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.
When you take the infrastructure in to account electrification of railways is not efficient at all. Miles of cables, substations at regular intervals, the enormous waste of power through transmission losses, the constant damage to overhead lines through storms and others things. The list is long and train companies won’t even try to calculate how long it takes to offset the construction and maintenance of these extra things.
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!
Could be worse…he could also have been a vegan, and do Crossfit.
:-)
If you have it handy, could you share a source for the 73% EV end-to-end efficiency? Thanks.
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.
Getting rid of nuclear was one of the dumbest boomer-driven boondoggles in history
In Germany, we aren’t getting rid of them any time soon, sadly.
They rather fall apart without doing and must be dismantled slowly, because there’s so much contamination.
Btw, the GDR reactors are interesting.
Their control rooms look so outdated and obsolete now that someone might think it’s a set of a 1960s sci fi film.
Space: 1999 would be jealous. ;)
Kingston Tennessee USA got a hard lesson about coal ash storage.
As that was being cleaned up they accidentally stumbled upon a nuclear waste dump left over from the Manhattan Project.
Germany doesn’t burn much coal and the amount is shrinking.
Our reactors are old and broken, lots of little incidents in past years.
They had their heyday in the 1960s/1970s.
Rebuilding them needs 20 years or more, it’s not a quick solution.
Provided that investors can be found, at all.
The only modern reactors we have are the experimetal thermal nuc. types.
Then there’s waste storage problem.
The only usable salt mine in Gorleben has water intrusion,
existing containers have to be saved.
About France.. The French are slowly, silently leaving atomic energy behind, too.
There are a few new plants built,
but not enough to compensate for the many plants that must retire in foresable future.
So really, people please use your mind.
Renewable types of energy isn’t as bad as populists make them look.
They are more reliable, too, they can be get back online in no time in case of a blackout.
Or power the local power consumers, such as the village next door.
By contrast, coal and atomic plants must power-up slowly.
The main problem in Germany is, I think, that there’s no power grid
going from north to south,
which could interconnect solar panels and wind generators in each region.
Hi, the power grids in Europe are not insular.
Each country gives and takes enery, in order to stabilize the European power grid.
And not seldomly Germany had overproduction that it sells off to its neighbor countries.
It’s also the renewables that contribute a lot here.
Those hydrogen trains are used on tracks where it was too expensive to electrify them because they are in rural areas.
What a shell game. “Blue hydrogen” a.k.a. burning LNG with a lot more steps and expense and manufacturing waste so that you can greenwash the whole thing and make money off the new hardware. None of this stuff is serious, it’s all the kind of BS that a zoom call full of 15 women from Human Resources would come up with to kick a can down the road. It’s all vapor and image.
“Germany still clinging to the dream of cheap russian gas”
Do you mean the North Stream pipeline? If so, then there were political reasons too.
Here too, Germany tried to establish a kind of peace project for the period after the Cold War.
It was a project that could have had a de-escalating effect.
Unfortunately, the Americans got involved here.
You know, our very best buddies.
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…
The problem is, that the germans completely fail again and again to recognize good solutions when they are older than 10 years. Making train controls smart is a really dumb idea, especially when pairing two trains for energy reuse in acceleration without storage (caculate yourself: acceleration and deceleration are cases of constant force, so the consumed and generated electricity is a linear function of speed). Best solution is the dumb one: connect as many trains as possible via electric grid, and let the advantage of scale do the work.
The shortage of personnel is home made, since abortions are the third most death cause after cardiovasular diseases and cancer, but fighting this death cause (or even naming it) is heavily frowned upon.
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.
Is that universal across the world, or just in countries which levy arbitrary taxes on one and subsidize the other? Because as well-intentioned as that approach is, the chickens will come home to roost eventually and markets will align to true costs instead of regulatory abstractions. Just takes one good war to clean that slate.
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 all ends up as heat eventually.
Well, hydrogen is saved highly compressed. And decompressing leads to a lot of coldness.
This type of neurosis is especially religious in nature
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.
500 million euros would be better spent switching from petroleum based diesel to bio-diesel which burns a lot cleaner than petroleum based diesel and they could have used the existing diesel engines and made only minor modifications
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!”
Bio-Diesel being green..
What about the resulting large monoculture fields?
What about ground erosion?
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.
pieces like this are forever piecing together anti-hydrogen biased stats and collectively ‘proving’ hydrogen is dead.
“Studies show that up to 70 percent of the original energy can be lost during the production, storage, distribution, and use of hydrogen. By comparison, the efficiency of the entire chain from power generation to traction power for directly electric trains is over 80 percent. ”
A real biased comparison here. They are measure electrics efficiency from the point of generation, but hydrogen’s efficiency from the point of fuel production. Its rough to compare the entire source chain of energy. What one can do is work to manage the side effects of that source chain and see if it can be made affodrable in total.
The whole deal here sounds like the Germans rushed an entire fleet into use before the manufacturer was at all ready to support such a move. Bad PR moves by the regional government. It may have been an attempt at luring green voters at the expense of the project overall. The manufacturer wasn’t at all ready to fully supply that fleet.
Likely they should have continued running diesel and co-run hydrogen trains as they ramped up all the processes needed long term. Wouldn’t looks as cool.. but its how you ahh.. keep the trains running on time. ;)
pieces like this are forever piecing together anti-hydrogen biased stats and collectively ‘proving’ hydrogen is dead.
“Studies show that up to 70 percent of the original energy can be lost during the production, storage, distribution, and use of hydrogen. By comparison, the efficiency of the entire chain from power generation to traction power for directly electric trains is over 80 percent. ”
A real biased comparison here. They are measure electrics efficiency from the point of generation, but hydrogen’s efficiency from the point of fuel production. Its rough to compare the entire source chain of energy. What one can do is work to manage the side effects of that source chain and see if it can be made affodrable in total.
The whole deal here sounds like the Germans rushed an entire fleet into use before the manufacturer was at all ready to support such a move. Bad PR moves by the regional government. It may have been an attempt at luring green voters at the expense of the project overall. The manufacturer wasn’t at all ready to fully supply that fleet.
Likely they should have continued running diesel and co-run hydrogen trains as they ramped up all the processes needed long term. Wouldn’t looks as cool.. but its how you ahh.. keep the trains running on time. ;)
Wow, imagine that, what a surprise!
Electric propulsion: needs either power lines (best solution – fixed costs proportional with rail lenght) or onboard power (batteries or generator) this is useful in case of main power failure, but otherwise efficiency is lower. I would refrain from choosing nuclear power on trains because of possible accidents.
But a mixed solution is to have battery powered trains, charging while running on local nuclear power network, then using battery power while transfering to the next power network while having enough power reserve to pass through one non functional power network.
Fuel propulsion: hidrogen is the only one non poluting (ie generating CO2), but storing H2 is complicated. You can burn it, but if you burn it with air, you can get some other byproducts, mainly containing nitrogen. You can use a combustion pile to get electricity, but the efficiency and power is unknown.
Mechanical propulsion: while clock springs like solutions won’t have enough power (still looks nice in Syberia game series), and the flywheel was barely usable for city buses with short distances between stops, you can use a rollercoaster type solution: somehow push the train uphill, then let it roll on.
Wind propulsion: skip.
Alternative for electric power: use sealed tunnels with low pressure. This will work on main routes. Air friction gets lower, efficiency grows. The tunnels are kept with low pressure, do not use air in the back of the train to push it. This I recomand for transporting goods, not people.
Will require many air pumping stations to keep the low pressure. They could be powered by solar pannels or excess grid power.
“Alternative for electric power: use sealed tunnels with low pressure. This will work on main routes. Air friction gets lower, efficiency grows. The tunnels are kept with low pressure, do not use air in the back of the train to push it. This I recomand for transporting goods, not people.
Will require many air pumping stations to keep the low pressure. They could be powered by solar pannels or excess grid power.”
That in a nutshell is the Green Climate Change agenda: spread the blame around. “powered by solar pannels or excess grid power.” My patootie.