As transport infrastructure in Europe moves toward a zero-carbon future, there remain a number of railway lines which have not been electrified. The question of replacing their diesel traction with greener alternatives, and there are a few different options for a forward looking railway company to choose from. In Germany the Rhine-Main railway took delivery of a fleet of 27 Alstom hydrogen-powered multiple units for local passenger services, but as it turns out they have not been a success (German language, Google translation.). For anyone enthused as we are about alternative power, this bears some investigation.
It seems that this time the reliability of the units and the supply of spare parts was the issue, rather than the difficulty of fuel transport as seen in other failed hydrogen transport problems, but whatever the reason it seems we’re more often writing about hydrogen’s failures than its successes. We really want to believe in a hydrogen future in which ultra clean trains and busses zip around on hydrogen derived from wind power, but sadly that has never seemed so far away. Instead trains seem inevitably to be following cars, and more successful trials using battery units point the way towards their being the future.
We’re sure that more hydrogen transport projects will come and go before either the technological problems are overcome, or they fade away as impractical as the atmospheric railway. Meanwhile we’d suggest hydrogen transport as the example when making value judgements about technology.
“However, trips and connections have to be canceled time and again due to technical failures or a lack of hydrogen.
Germany still clinging to the dream of cheap russian gas aka ‘blue hydrogen’. Germany even managed to force EU into including ‘blue hydrogen’ in the Clean Industrial Deal
while excluding Nuclear power!
“The project cost 500 million euros”
gee I wonder how much of that came from EU funds
“Electric trains powered solely by overhead lines achieve the highest level of efficiency”
Wonder how many kilometers those 500mil euro could have electrified.
Russian hydrogen as blue hydrogen?
For those wondering at home: yes, natural gas steam reforming to produce hydrogen (the dominant way we produce hydrogen) does produce CO2 as a byproduct. The carbon atoms have to go somewhere. It only becomes “blue” when you find some way to permanently trap that CO2. Good luck.
Otherwise, we don’t have anywhere NEAR the electrolysis capacity required to produce hydrogen on a sufficient scale, and its not clear if/when we ever will. It’s crazy expensive, energy intensive, and inefficient. It starts to look a lot easier to just run a steel cable to carry the power directly to the train.
Correct. There’s quite a lot on CleanTechnica about Hydrogen failures and they’re all along these lines. Ironically, I was chatting a bloke at a garage while waiting for the result of my MOT test for my car (in the UK, where yearly MOTs certify the car as being road-worthy). I mentioned my car was an EV (an 8-year old Renault Zoe, with 72K miles on the clock and 98% battery state of health) so he immediately launched into a talk about the wonders of hydrogen.
I could barely get a word in edgeways. It’s such a strange experience, as though he didn’t even want to hear about. It took me a whole 5 minutes to say: “So, end-to-end, EVs have an efficiency of 73%, Hydrogen 23% and Combustion cars just 13%”.
And of course, he knew about every Hydrogen project under the sun, especially “Hydrogen Trains”. I was trying (but mostly failing) to convey the idea that the big advantage with battery-electric trains is that they have a lot of potential charging infrastructure in place; can run on diesel and electric lines and are super efficient thanks to regen!
It was an uphill task: a rack and pinion up-hill task ;-) .
Hydrogen has such a hold on popular imagination!
Really depends on the country and technology, but, here , in France, it’s in the ballpark of 1.000.000€ per Km of railroad to electrify.
For Germany it should be approximately the same.
But as you said, Germany lead the dance in europe, and they said “Nuclear bad”, so if they electrify their railroad, it would use their, really green, coal electricity…
Sometime, I really wonder if I should cry or laugh about this whole situation…
According to the online encyclopedia, the Rhine-Main railway has a line length 77.7 km, so at €1M per km they could have electrified the whole railway (well except for the engines) and had €422.3M€ left to…
always entertaining to see people comparing coal to nuclear an only look at the waste of one of the two. they are both bad.
Both bad yes, but one is containable, the other not. Even then coal doesn’t just leave behind CO2, the ash from coal powerstations itself is radioactive too. I know which I’d rather have in my back yard.
no. wars and humans tendency to default to general destruction during a society meltdown, combined with general ignorance is the biggest problem with nuclear.
yes, i’ve read “the decline and fall of the roman empire”, listened to the fall of societies podcasts and seen enough ruins in my life to see what a nuclear waste deposit site will look like in 200 years. it will not look like the pantheon, more like the exclusion zone around chernobyl reactor numer 4.
coal ash is bound in building materials, something I don’t see happening soon with nuclear waste.
i view nuclear waste sites as land mines, they sit still for ages, but something terrible will happen when disturbed. there is still a unexploded mine in the WWI fields and when that goes off, there will be a huge crater and the farm on top will be gone, but thats it. imagine a blow up of a nuclear storage facility.
nuclear stuff is fine, i just don’t trust humans with it.
and to get back on topic: hydrogen powered trains are doomed by design. nothing beats overhead power wires, regardless where the power is coming from.
There are some technologies, that sound wonderfully on paper and simply don’t progress into a usable state. H2 is one, supercaps are another.
As the article stated, for trains the best solution is a trolley system and a smart train control (so that a braking train feeds an acceleration train).
Additional, as every EU state, Germany suffers from a shortage of personnel on every level.
Currently, my only hope is that somewhere a Hobbit is on his way to destroy a Ring…
Solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and repeat to achieve more and more economies of scale. Proven simple technologies, relatively clean. And if to throw money somewhere, develop aluminium-ion batteries.
Hydrogen is dangerous to handle, for now ineffective and dirty to produce.
It absolutely looks like economics is also on your side. The cost of solar and wind electric is below even coal right now. Hydrogen? Not so much.
I think we’re lucky, honestly, to have the cheap option lining up with the easy option.
Still, the recombination of hydrogen and oxygen through “combustion” generates heat, regardless of the fact that carbon is nowhere to be seen. And that latent heat in the atmosphere is the real problem. We’ll never be able to get away from that… not even with electrics. “Work” is “work”.
It is really interesting to see that articles with very similar wording appear in different media at that same day. They mention different authors, but I assume that the articles were simply based on material delivered by lobbyists.
https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/energie/wasserstoff-zuege-probleme-100.html
(Thomas Eckert, NDR)
https://www.ingenieur.de/technik/fachbereiche/verkehr/sind-wasserstoffzuege-ein-teurer-irrweg/
(Dominik Hochwarth)
I work with battery electric buses and a small fleet of hydrogen buses. Watching where battery electric was 10 years ago and where it is now, I think it’s more a question battery electric lucked out, got more use, better economy of scale and became cheaper, than that it is inherently a better technology than hydrogen.
Bio-Diesel is green, has all the benefits of liquid fuels, and it often a drop-in replacement for existing systems.
Related; Bio-fuel can replace fuel oil, often drop-in, or requiring very minor equipment upgrades, vs replacing a heating system with an entirely new electric system potentially powered by a coal power plant…
Liquid fuels are great. We have green liquid fuels that work with existing infrastructure. They just don’t sound as cool as “Hydrogen Power!”
I think that the hydrogen trains could fill a really small niche nowadays. For one electric trains using overhead wires or a third rail are a proven and successful technology, so even for medium-small railways electrification makes sense, especially for mountain lines. On the other hand even if a diesel train is polluting, it pollutes less than having people using a car and even a bus, because they are more efficient. There’s a reason because in the late 1800 there were horse drawn trams running on rail.
There are some electric trains that have a diesel unit attached and could switch between diesel generator and overhead wires, and Hitachi has made a train with both a pantograph and batteries, and could recharge batteries wile running on electrified paths.
A fuel cell it’s more complex than a battery controller, and even if batteries are weighing more, that it’s actually an advantage in a locomotive.