150 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and eight heavy-duty hydrogen refueling stations will be deployed thanks to money gained by the H2Accelerate collaboration, which got €30 million ($32 million).
It is believed that the two initiatives would be a crucial step towards the mainstream commercialization of the hydrogen transportation technology by enabling the testing of vehicles and refueling equipment under real-world settings.
The deployment of the 150 vehicles will be managed by SINTEF with assistance from Shell, TotalEnergies, and Everfuel as part of the H2Accelerate TRUCKS project, which is a collaboration between Daimler Truck, Volvo Group, Iveco Group, VVT, International Road Union (IRU), Romanian National Union of Road Transporters (UNTRR), Federazione Italiana Autotasportatori Professionali (FIAP), WK, and Element Energy France.
By the middle to end of the 2020s, 150 fuel cell trucks are expected to be on European roads thanks to funding from the Clean Hydrogen Partnership. This will enable the three OEMs to advance technologies toward serial manufacture in the second half of the decade. The trucks are anticipated to be either 42 or 62, with a capacity of up to 44 tonnes and ranges of at least 600 kilometers.
The trucks will be tested in real-world settings over a number of years to demonstrate and evaluate their technical and economic performance thanks to the €30 million in funding provided by the Clean Hydrogen Partnership. The project’s outcomes will be used to lay the groundwork for a large-scale fuel cell truck deployment in the years to come.
The H2Accelerate Inaugural Station Deployment (ISD) project, sponsored by the Connecting Europe Facility, aims to enable the deployment of eight hydrogen refueling stations in France and the Netherlands. This initiative is expected to both support and benefit from the truck deployments.
The partnership will use N+1 redundancy in station design, which will see important pieces of equipment duplicated in stations to reduce downtime in the case of component failure. Each station will have a capacity of more than one tonne per day. The stations will be set up along important TEN-T transportation corridors, making them accessible to truck end users traveling on major European motorways.
The H2Accelerate collaboration’s initial deployment of a planned series of hydrogen refueling stations is the ISD. Future stations along important routes connecting Scandinavia and Italy are also planned by infrastructure members. By approving the projects, it will be possible to address the supply and end-use problems, lowering the obstacle to first mover activity.
