Heat Pumps For Electric Buses Blow Another Meme Out Of Water
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Every time I publish anything on electric buses — and I’ve published a lot on them recently — hydrogen bus fans point out that in the west, diesel heaters are often included in buses for winter time use. They say that as if the waste heat from fuel cells was free and as if the laws of physics required diesel heaters. They think it’s a killer argument.
To be sure, it is a great emotional argument. It sounds so bad and counterproductive. Too bad it’s also based on really bad data and assumptions.
Let’s start with hydrogen buses, whose purported value proposition compared to battery electric buses is that they don’t need extra heat so don’t lose range in the winter. First off, real world experiences with fuel cell vehicles shows that they do lose range in the winter time.
Quebec’s fleet of hydrogen cars saw fuel efficiency losses in the same range as battery electric cars in the winter time. Oh, and internal combustion vehicles lose efficiency in the winter time too, typically just a bit less.
But let’s get back to hydrogen buses not needing heaters. Why would that be? Well, it’s because fuel cells are inefficient. They only manage to extract 40% to 60% of the energy in the hydrogen in the form of electricity. The rest is waste heat. The important part to remember is that 100% of the hydrogen has been paid for, and green hydrogen especially is expensive.
Reusing the waste heat is good, but it’s like burning good bourbon to heat your home, not exactly a sensible economic proposition. The only actually good thing about this is that it somewhat reduces the inefficiency of the green hydrogen energy value chain, as 70% to 85% of the energy in the hydrogen gets used.
Of course, electrolysis is only about 60% efficient, so it’s still only 35% to 42% of the electricity actually being used, and multiplying the cost of the electricity by turning it into hydrogen first.
Which brings us to battery electric buses. We have a problem in the west in that our bus manufacturers are mostly incompetent when it comes to heating buses. They’ve spent decades moving waste heat from diesel engines into the passenger compartment in the winter time, usually far too little or far too much from personal experience, and think that the only way to create heat in electric buses is with electric coil heaters, the least efficient form of electric heating.
Further, they are almost all wasting time on the dead end of hydrogen buses instead of making the battery electric buses as good as they can be. As a result, western manufacturers electric buses are lower range and higher priced than Chinese buses, which is why Chinese buses have a 28% market share in Europe despite there being multiple bus manufacturers in Europe lobbying hard for preferential treatment. As I noted at one point, Lord Bamford, knighted at some point for making JCB a UK success story, undoubtedly had a hand in his son’s failing UK bus company Wrightbus getting a big order for hydrogen buses from the London transit organization as a fiscal lifeline.
Meanwhile, in China, they have delivered as many as 44,000 in electric buses a year, 9 times as many as Europe is buying. Of course, Europe is buying about seven times as many electric buses as North America, around 5,000 last year, so Europe definitely isn’t in the losers part of the podium, but is actually taking silver, with India taking bronze with its roughly 1,900 battery electric bus deliveries in 2023. That’s right, China, Europe and India are on the podium and affluent and progressive North America isn’t.
And here’s the thing about Chinese manufacturers. They know that heat pumps exist and aren’t wasting nearly as much time and money on hydrogen. There are about 700,000 battery electric buses in operation in the country and about 5,300 hydrogen buses, with a large plurality of those on the streets of Foshan, which made the bad strategic decision to bet on hydrogen for transportation a while ago. BYD offers hydrogen range extenders for transit organizations foolish enough to demand them, but BYD and Yutong, the 367 kilogram gorillas among Chinese bus manufacturers, mostly ship battery electric and have the volumes that they can afford to have a shop that deals with hydrogen. Western manufacturers don’t have those volumes.
And China, as I keep saying is the same size as the United States and has the same climatic diversity. It’s freezing cold in the north, in other words. Beijing’s lowest temperature on record was -27.4°C (-17.3°F), documented on February 22, 1966. More recently, the city experienced a chilling -19.6°C (-3.3°F) on January 7, 2021, marking the coldest day in over half a century. In December 2023, Beijing recorded its coldest December since 1951, with multiple days dipping below -10°C (14°F), underscoring the extreme winter variability in the Chinese capital.
Beijing isn’t even the farthest north in China, by a long shot. The country extends another 1,600 kilometers to the north, and Beijing is only 2,100 kilometers from China’s southernmost tip. North of Beijing is Harbin, known as China’s “Ice City,” which hosts the world-famous Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, drawing visitors from across the globe to experience its frosty splendor. Located in Heilongjiang Province, where winter temperatures regularly plummet below -20°C (-4°F), the festival showcases massive illuminated ice sculptures and snow creations, crafted from blocks of ice harvested from the Songhua River. Beginning in early January and often extending into February, the festival transforms the frozen city into a dazzling winter wonderland, featuring ice slides, cultural performances, and breathtaking replicas of global landmarks.
Can we all agree that Harbin has cold weather? Can we all agree that it has colder winters than any major US city that isn’t in Alaska? It’s colder than Minneapolis, which apparently is even colder than a San Francisco summer.
Per the International Council on Clean Transportation, Harbin has 2,111 electric buses as of October of 2024.
The city’s Zhongtong New N Series electric buses are equipped with advanced electric heating systems powered by their onboard battery packs. These include electric resistance heaters and hanging heaters, providing targeted warmth for passengers, alongside comprehensive insulation to retain heat efficiently. The buses feature battery thermal management systems to optimize performance in subzero conditions. Many of them have heat pumps as well.
Europe gets this because they have been buying Chinese buses for years. BYD with its joint venture with British bus firm Alexander Dennis has been delivering buses with heat pumps since 2019. Yutong has unveiled a multi-source ultra-low temperature heat pump capable of operating in extreme conditions as cold as -30°C. The company claims the system improves winter driving range by 10% while cutting heating energy consumption by the same margin, marking a significant boost in energy efficiency for its electric buses.
That’s because BYD and Yutong are building and delivering a lot of battery electric buses globally and as a result are constantly improving them. Meanwhile, Western manufacturers are frequently wasting an inordinate amount of time and money on the dead end of hydrogen.
North American electric buses with diesel heaters, like those in Minneapolis, exist because New Flyer is making a big strategic mistake, not because diesel heaters are necessary. If New Flyer focused on battery electric buses, learned that heat pumps exist and built buses for the cold instead of expecting waste heat from the drive train to make insulation unnecessary, then they could be delivering higher range electric buses that were at least somewhat close to as good as China’s.
Faint hope of that, of course, as New Flyer has a cushy arrangement with Canadian transit ‘think’ tank CUTRIC which recommends hydrogen buses with bad studies, and New Flyer is the sole provider of hydrogen buses in Canada so it doesn’t have to compete. Then the federal government covers half the capital cost of the hydrogen buses and the hydrogen refueling system, making transit agencies think they are getting a good deal when in fact they are getting expensive to operate buses that are less reliable and aren’t actually low emissions, never mind zero emissions.
Failed North American electric bus startup Proterra — which also constantly gets thrown in my face as if half of all startups don’t fail — also ran diesel heaters in some northern cities, but if they’d survived, they’d undoubtedly be doing what BYD and Yutong are doing. Of course, they were a California startup and likely sold more buses in that state — not known for its Arctic temperatures — than anywhere else, so I suspect they didn’t do what Zhongtong is doing in Harbin, building buses that are better insulated for cold weather. The thousand odd buses Proterra managed to sell didn’t leave enormous amount of room for variance. It’s a pity that they failed because that’s part of the nonsense around hydrogen buses going on in Canada right now, with Edmonton’s problems with Proterra buses getting referenced constantly, as if that somehow makes hydrogen buses the right answer. Not the right logic, folks.
Let’s spell this out clearly. Hydrogen buses less efficiently and more expensively turn electricity into forward motion and heat than battery electric buses. Batteries are plummeting in price so putting bigger batteries in insulated buses and powering heat pumps with them will deliver the ranges required at reasonable price points. But New Flyer won’t be doing that.
BYD has firmly established its presence in Canada’s public transit sector, with its buses approved for sale and operation under Canadian Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (CMVSS). Transit agencies across the country, including Edmonton Transit Service and St. Albert Transit in Alberta, have integrated BYD’s zero-emission buses into their fleets, citing their reliability even in harsh winter conditions. Equipped with advanced battery thermal management systems and specialized heating solutions, these buses are designed to perform efficiently in Canada’s cold climate.
Meanwhile, New Flyer wastes time and resources on hydrogen buses. As I noted regarding this strategic blunder, it likely loses three battery electric bus sales for every hydrogen bus sale it makes. Every hydrogen bus it delivers will create unhappy customers who were promised vehicles that were zero-emissions, reliable, cheap to fuel and could operate just like diesel buses. None of those claims are true, and customers will eat the pain. They have options for better electric buses and will buy from better vendors, including BYD, instead.
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