test and assembly equipment for hydrogen fuel cells and electrolysers, and received $1.1 million in 2023, which may not be lost if they focus on electrolysers.

Then there’s Powertech Labs, the subsidiary of BC Hydro, the province’s utility, which really should know better as an electricity supplier than to get heavily into energy molecules. The company designs modular hydrogen filling stations that can deliver a filling of 700 bar and operates facilities for testing high-pressure fuel systems and station equipment. Powertech’s offering includes the Hydrogen Station Equipment Performance (HyStEP) device, which enables rapid station validation, and lightweight hydrogen transport units for mobile refueling. Because BC Hydro is a Crown company, that means more government money for hydrogen for energy.

So BC, which should know better, having suffered the Whistler trial and presumably knowing that Ballard has lost $1.3 billion since 2000 and never made a profit, is slipping backwards in hydrogen financing and testing its use in the transport sector. There used to be an implicit rule within the government that hydrogen could not be considered for decarbonizing transport, but apparently ten years is the length of the government’s memory.

This all comes to a head with CUTRIC, the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium, the heavily government-funded independent, non-profit transportation decarbonization think tank, which has never seen a transportation decarbonization option found one that ruled it out. CUTRIC takes the thinking out of the think tank.

TransLink, the South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority, operates Metro Vancouver’s regional transportation network, including buses, the SkyTrain, SeaBus ferries and the West Coast Express commuter rail. It was founded in 1998 and oversees public transportation, the region’s major roads and bridges. Major services include SkyTrain’s Expo, Millennium and Canada Lines, the RapidBus system and the SeaBus connecting downtown Vancouver to North Vancouver. TransLink has recently expanded its network with projects like the Broadway Subway and planned extensions to Surrey and Langley. The Compass Card system offers seamless fare payment through the network.

It is a smoothly functioning transportation system in a province and metropolitan area that takes climate change and climate action seriously. It has a lot of trolley buses in the city of Vancouver, the subway is electrified, and it started electrifying buses at least five years ago, when I discussed the program with the person running it at the time. No hydrogen in 2019.

But in December 2023, the Canadian government and Translink committed $1.3 million to CUTRIC to conduct a detailed market scan of current and emerging zero-emission technologies, a transition roadmap and recommendations for future ZEB innovation projects. 80% of that funding came through Canada’s federal Zero Emissions Transit Fund (ZETF), which considers high-emission gray hydrogen fuel cell buses to be low-carbon. The research was conducted solely by CUTRIC because it is the only advisory group that will fund ZETF.

Translink immediately runs the risk of ending up with a recommendation for hydrogen buses as part of a mixed fleet, a recommendation that the process will force it to take seriously and act on. The door has been opened for CUTRIC to push hydrogen fuel cell buses back to BC, and the company will likely try to do just that.

Why? Well, there’s play in it. The company conducted a similar study for the city of Brampton, Ontario, and came up with a cost estimate of $9 billion for a fleet transformation through 2041. It used artificially low hydrogen system costs and artificially high battery costs, as well as very poor modeling choices. to cut $1.5 billion from the mixed hydrogen and battery-electric fleet option, bringing it a hair below the cost of the all-electric fleet.

That means that the very expensive, production-only hydrogen bus system from the Brampton study, if deployed, will be 50% funded by Canadian taxpayers and will be as unreliable as has been shown worldwide, including from detailed government reports in Europe and California . , are much more expensive to use due to the high costs of hydrogen and do not provide any climate benefits.

Why would CUTRIC provide such flawed research? Well, it’s worth considering what three of the board members get out of it. Ballard Power, the perennial money loser, gets nothing if CUTRIC doesn’t recommend hydrogen buses, since Ballard only does fuel cells. Enbridge, North America’s largest natural gas transmitter and operator and a company committed to hydrogen for energy, will get nothing if only battery-electric buses are deployed.

The worst is New Flyer, North America’s largest bus manufacturer. In Canada, it is the only manufacturer of hydrogen fuel cell buses, so municipalities must source only fuel cell vehicles from it, which does not apply to inferior battery electric buses.

All three of these companies have board seats at CUTRIC and have direct financial benefits from CUTRIC’s finding that hydrogen buses should be in the mix.

I have a lot of sympathy for the transit companies in Canada. They provide exceptional service with limited budgets. They do not have transformation and energy experts. They do not receive money to independently conduct substantive research into alternatives, but to operate the fleets they have.

The Canadian government has blessed fossil hydrogen buses through its somewhat broken ZETF fund. Furthermore, CUTRIC is blessed to be the only organization in Canada for which ZETF will fund 80% of the investigations, meaning transit agencies cannot obtain independent investigations from an organization that is not in a deep conflict of interest. If a transit agency wanted to go to PWC, Stantec, WPS or Dunsky for an independent investigation, the price tag for the agency would likely be much higher than if it went to CUTRIC, which the government has blessed.

I’m saying it’s only likely they would pay more, as $1.3 million is clearly a high price tag for the quality of delivery CUTRIC provides. Brampton’s study is riddled with several glaring errors, such as labeling graphs of the present value of costs as net present value, and CUTRIC contains typographical errors on its website. They just don’t do quality work, aside from the huge errors in data assumptions and modeling. This is a modeling and stakeholder exercise that would probably have cost around $500,000 from one of the major consulting firms, and that is without the model that CUTRIC maintains and is so unfairly proud of. It’s possible that without the overhead of the larger firms, a consulting firm like Dunsky could stay within budget. They would probably do better for the $260,000 Translink is paying. A Stantec or WPS could perform the technical modeling more robustly, so probably cost more than Dunsky, but could also yield more.

My recommendation to Translink is to immediately conduct a governance review of CUTRIC and the investigation into the massive conflicts of interest. Revise the terms of the study to ensure that hydrogen fuel cell buses are not brought to market in ten years, allowing rebates to eliminate 40% of their costs, the cause of the $1.1 billion turnaround in the Brampton study . Spend some money and time reviewing actual experiences with hydrogen bus fleets from California and the EU, as well as the hydrogen fleet experiences in Quebec City. Look at hydrogen leakage in real facilities and recent studies on hydrogen’s greenhouse effect.

Here are some links to get started:

Each article provides links and analysis to peer-reviewed and government reports on hydrogen fleets and facilities.

For Translink stakeholders, including the Province of BC with its new government and the City of Vancouver, it is critical that there is transparency on the terms of Translink’s letter to CUTRIC on how the results should be implemented and reported. Brampton’s research makes it clear that CUTRIC is very happy to make a more expensive hydrogen solution look like a cheaper solution by an intangible 0.1% in order to meet procurement guidelines.

All transit agencies and cities in Canada: You should consider CUTRIC as an unreliable source of very expensive guidance. Only involve them with very strict parameters and oversight if you need the ZETF funding that comes with it. Talk to technical consultancies such as Stantec and WPS and consulting firms to compare what you should pay for the types of reports CUTRIC provides.

And bluntly, your advice to CUTRIC should be to ignore hydrogen as an option. While they may produce useful results in terms of route maps and scenarios for battery electric buses, although my assessment so far makes me think they are incapable of doing that too, they are clearly incapable of being even remotely fair and to be useful in the field of hydrogen bus fleets.