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Victoria warned against ‘very inefficient’ hydrogen buses after trial announced
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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Electrify what you can, use renewable fuels like hydrogen for what you can’t.
Hydrogen buses will have a role, but they’re not in direct competition with electric buses.
There's a few things about this that surprise me:
Melbourne isn't already entirely, or at least mostly, electrified (not just trains, but buses too)
Regional Vic is having all of their buses replaced too. Naturally that's going to exclude vline coaches, but although big cities like Geelong and Ballarat make sense, smaller ones like Portland and horsham feel like much lower priorities to me
They’ll be using this demonstration project to better understand the TCO of the vehicles and situate them in ideal use cases. I don’t expect these ones to stay around in the city.
Probably. I'm hoping I'll be able to get a few photos before that happens though. I don't see them sticking around that long
They’ll probably continue to be used around hydrogen hubs. Government is doing a lot of work to scale green hydrogen production, part of which requires there to be demand for what’s produced
Eh, I'm not sure I think hydrogen is the best option honestly. It seems like a lot of effort to go to, and certainly more than chicken some solar panels and a few batteries at a depot/on buses
@Baku @Railison Burning methane ("natural") gas to make hydrogen to run a bus really isn't much of a step forward, if your aim is to reduce emissions.
Some solar panels and a battery would be a much better option.
From TFA:
"But Guardian Australia understands the buses will run on grey hydrogen, produced using natural gas.
"Currently about 96% of the world’s hydrogen is produced using coal (brown hydrogen) and gas (grey). The production of grey and brown hydrogen releases carbon dioxide and unburnt fugitive methane into the atmosphere."
#bus #vicpol #climate #methane #ClimateChange #PublicTransport #melbourne #environment #auspol
Yeah never said that emissions reductions were the aim for this trial. They’ll be looking at how much the vehicles cost to run and maintain, and probably use that to help determine the strike price for green hydrogen subsidies down the track.
@Baku @Railison Battery electric busses are a well established technology, used widely, normally hard to get grants for.
Despite this they got a 50 bus grants for the battery technology, plus 2 for hydrogen. If you want to get free money for these things it needs to be novel, and H2 is.
Regardless, anything is better than diesel. I ride my bike on a now almost all electric bus route. I hold my breath much less often now. The reduced particulates is enough to show in the graphs for Wellington
@LovesTha @Railison @Baku Build more trains, increase train frequency, and expand the rail network.
That's a real solution, not greenwashing with busses that are powered by hydrogen extracted from fossil-fuels.
@LovesTha @BinChicken @Railison @Baku Here's a link to the timetable for Sydney's Metro Northwest line, which runs driverless trains: https://transportnsw.info/documents/timetables/93-M-Sydney-Metro-North-West-20230929.pdf
Note that even off-peak or on weekends, the frequency is every 10 minutes, and every four minutes during the peak.
The technology is there to do far more frequent driverless trains, but Victoria hasn't invested in it.
@LovesTha @ajsadauskas @Railison @Baku Level crossing removal is good for a whole bunch of reasons, including (by my understanding) that it's a necessary requirement before you can get started with high frequency trains. Same goes for modernising the signalling system that IIRC was designed in the 1970s.
Victoria's public transport has had decades of dismal stagnation following the failed neoconservative experiment with privatisation. There was bare minimum of maintenance and little in the way of updates until recently. Lately, we've had serious effort put into level crossing removal, new trains, signalling upgrades, route extensions, and tunneling. Good to see progress but we still have a long way to go if we want Melbourne to have a modern metro.
@Railison @Baku Electric buses should refer to directly electrified buses. The problem with battery powered buses is the weight and cost of the battery. It fundamental dooms that idea to non-viability, and nearly all transit agencies have found them to be nearly unusable once real-world factors are taken into account.
For buses that can't be electrified, it pretty much has to be #hydrogen or some other chemical fuel.