31 January - The Mayor is green, but not in a good way
With
no TV to watch I often find myself scrapping the barrel of YouTube for
interesting snippets of information. I have recently been ensnared by a number
of American channels which marvel at the way we British have beaten them to so
many inventions and very often do things better than the Yanks.
However the staple diet is transport in the UK generally and London in
particular and that subject boasts a number of high quality channels. One that I would not
put in that category has covered hydrogen powered buses and how their
introduction has been troublesome. It has proved difficult to get confirmation from a
wide range of sources and I would guess that TfL has gone into cover-up mode.
Consequently what follows is limited by the need to restrict things to the few clues available on the web
if excessive speculation is to be avoided.
One obvious fact is that our dictatorial Mayor is not good when it comes to TfL finances or finance generally. It is as though he is intent on impoverishing London and Londoners.
In the associated photograph he is celebrating the introduction of 20 hydrogen powered buses to
Route 7 in West London in 2021. A Freedom of Information request revealed that
they cost
more than half a million pounds each which is about twice as much as a battery powered bus.
It was probably never a good idea
except as an excuse for more virtue signalling at your expense. French bus companies
cancelled their order for hydrogen powered buses and they did not last long in Germany either.
Not being as stupid as the Mayor of London, overseas operators worked out that using
electricity to make hydrogen (by electrolysis of water) and using a hydrogen fuel cell on board a bus
to run its electric motor is horribly inefficient compared to bypassing the electrolysis
and charging a battery directly instead. Six times more expensive according to the French
and three times more expensive than the most optimistic UK estimates I can find.
But clever Dick Khan had a plan. He would use the hydrogen that is a byproduct
of chlorine production and get somewhere near that three times as expensive estimate.
But not for long. Eleven million quid’s worth of buses have been parked up in Acton
for the past year doing nothing while good old diesel plies the streets of London.
TfL’s website says nothing about it but the aforesaid obscure YouTube channel
provides confirmation of my suspicions. Its viewers’ comments are varied but include the reason why.
The bus withdrawal is almost certainly associated with the easily Googled fact that swimming pool
operators are having difficulty with the supply of chlorine gas. A chlorine shortage
would mean a hydrogen shortage too.
If the Mayor is saying anything about the eleven million pounds down the drain you can be pretty sure
he will be blaming the bus manufacturer for “technical shortcomings” (as operators of the same bus in Scotland are). Anyone but himself.
Unless electrolysis costs fall dramatically Sadiq will belatedly find the same as his French counterpart did. Hydrogen powered buses cost six times as much to run as batteries.