Vancouver Translink Bus Decarbonization At Risk From $1.3 Million CUTRIC Sole Source Study – CleanTechnica

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British Columbia in Canada has a long history with hydrogen for transportation and its constant failures. Ballard Power, the fuel cell manufacturer that pivoted away from lithium ion batteries in 1989 to the losing technology, is based in the Vancouver area. Whistler, the famed ski and mountain biking area with its 1.6 kilometers of vertical and two mountains, trialed hydrogen buses for the 2010 Winter Olympics, and ditched them with relief in 2014.

An entire ecosystem of companies has sprung up around Ballard. Companies like HTEC get governmental money to build refueling stations like the one in Quebec City, where $5.2 million bought a station that was out of service for a full third of the hours of the four year trial, and hydrogen that was subsidized by about $500 per kilogram for those years. HTEC operates the five hydrogen refueling stations in BC as well, making the province the only jurisdiction in North America besides California that has a lot of Toyota Mirais suffering through the refueling problems on a significant scale. This year HTEC scored $20.5 million more governmental funding to buy and operate a small fleet of hydrogen drayage trucks for ports and other freight in the Lower Mainland. That’s going to go badly simply because they don’t have to be remotely competitive with battery electric trucks because they’ve been given so much money. The results are going to be skewed.

Westport Fuel Systems has wasted million in taxpayer money working on hydrogen internal combustion engines, a non-solution which remarkably is even lower end-to-end efficiency than hydrogen fuel cells, so with much higher operating costs. Greenlight Innovation specializes in designing and manufacturing testing and assembly equipment for hydrogen fuel cells and electrolysers, and received $1.1 million in 2023, which maybe won’t be wasted if they focus on electrolysers.

Then there’s Powertech Labs, the subsidiary of BC Hydro, the province’s utility, which really should know better as a provider of electricity than to get heavily into molecules for energy. The company designs modular hydrogen fueling stations capable of 700-bar fills and operates facilities for testing high-pressure fuel systems and station equipment. Powertech’s offers include the Hydrogen Station Equipment Performance (HyStEP) device, enabling rapid station validation, and lightweight hydrogen transport units for mobile fueling. As BC Hydro is a Crown corporation, that’s more governmental money into hydrogen for energy.

So BC, which should know better, having suffered through the Whistler trial and presumably knowing that Ballard has lost $1.3 billion since 2000, never turning a profit, is sliding backward into funding hydrogen and trialing its use in transportation. There used to be an implicit rule in government that hydrogen was not to be considered for any decarbonization of transportation, but apparently ten years is the length of governmental memory.

This all comes to a head with CUTRIC, the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium, the heavily governmentally funded independent, non-profit transit decarbonization think tank that has never met a transit decarbonization option it has ruled out. CUTRIC takes the think out of think tank.

TransLink, the South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority, manages Metro Vancouver’s regional transportation network, including buses, the SkyTrain, SeaBus ferries, and the West Coast Express commuter rail. Established in 1998, it oversees public transit, major roads, and bridges in the region. Key services include the SkyTrain’s Expo, Millennium, and Canada Lines, the RapidBus system, and the SeaBus connecting downtown Vancouver to North Vancouver. TransLink recently expanded its network with projects like the Broadway Subway and planned extensions to Surrey and Langley. Its Compass Card system offers seamless fare payment across the network.

It’s a smoothly operating transit system in a province and metropolitan area that takes climate change and climate action seriously. It has a lot of trolley buses in the city of Vancouver, its subway is electrified and it started its bus electrification effort at least five years ago, when I was discussing the program with the person then leading it. No mention of hydrogen in 2019.

But in December of 2023, the government of Canada and Translink committed $1.3 million to CUTRIC to perform a detailed market scan of current and emerging zero-emission technologies, a transition roadmap and recommendations for future ZEB innovation projects. 80% of that funding came through Canada’s federal Zero Emissions Transit Fund (ZETF) which counts high-emissions gray hydrogen fuel cell buses to be counted as low-carbon. The study was sole-sourced to CUTRIC because it’s the only advisory group ZETF will fund.

Translink is directly at risk of ending up with a recommendation for hydrogen buses as part of a blended fleet, one that it will be forced by the process to take seriously and act upon. The door has been opened for CUTRIC to push hydrogen fuel cell buses back into BC, and it’s likely to try to do just that.

Why? Well, it has game. It did a similar study for the City of Brampton in Ontario and came up with a $9 billion cost workup for a fleet transformation through 2041. It used artificially low hydrogen system costs and artificially high battery electric costs, as well as very bad modeling choices, to remove $1.5 billion from the blended hydrogen and battery electric fleet option, bringing it a hair under the cost of the battery electric only fleet.

That means that the very high cost, sole sourced hydrogen bus system in the Brampton study, if deployed, will be 50% funded by Canadian taxpayers, be as unreliable as they have proven to be globally, including from detailed governmental reports in Europe and California, be much more expensive to operate due to the high cost of hydrogen and not deliver climate wins.

Why would CUTRIC provide such a flawed study? Well, it’s worth considering what three of its Board members get out of it. Ballard Power, the perpetual money loser, doesn’t get anything if CUTRIC doesn’t recommend hydrogen buses, as all Ballard does is fuel cells. Enbridge, North America’s largest natural gas transmitter and utility and a firm committed to hydrogen for energy, doesn’t get anything if only battery electric buses are deployed.

Worst is New Flyer, North America’s largest bus manufacturer. In Canada, it’s the only manufacturer of hydrogen fuel cell buses, so municipalities have to sole source fuel cell vehicles from it, something that’s not true for its inferior battery electric buses.

All three of these firms which have Board seats on CUTRIC and direct financial benefits from CUTRIC finding that hydrogen buses must be in the mix.

I have a lot of sympathy for transit operators in Canada. They provide extraordinary service on constrained budgets. They aren’t staffed with transformation and energy experts. They aren’t funded to do substantive research into alternatives on their own, but to operate the fleets that they have.

The government of Canada has blessed fossil hydrogen buses through its somewhat broken ZETF fund. Further, it’s blessed CUTRIC as the only organization in Canada which ZETF will fund 80% of studies for, meaning transit agencies can’t get an independent study from an organization which is not in deep conflict of interest. If a transit agency wished to go to PWC, Stantec, WPS or Dunsky for an independent study, the price tag likely would be much higher for the agency than going to CUTRIC, which the government has blessed.

I say it’s only likely that they would pay more as $1.3 million is clearly an inflated price tag for the quality of delivery CUTRIC provides. The Brampton study is riddled with multiple glaring errors like labeling cost present value charts as net present value, and CUTRIC has typos on its website. They just don’t do quality work separate from the massive errors in data assumptions and modeling. This is a modeling and stakeholder exercise that likely would have been in the range of $500,000 from one of the big consultancies, and that’s without the model that CUTRIC maintains and is so unjustifiably proud of. It’s possible that a consultancy like Dunsky, without the overhead of the bigger firms, could get within the budget. They’d likely do a better job for the $260,000 Translink is paying. A Stantec or WPS could do the engineering modeling more robustly, so would likely cost more than Dunsky but also be able to deliver more.

My recommendation to Translink is to do an immediate governance review of CUTRIC and the study regarding the massive conflicts of interest. Review the terms of the study to ensure that hydrogen fuel cell buses aren’t pushed out a decade so that discounting eliminates 40% of their costs, the cause of $1.1 billion of the swing in the Brampton study. Spend a bit of money and time reviewing actual experiences with hydrogen bus fleets from California and the EU, as well as the Quebec City hydrogen fleet experience. Look at hydrogen leakage rates in real world facilities and recent global warming potential studies on hydrogen.

Here are some links to get started:

Each article provides links and analysis of peer-reviewed and governmental reports on hydrogen fleets and facilities.

For Translink stakeholders, including the province of BC with its new government and the City of Vancouver, getting transparency into the terms of Translink’s brief to CUTRIC on how to conduct and report on the results is crucial. The Brampton study makes it clear that CUTRIC is quite happy to make a higher cost hydrogen solution appear a lower cost solution by an immaterial 0.1% in order to meet the letter of procurement guidelines.

All transit agencies and cities in Canada: you should consider CUTRIC to be an unreliable source of very expensive guidance. Engage them only with very strict parameters and oversight if you need the ZETF funding that comes along with them. Talk to engineering consulting firms like Stantec and WPS and consultancies to benchmark what you should be paying for the types of reports CUTRIC is delivering.

And bluntly, your guidance to CUTRIC must be to ignore hydrogen as an option. While they might be delivering useful results around battery electric bus fleet roadmaps and scenarios, although my assessment so far makes me think that they are incapable of that as well, they are clearly incapable of delivering anything remotely honest and useful around hydrogen bus fleets.