Large scale demonstration of Hydrogen Refuelling Stations and FCEV road vehicles - including buses and on site electrolysis

This topic calls for a large scale demonstration project covering FCEVs and HRSs, coupled to decentralized electrolysers, to be deployed in alignment with and in cooperation with national or/and regional roll-out activities. Demonstration of electrolyser integrated HRS operating in grid balancing mode in a selection of the new HRS installed will also be covered.

Vehicles

For vehicles, the project will cover the roll-out of a fleet of at least 200 FCEVs. This should comprise multiple OEM supplied passenger cars, utility vehicles (light duty vans, medium duty trucks) and buses. Other vehicles can be included provided they can demonstrate a strong business case a significant market potential (10,000’s per year) and have reached a TRL of 7 or above.

The majority of FCEV's are expected to be using a fuel cell system as the key power source, and 70MPa storage in the case of passenger cars or 35 MPa for buses. Storage systems lower than 70MPa can be allowed if relevant and the

While fuel cell transport applications have recently moved into the early commercialization stage a number of challenges still need to be resolved before hydrogen can be widely implemented as a transportation fuel. These challenges include improved performance and lower costs of both fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) and hydrogen refuelling infrastructure and thereby a strengthened customer acceptance. This requires a large scale “market test” with HRS located on a network basis in different regions showing various geographical and demographical characteristics; and with sufficient vehicle numbers, and types, per station to generate relevant data based on demonstration of the HRS under high load conditions. The learnings obtained are specifically intended to trigger further technological improvements of both stations and vehicles and to provide the necessary experience and confidence on the part of investors and policy makers in the business plans for the multi-billion euros of investments needed to

Vehicles

At least 80% of the vehicles to be deployed in the project should be “next” generation and based on model platforms made available / released in Europe after 1st January 2015). A number of older vehicle models can be accepted where these are introduced in the early stage of the project to help improve HRS loading levels.

Technical targets for passenger cars:

• >6,000h vehicle operation lifetime
• The key power source of vehicles must be a fuel cell system (except for light duty vans, medium duty trucks and other vehicles proposed based on a range extender concept or optimized combinations of hybrid drives)
• Vehicle range > 400 km
• Fuel cell system MTBF >1,000 km
• Availability >98% (to be measured against available operational time)
• Tank-to-wheel efficiency >42%, measured in the New European Drive Cycle (NEDC)
• Pilot series production ability has to be shown

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