Ya thats a definete oospy somewhere.. but they say they fixed it. The new main issue is of all things the zebra batteries;/ Sounds like they didnt make a good pack design on those batteries and it cant handle dead cells well at all.

My, other then that it was a great test of a critical emerging technology that will mitigate the effects of our overeliance on fossil fuels. We just need to take the lessons learned and apply them to the next prototype and correct the start-up problems that go with any new technology.

Oh, wait, fuel cells have been around for about 100 years and NASA has been using them for something like 40 years.

Rewrite: This is a demonstration that old technological approaches to current environmental issue will not work and new and innovative approaches and ideas will be necessary to make sustainable, carbon free, energy and transportation systems a reality and thereby end our overeliance on oil.

Whew, that's better . . . .

Next time, try Enova Systems. Much better product and time tested to perfection. When will people learn???

Pretty dismal report. Overall costs beyond belief. Even so, if the same project started today the results would be much better. A lot of things seem to have been fixed.

The next report on this same bus will be out in a few months. The fuel cell durability is key, the other problems have known fixes.

The limits on speed are of concern. They indicate these buses might be best in very dense urban areas with stops every block. That is where air pollution is worst from diesels anyway.

Such things as heating and air conditioning and operation on ice wouldn't matter in large parts of the world. There is a place for most technologies, and maybe Connecticut isn't that place for FC buses right now.

"there have been a number of specific problems and limitations that resulted in bus availability consistently below the 85% target."

The chart shows actual availability above 80% once in 15 months! The other months range down to 20 something %.

Previous independent results published by the US military for fuel cells in military housing showed PEM fuel cell membranes failing in less than a year.

The US military also published the thermal conversion efficiency which was about 20%; much lower than the theoretical potential of about 50%.
"The fuel cell bus averaged 4.79 miles/kg of hydrogen, equating to 5.41 miles per diesel gallon equivalent (DGE). The buses are plugged in each night to recharge the batteries; the electric energy added to the fuel cell buses each night currently is not accounted for in the fuel economy calculation."
Can anyone estimate the thermal conversion efficiency based on 5.41 mpg plus electricity?

I have the uneasy feeling that taxpayers dollars would have been better spent on researching small stationary 1 kW fuel cell stacks for micro chp until the efficiency and reliability targets has been met before trying to build a 100 kW plus stack for a bumpy road.

And down goes Fraser, er, Fuel Cell...

As for the battery pack: poorly designed. Nothing fundamentally wrong with the chemistry.

A Capstone turbine (alternately a Cyclone Power steam engine) fired by natural gas would appear to be a better solution from a fleet operators standpoint and from a life cycle CO2 standpoint. After all, that H is coming from NG at the moment anyways....

While we have a discussion going, anyone care to comment as to why we haven't seen a bus chasis made of aluminum or carbon fiber? Perhaps the aluminum wouldn't hold up well seeing this isn't a monobody ala Jaguar XJ.

I would think that using CF for the roof alone would save ~500 lbs without substantially adding to the cost.

That's why fuel cells are best used on-site at power plants. The catalytic membranes need careful treatment, and replacement - the kind of thing engineers should be monitoring and overseeing. They don't have much future as on-board devices for electricity generation for transportation, but they could be key components of large hydrogen-based storage systems for wind & solar energy.

At present, there are two viable transportation train systems: the electric motor and the internal combustion engine. Keep in mind that about a century of R&D work has gone into each.

My preferred model would be an ethanol-electric hybrid, with a built-in high-efficiency solar PV roof panel, charged off of solar panels and wind turbines, with the ethanol coming from clean fossil fuel-free agriculture, and only used as a backup once the batteries were exhausted.

Remember, the internal combustion engine was originally run on farm ethanol. Petroleum (gasoline) wasn't used for engine fuel until the 1900s, but rather as lighting fluid, and the first ethanol-electric hybrids were designed c. 1900. Then, along came J.D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil, the J.D.-funded Christian Women's Temperance Movement, and Prohibition - and that was the end of the farmer's ethanol industry in the United States, and the beginning of the petro-era.

Why haven't we seen any ethanol-electric hybrids for sale in the U.S.? Why no development of wind and solar powered farming systems that don't need petrochemical inputs? Fossil fuel interests just have too much control over electricity generation and distribution and automobile manufacturing to allow this to happen (at least so far, that's been the case).

There really is no technological barrier to a completely renewable energy-based economic system - though it will require trillions of dollars in new investment, endless hours of labor, and a lot of materials and manufactured goods to pull it off. It will have to be done, as the world's cheap oil is currently at peak/plateau, there have been no new major discoveries in years, and there is increasing tension over what's left.

The option of relying on more coal and tar sand oil is insane, but that's what the U.S. energy industry has decided to attempt.

170kW total is not 450hp.

The ZEBRA batteries with failed cells are still working!, but they don't work well with each other because they have different voltages. Except for ZEBRA batteries, almost no battery with a failed cell will operate at all. No batteries with more than one cell will work well paralled directly with another battery with no failed cell, and such a situation might well cause a LiIon battery to burn. MES-DEA could figure out a way to short out some good cells so that the battery packs match.

A higher technology solution is to use low voltage buck-boost voltage regulators in series with two out of the three battery packs, but the gain in efficiency is not worth the expense. Diodes are fine. ..HG..

Arrays of heavy current Back-To-Back diodes can be inserted in series with the voltage of two of the battery packs to equalise the voltage to the voltage of the lowest voltage pack. High current low voltage mosfets could short out some or all of the diodes for dynamic balancing as needed. This would leave all of the batteries instantly available for high current all of the time. Even with no failed cells there are problems with balancing the voltage of two paralled batteries. It is never reccomended to parallel batteries.

@jv:

Batteries are centuries old, electric cars predate the ICE car by half a century or so. By your logic, that means the HEV-PHEV-EV path is a dead end.

79% pr .1% engineering and 19.9% some low paid guy with a fake highschool deploma being told to just MAKE IT WORK OR YOUR FIRED!!!

@ Anne

Yes, power and transportation and battery and fuel cell technologies are old. Nothing available today beats and oil powered car with an infernal combustion engine. Nothing. Period.

We have no choice except to develop new systems as oil winds down in supply over the next 50 years. Coal is the best US option backed up by nuclear for primary energy. (Fast reactors required to replace vanishing U235 too!)

There are no commercial batteries for cars right now. Lion might work at some point, but it is at least 2 years before Toyota plans to put out something. A plugin EV won't be available for the masses soon, no matter what Elon Musk wants or not.

Lots of work to do for decades to get these things to work -- and we have no choice to do just that. Government sponsored disasters like this stupid bus don't help that process at all and turn off people as to what has to be done. Too bad.