Hydrogen-powered shuttle fleet for NREL visitors

In India fuel prices are hiking and people are very concerned about the severe imbalance between income and expenditure. If policy makers stood still in their money-minting-citizen-wrecking projects, and give the Colorado-based National Renewable Energy Laboratory a bit of their attention, maybe they could get convinced to cut their fellow countrymen some slack. The lab’s Department of Energy is leasing out 12 hydrogen-powered shuttle buses for visitors to tour the premises. Engineers say that the shuttle can run up to 250 miles and is up to 25% more energy-efficient than conventional gasoline-powered engines.

According to a statement by the NREL – ‘the shuttle uses the same basic technology as a conventional engine but runs on hydrogen fuel created at the Wind to Hydrogen (Wind2H2) Project in Boulder which links wind turbines to electrolyzers, which pass the wind-generated electricity through water to split it into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen can then be stored and used later to generate electricity from an internal combustion engine or a fuel cell’. The lab’s engineers point that while it might not be such a huge difference, it is a ‘good stepping stone to get the technology into the market and provide an alternative to fleets while the infrastructure for hydrogen fueling stations develops’.
[EarthTechling]