Agenda Of Canadian CUTA Transit Conference Shows They Have Hydrogen On Brain Too
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Globally, there are almost 700,000 battery electric buses in operation and perhaps 6,000 hydrogen buses. In Europe in 2023, about 6,400 new battery electric buses were registered vs. about 140 hydrogen buses. As I noted recently, there have are more hydrogen bus trials that have been abandoned than operational hydrogen bus fleets. And in recent years, it’s become clear that hydrogen leaks badly and has a much worse global warming impact than previously assumed.
So, you would think that a several day transit conference in Canada’s agenda would be packed with battery electric information, charging information, microgrid insights, battery cost curves, and the like, and that there might be one lone hydrogen presentation. Would that this were true.
I’m aware of the CUTA Toronto Annual Conference and Transit Show because a bunch of people were asking if I was going to be attending. CUTA, by the way, is the Canadian Urban Transit Association, with a membership of transit systems, public bodies, companies that supply the sector, and experts in urban mobility. The questions were raised because Canada has been driven sideways on decarbonizing transit in recent years by another organization, CUTRIC, or the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium, and I’ve been analysing what has been going wrong and why.
The big ticket failure is their scenario report for Brampton which assessed a hydrogen-only, battery-only, and blended fleet and recommended the blended fleet. Between global strategy consultant and author Michael Raynor and I, we identified $1.5 billion in bad modeling and flawed cost assumptions in favor of hydrogen and against battery electric, dwarfing the $10 million difference found to justify the blended fleet.
The report fails every sniff test of validation against external global experience, scenario modeling, strategic analysis, and basic quality control.
The conference started yesterday, and so I thought it would be worth looking at their agenda to see how the sessions stacked up. How many were devoted to hydrogen? How many devoted to battery electric? How many devoted to dead ends like renewable natural gas, another of Enbridge’s favorite greenwashing molecules together with hydrogen, as I wrote about recently as well, finding that it was 0.02% of their annual volume after 13 years of developing it and bragging about it.
Let’s start with basic numbers from counts from the agenda:
- Hydrogen — 26 mentions
- Fuel cells — 7 mentions
- Battery or batteries — 22 mentions
- Electric — 23 but often in paragraphs that also included hydrogen
This seems skewed radically toward the rounding error option. Perhaps it’s just in the speaker bios? No.
What about the count on sessions focused on hydrogen vs. battery electric buses?
- Hydrogen — 2 sessions, both focused on hydrogen infrastructure
- Battery electric — 3 sessions, one on the fire risks of battery electric buses, one on fleet increases with battery electric buses, and one on experiences and transformation plans
- One panel discussion that involved both, hosted by Cummins, the internal combustion engine manufacturer
- One session on preparing the transit workforce for emerging propulsion technologies, which only mentions electric buses
- There’s a session on energy management and energy as a service which is about multiple energy streams, not just electricity
- There’s a session on tramways — i.e., grid-connected battery electric buses
- Nothing on renewable natural gas, thankfully
That’s … odd. Nothing on electric bus charging? Nothing on battery buffering for charging? Nothing for solar on bus yards to enable charging? Nothing about en route charging? Nothing about induction charging? Nothing about strategies for route optimization? Nothing about projected growth in capacity and decline in costs for batteries and hence battery electric vehicles? Nothing about incremental bus fleet acquisitions with the longest routes left until battery electric range increases as it will inevitably do? No electrical utility professionals providing guidance on grid interconnections? No sessions on battery electric bus maintenance and operations? Nothing on right-sizing batteries to routes, the key strategy India has used to maximize fleet size and minimize costs? Nothing on battery electric bus procurement strategies? Nothing on lobbying provincial and federal governments to get BYD and Yutong factories built? Nothing on effective tendering for battery electric bus fleets? No strategic consulting firms talking about the reality of the massive transformation and how to ensure appropriate guidance and support is in place?
Nothing on the real greenhouse gas emissions of hydrogen buses with gray and green hydrogen, both higher emitters than battery electric? Nothing about gray hydrogen being almost as high emissions well to wheel as diesel? Nothing on California’s hydrogen bus fleet experience, which includes 50% higher maintenance costs than diesel and double battery electric? Nothing on EU’s JIVE program status report about the failure of manufacturers to provide warranties longer than 20 months for hydrogen buses, while five-year full parts and service and eight-year drivetrain warranties for battery electric buses are common? Nothing on the failure of hydrogen refueling globally, between compressor failures and innumerable hydrogen supply chain failures? Nothing on hydrogen bus fleets having lower range in the winter time in global experiences? Nothing about hydrogen buses and refueling infrastructure not dropping in price at all? Nothing about the very high cost of delivered hydrogen, whether gray or green, much higher than the cost of energy per kilometer than battery electric?
The battery session that found a 34% increase in fleet size with battery electric vehicles clearly had some challenges in its methodology, or at least its framing. I found the paper the author is presenting about and it has zero mention of battery energy density improvements that are being delivered today, 650 km ranges from BYD buses being delivered right now, LFP batteries with 300 kWh/kg energy densities, energy density curves, or even, amazingly, the actual energy density of batteries in the buses studied. It just looked at the limited number of battery electric buses currently in operation in Canada, ran some stats, and pretended that in a rapidly changing technological space, the past was a good predictor of the future.
It also ignores real-world data from hydrogen fleets that shows their range degrades substantially in the winter time too, including from neighboring Quebec, where the governmental fleet of mostly Toyota Mirais saw substantial range degradation, and the experience from Whistler, BC, also a Canadian example, where hydrogen buses froze up in the winter time because the water vapor from the fuel cell wasn’t thermally managed.
The author barely studies transit, by the way, mostly being focused on the odd combination of autonomous vehicles and road capacity engineering studies, with only two transit studies in their publication history.
So, two of the three battery electric bus sessions are about how bad they are — global purchases make it very clear that’s not the case — while the two hydrogen sessions (the ratio should be 20 to 1, not 3 to 2) are neutrally framed. Also, no mention of the massively lower likelihood of pure battery electric bus fires than diesel bus or hybrid bus fires, or lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries which eliminate the already low risk of battery electric bus fires.
An early session was Understanding Hydrogen Applications, Supply and Infrastructure by a couple of people from New Flyer, the leading bus manufacturer in North America. I wrote about New Flyer’s major strategic blunder in getting sucked into the vortex of hydrogen fuel cell buses recently as well. It’s a seductive trap, as each individual bus has a higher sticker price with 50% paid for by the government, but each hydrogen bus sold likely means the loss of three battery electric bus sales to BYD, as well as long tail of unhappy customers.
New Flyer almost went bankrupt in 2022, and was bailed out with $200 million in governmental loans and credits. It can’t afford to divide its attention. It’s going to end up like recently bankrupt Quantron, which tried to do both battery electric and hydrogen trucks, couldn’t do either remotely well compared to competitors, and went out of business. At present, it’s the only game in town for Canadian transit agencies wanting hydrogen buses — because they’ve been misled about both battery electric and hydrogen buses by organizations like CUTRIC — and one of the only games in town for battery electric buses, and so those agencies are putting their fleets at greater risk. Once again, bad strategy.
Battery electric buses are the biggest transformation that transit agencies in Canada have dealt with since the shift to diesel buses in the mid-20th century. There are 66 presentations and panels in the three and half days. Most transit agencies have already committed to majority or entirely battery electric fleets. There are hundreds of battery electric buses on order.
There are only three presentations related to the actual decarbonization solution that’s staring Canadian transit agencies in the face, and two of them are negative. This isn’t a sensible focus.
This isn’t to say that other sessions are bad. There are sessions on transit safety, transit revenue, funding, asset maintenance, accessibility, and diversity.
But when one session is a zombie-apocalypse bus evacuation game, and sessions on how to effectively transform to battery electric fleets aren’t 25% or more of the agenda, CUTA has lost the plot. At least Ballard and Enbridge aren’t presenting, which is something.
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