A consortium of companies called ZEFER (Zero Emission Fleet vehicles for European Roll-out) has started a roll out of 180 hydrogen fuelled vehicles to fleets in London, Paris and Brussels.
The €26 million pan-European initiative will introduce 60 fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) at each city into a combination of taxi, private-hire and police fleets.
The first 25 Toyota Mirai hydrogen vehicles have been deployed this week in London by Green Tomato Cars. Another 25 will be delivered to the company in September.
Of the FCEVs being rolled out 170 will be operated as taxi or private-hire vehicles, and the remaining 10 will be used by the police in London.
The ZEFER project will be used to gather data and to demonstrate the business case for future FCEV adoption and test the performance of cars and infrastructure under high-mileage conditions.
As the vehicles will be in regular use each day, it will create hydrogen demand from each vehicle roughly four times that from a normal privately-owned car.
This will help to ensure high utilisation of the early networks of hydrogen fuelling stations which are already operating in each city.
The Mirai are expected to do the same average mileage as other cars on the Green Tomato Cars fleet, around 120-150 miles a day. A Mirai can travel up to 300 miles on a full tank of hydrogen, so the private hire cars should be refuelling every two days on average.
ZEFER will be delivered by a consortium led by Element Energy, including hydrogen suppliers (Air Liquide and ITM Power Trading Ltd), vehicle end users (Green Tomato Cars, HYPE and the London Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime), observer partners (BMW and Linde AG) and partners supporting the analysis and policy conclusions (Cenex and the Mairie de Paris).
It is co-funded with €5 million from the Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking, a public-private partnership supporting fuel cell and hydrogen energy technologies in Europe.
Ben Madden, director at Element Energy, said: “This major project will demonstrate commercially viable use cases for hydrogen fuelled vehicles in high mileage urban fleets.
“The increasingly widespread hydrogen infrastructure network in leading European cities as well as new FCEV models from manufacturers are beginning to drive real market adoption.”
