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London, Paris and Brussels become testbeds for hydrogen fuel cell vehicle fleets

Mark Moran
04 May 2018
Paul Van der Burgh, Toyota GB president and managing director, Chris Grayling, transport secretary, and Jonny Goldstone, Green Tomato Cars` co-founder and managing director
Paul Van der Burgh, Toyota GB president and managing director, Chris Grayling, transport secretary, and Jonny Goldstone, Green Tomato Cars` co-founder and managing director

 

A project designed to demonstrate the benefits of zero emission fuel cell cars for large urban fleets will deploy 180 hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles as taxis, private-hire vehicles and police cars in London, Paris and Brussels. 

ZEFER (Zero Emission Fleet vehicles for European Roll-out) will deploy fleets of 60 hydrogen-fuelled vehicles in each city. These vehicles will be used in the applications where vehicles drive long distances every day, need rapid refuelling, and have polluted city centres.

The €26m pan-European initiative will introduce 180 fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) into a combination of taxi, private-hire and police fleets. FCEVs run on hydrogen gas as a fuel. A fuel cell transforms the hydrogen directly into electricity to power the vehicle and produces no emissions other than water. These vehicles will be in regular use each day, creating hydrogen demand from each vehicle roughly four times that from a normal privately owned car.

It is envisaged that basing the trial around fleet vehicles will help to ensure high utilisation of the early networks of hydrogen fuelling stations that are already operating in each city. This, in turn, will improves the economics of operating the stations and hence helps accelerate the commercialisation of hydrogen as a zero-emission fuel for Europe’s cities.

The project will gather data and disseminate results to demonstrate the business case for future FCEV adoption and test the performance of cars and infrastructure under high-mileage conditions. 

ZEFER will be delivered by a consortium led by Element Energy, including hydrogen suppliers (Air Liquide and ITM Power Trading), vehicle end users (Green Tomato Cars, HYPE and the London Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime), observer partners (BMW and Linde AG) and partners supporting the analysis and policy conclusions (Cenex and the Mairie de Paris).

It is co-funded with €5m from the Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (FCH JU), a public-private partnership supporting fuel cell and hydrogen energy technologies in Europe. 

The three members of the FCH JU are the European Commission; the fuel cell and hydrogen industries, represented by Hydrogen Europe; and the research community, represented by research grouping Hydrogen Europe Research. 

Commenting on the award of grant funding, Bart Biebuyck, executive director of the FCH JU said; “Project ZEFER is an important step towards widespread commercialisation of hydrogen cars. The three taxi service companies and the police of London will use 180 hydrogen-electric cars that are silent, vibration-free and emit no emissions. This brings a superior service for the comfort of taxi passengers, convenient driving range for the drivers, and a clear gain for improving air quality in Paris, Brussels and London. These hydrogen cars will be put under high utilisation, pushed to their limit to prove the case of the technology and hopefully we will soon see many more of them on European roads.” 

The 180 FCEVs will be procured from the vehicle manufacturers able to offer state of the art hydrogen fuel cell cars in Europe with the first 25 vehicles  – Toyoto Mirais – deployed in London by Green Tomato Cars. The Mirai are expected to do the same average mileage as other cars on the Green Tomato Cars fleet, around 120-150 miles a day.  A Mirai can travel up to 300 miles on a full tank of hydrogen, so the private hire cars should be refuelling every two days on average.

The London trial was launched by transport secretary Chris Grayling, who said: “Improvements in hydrogen infrastructure over the last year and the developing partnerships between the hydrogen power providers, manufacturers of hydrogen vehicles and end users, are helping accelerate the decarbonisation of road transport.”

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