“The future of Whistler’s hydrogen fuel cell buses — the largest fleet in the world — is in doubt after BC Transit said it cannot afford to continue to run and maintain the fleet when the $89-million demonstration program wraps up next spring.
Information obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request by the Canadian Autoworkers’ Union 333 suggests Whistler’s 20 hydrogen fuel cell buses cost three times more for maintenance and fuel costs than the conventional Nova diesel buses they replaced in 2009.
BC Transit deployed the hydrogen bus fleet in 2009 as part of a grand scheme by Gordon Campbell’s Liberals to showcase fuel cell technology during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games and have a “hydrogen highway” stretching from Whistler to California.
That didn’t happen and hydrogen is now trucked from Quebec every 10 days, instead of from a hoped-for fuelling station in B.C.
h/t Exurban
“…hydrogen is now trucked from Quebec every 10 days, instead of from a hoped-for fuelling station in B.C.”
Because, amazingly, commercial hydrogen is made from NATURAL GAS, and it is extremely difficult to make, store and handle. Among other issues, hydrogen will walk through the walls of mild steel pipe, tanks and valves. Tanks which will hold oxygen forever at very high pressures will leak like a sieve if you put hydrogen in them.
It also makes steel brittle and prone to fracture at inopportune moments. Like when you’re fueling up a bus. Or when the bus is driving down the road. Or if the bus gets hit by a Smart Car at the stop light, or…
I’m not an engineer, nor even a welder. (Welders sometimes use hydrogen.) I’m a physical therapist. This information about hydrogen is known to anyone who completed high school chemistry. Everybody who has Clue #1 about cars, chemistry, welding, rockets or just plain life in general knows about hydrogen and its problems.
Which means, my good friends in BC, that “Gordon Campbell’s Liberals” and their assorted bureaucratic apparatchiks and hangers on deliberately stuck the city of Whistler with buses they -knew- would not work.
Just one of many such examples I’m sure, but this one is remarkably plain. Kinda like Ontario’s windmills, but less money involved.
That is what happens when ideology (idiotology) replaces economic forethought. Liberal planning is all hat and no cattle!
Hey, maybe the Iranians can sell BC Transit a ‘nuclear powered bus’…what could possibly go wrong?
All you need is a flimsy piece of paper, $8 billion and a concerted effort of suspended disbelief. What’s not to like?
Naturally, this could be considered green technology, as that will be the color of your skin after boarding. Lizzie May will no doubt give it her full approval, after her Taliban introduction to being ‘stoned.
The Green Party can have a new slogan: “I was an Afghani; before I was Iranian, and after that I might be Canadian.”
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
Yes,it’s remarkable how alike the B.C. and Ontario Liberals are.
Like every other “green” scheme,this one was destined to fail,as knowledgeable critics said at the time.As usual,the critics were buried in an avalanche of angry rhetoric courtesy the media, who always shill for their peers.
Of course,our own PM,Mr.Harper, distinguished his legacy by punishing Gordon Campbell with the ambassadorship to Great Britain. That’ll learn ‘im!
Makes a fellow pine for simpler times,when this sort of political robbery could be solved with a rope and tree. 😉
I’m of the opinion we should bring back the Code Duello. Pistols at dawn with a long line of determined voters is just the thing to slow up light fingered, bombastic liberals.
Wrong about everything 100% of the time … that’s what we have to live with because of Lazy Ignorant Voters.
LIVs … the true definition.
Another unworkable idea from a bankrupt ideology. They could have instead used buses that run on natural gas of which there is no shortage in BC and that burns clean. The technology for that already exists.
Another day, another revelation of extreme government waste.
How much longer do you think democracy can survive this brutal mismanagement by these self-interested partisan dictators?
But, but, we have safer streets because of the June gun amnesty!!
And, and, the Highway Road Blocks on interior roads!! Safe, safe, safe!!
About the only positive thing one might say is that there was a company in BC
that was developing commercial hydrogen-burning fuel cells.
Hydrogen is a hazardous material, as Phantom says. And natural gas is largely methane,
which, being CH4, is the most hydrogenous of fuels other than pure hydrogen.
Duh. Duhhhhh. They `tupid.
Hydrogen trucks … hope they check their brakes, we don’t want to lose all Hope.
Fuel cells don’t need pure H2, they run fine on natural gas.
The ‘hydrogen economy’ is another one of those greenwashed lefty scams.
The hydrogen economy concept has been around for decades. Just a few minor obstacles standing in the way, some of which have been noted by Phantom. H2 isn’t as bad as Phantom describes as we had steel H2 tanks when I worked as a chemist and H2 losses weren’t of that much concern since the H2 was used fairly quickly in synthetic reactions. H2 is also easy to make from either electrolysis of H2O or from CH4. However, to utilize the former H2 manufacturing method would mean that the BC moonbats would have to be convinced to build environmentally friendly hydroelectric dams which are currently prohibited from being built by moonbat legislation which prefers to kill 2 birds with one windmill and builds bird blenders and tries to keep disagreements over the native Indian salmon fishery down by killing off as many eagles as possible with those windmills (less competition for salmon).
H2 is a great energy storage medium although having H2 fuel cells on buses is pushing the envelope of fuel cell use. H2/O2 fuel cells make perfect sense in weight sensitive missions such as moon flights and Mars flights where cost is a secondary consideration. In a simple transit bus, one wants the cheapest fuel option available and that would be diesel. CH4 fueled buses are more expensive as the energy density of liquid CH4 is less than that of gasoline and needs a more complex pressurized system to keep it in liquid form. In typical nonthinking moonbat fashion, BC bird blenders don’t use their electricity to generate electrolytically produced H2 which would at least serve as a low pass filter for very fluctuant wind power levels. Better yet would be to utilize hydroelectric power to create H2 instead of dumping excess water when power demand is less than maximum power createable given water heights in dams. So, in typical moonbat fashion, the morons who make up the BC government have taken a potentially viable solution to a problem and FUBARed it.
Ballard Power systems is likely quite capable of making industrial size fuel cells and an H2/O2 fuel cell combined with erratic windpower electrolysis of H2O would likely provide a workable solution to the extreme capriciousness of wind power. Instead, we get bird blenders which destabilize the electrical grid, a directive for BC Hydro to focus on unwanted individual electrical usage surveillance systems at the cost of $1 billion, a ban on hydroelectric development in BC which likely has the highest undeveloped hydroelectric potential in all of N. America, a ban on nuclear power plants in a province which has lots of geologically stable areas to build such plants, and instead have a H2 powered bus system with absolutely no support infrastructure.
This is probably the best illustration of the incompetence of BC politicians and why the interior of BC should secede from the coastal moonbats.
H2 decouples in the quantum world and H+ ions enter the steel moving through layers where they rejoin making bubbles between the laminations in the steel disrupting the crystal structure. Hydrogen embrittlement