Hamburg's push to run its public buses on hydrogen is running into trouble, Golem reports — the latest European city to find that fuel-cell transit is harder to scale than it looked on paper.
The concept is appealing: replace diesel buses with hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles whose only tailpipe emission is water, and refuel them in minutes rather than charging them for hours. The reality has been messier. Fuel-cell buses cost substantially more than their diesel and battery-electric equivalents, and they depend on a supply chain — green hydrogen production, distribution and refuelling stations — that many cities have not built.
The deeper problem is efficiency. Turning renewable electricity into hydrogen, compressing and transporting it, then converting it back into power in a fuel cell wastes far more energy than storing the same electricity in a battery. For a city bus, which returns to a depot every night and can be charged there, that gap is difficult to justify.
Hamburg is not alone. Several German and European transit operators have scaled back hydrogen bus plans after pilot phases, redirecting spending toward battery-electric fleets while reserving hydrogen for longer-range or heavier duties where batteries struggle.
The outcome in Hamburg will be watched as a test case: whether a well-funded city can make the hydrogen supply chain work at the pace its climate targets require, or whether buses join the list of applications where batteries simply win.
