Below is the text version for the "Fuel Cell Electric Buses: Progress toward Meeting Technical Targets" webinar, held on May 17, 2018.

Eric Parker, Fuel Cell Technologies Office

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the US Department of Energy's Fuel Cell Technology Office monthly webinar series. We've got another great presentation this month from Leslie Eudy on Fuel Cell Electric Buses: Progress Towards Meeting Technical Targets. My name's Eric Parker, I provide program support here within the Fuel Cell Technologies Office and I'm the organizer for today's meeting. We'll begin in just a second, but first I have a couple housekeeping items to tell you about.

Today's webinar is going to be recorded and the recording along with the slides will be posted at a later date, and we'll be sure to let everyone know. In addition, all attendees will be on mute throughout the webinar, so please submit written questions via the chat box you should see on the screen now in the WebEx panel. We will cover the questions as best we can during the Q&A portion at the end of the presentation.

With that I would like to introduce today's DOE webinar host, Jason Marcinkoski, who is a program manager lead here at the Field Cell Technologies Office joining us here in person. Thanks, Jason.

Jason Marcinkoski, U.S. Department of Energy

Thank you, Eric. Leslie Eudy is a senior project leader in the Hydrogen Technology Validation Group at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. She manages projects, evaluating advanced technology in heavy vehicle applications with a focus on fuel cell and electric transit buses. This involves coordination with various partners to collect data and assess the progress of the technology in comparison to baseline technology vehicles. She has worked at NREL for 20 years and worked on battery electric buses, hybrids, CNG and fuel cell buses. And the topic of bus targets is timely, as DOE is currently working on developing targets for fuel cell trucks in general. Thank you, Leslie, for being here today to give us this talk.

Leslie Eudy, National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Thanks, Jason. So let's start out and talk about the evaluation objectives. We work with the transit agencies to collect data. This table shows you a selection of the targets Jason mentioned, the targets that were developed back in 2012 between DOE and DOT through the Federal Transit Administration. This is just a selection of the targets, mostly performance based targets. We look to validate those buses' performance and look at the cost as well, and we compare that to the targets as well as to conventional technologies. We document for other transit agencies the lessons learned, hopefully so that new agencies that are interested in this technology can avoid some of the pitfalls from some of the early adopters. And I'm going to go through data as we move forward that talk about these targets such as power plant lifetime, availability, the frequency of road calls, and maintenance cost and fuel economy.

Our approach is to—we're basically a third-party evaluator. We work with the transit agencies, and most of the data we get comes straight from the transit agencies and then some from the manufacturers. We include comparisons to the conventional technologies, in most cases that's diesel, but some of our fleets don't have diesel baseline buses, so we look at CNG, occasionally we'll have diesel hybrids as a baseline as well.

We work with each of the individual sites and we collect data and then document their experiences and that builds a database of a number of data items that we have from all these fleets. We publish the individual reports, and then once a year we do an annual status report where we look at the data from all those sites and sort of assess the progress and look at what maybe needs to happen for the technology to continue on that line towards commercialization.

So the next few slides we're going to talk about data summaries from our most recent data. This will also be included in my annual merit presentation in June. But this is—we've got two different manufacturers that we've been working with so far, and this table gives you some specifications from those two manufacturers. One design is a Van Hool-based bus, it has original—the power plants were originally designed by UTC Power and they have a fuel cell dominant system with a Siemens ELFA hybrid system and using EnerDel batteries. The other design we're looking at is built by ElDorado National on their Access platform and that bus was developed under the FCA program, and it's dubbed the American Fuel Cell Bus, which is the AFCB acronym. And that one has a BAE HybriDrive system with a Ballard fuel cell, and it's also a fuel cell-dominant system with A123 batteries.

This table shows you the fleets that we've included in the data summary. We've been working with six fleets over the last few years, but we don't have data from all those fleets in the following data products. So this shows you who we've been working with, how many buses they have, what design it is, and what data is included. We've followed the AC Transit buses for six or seven years now, so we've cut down on the data that we've collected on them; it's mostly the fuel cell hours, but we've also included the fueling records and on another reliability chart we've shown their miles between road call as well. We have all data on SunLine and Orange County Transit Authority and the UCI, there's a bus at the University of California at Irvine. And then the NBTA bus we don't have a full data set on those, so that includes fuel cell hours and their fueling records. And then Stark is our newest fleet. We have not selected a clean point for those yet, so right now we only have the fuel cell hours, but we've got about four or five months worth of data on those, so they will show up in our next data reports. And I've got the numbers besides the fleets showing our valuations are funded by either DOE or FTA, and I've indicated which ones are funded by which.

So we're looking at this chart shows you the growth of fuel cell buses in the US. Over the past few years we've started evaluating from original prototype buses back in 2005 and we're seeing some of those numbers climb now. The nice thing is that the new bus orders are following the standard procurement process, which is definitely needed to have a commercial product. Right now we have 33 fuel cell buses in service; we are not collecting data on all of those. And then potential by the end of 2019, once orders that are on the line come through could be 71 buses. And I have a note at the bottom about the European fuel cell programs. From the notes that I've seen we have about 46 active and there's 313 planned in Europe. And then Asia is also planning some larger fuel cell bus programs. I've seen as many as 400 planned and with the potential for as much as 2,000 more per year in Korea.

One of the most important things to look at is the longevity of the fuel cell power plant. This chart shows you for each of the buses that we are working with the number of hours that the buses have achieved as of the end of February 2018. The targets—there's an interim target of 18,000 hours and the ultimate target is 25,000 hours. The idea is that the 25,000 hours will take a bus through half of its life and then similar to what they might do with a CNG or a diesel bus, where they might do an engine rebuild or an engine refresh, the thought would be that that would take the fuel cell to a point in time where they might want to refresh or replace that power plant. We've seen two buses now that are over the ultimate target as of March. I have some more data, this is through February, but so we've seen once bus go over 27,000 hours, which is a huge accomplishment for these buses. You can see that some of our newer buses have come online, and so they don't have near as many hours, and the average for the group as a whole is over 13,000 hours.

Fuel economy, we track end use fuel economy, but we developed this product last year for our last status report to look at sort of the different designs that we've looked at and the first generation versus second generation. So these box plots show you based on the first year for data at each demonstration. Fuel economy is very dependent on duty cycle, so what we did to get these numbers were we looked at each of our demonstrations, we took the first year worth of data and we took the average fuel economy for the buses for that whole year, so that would also include any summer versus winter driving.

The first generation buses there were six demonstrations of three different fuel cell bus designs and the Gen Two are five demonstrations of two different designs. And you can see that from the first generation to the second generation we've seen a fuel economy increase. And I did put a note on here that the low point of the Gen One, is the only bus that we've looked at that was not a hybrid electric bus, it was just a strict fuel cell bus and it got worse fuel economy than the baseline buses.

The fueling data summary is interesting; it shows you how much fuel that we have recorded on our buses that we've evaluated. This chart shows for each of the demonstrations the number of buses that are at the site, the number of days that the buses were fueled, the monthly hydrogen in kilograms, the number of occurrence, and then average daily fuel use and then average fill amount per kilogram. While these buses do hold, depending on the design, either 40 or 50 kilograms of fuel, the average overall has been about 21 kilograms per fill and we've seen it up definitely more than 30 kilograms per fill, but the average has been 21. Transit agencies will fill the buses during a six to eight-hour window at the end of the day, so stations need to be capable of back-to-back fueling. Our stations so far have had no issues with back-to-back fueling as long as you have—at least the stations that we have now can handle, you know, up to 10 or 12 buses. We have seen some issues with having to have a little wait come after the 10th or 11th bus.

The goal for an agency is to fuel it in less than ten minutes. That's typically what they do with a diesel or CNG bus, and they clean it and do all the prep work while they're fueling the bus.

Looking at reliability, transit agencies track that as miles between road call. And this chart shows several different lines. Let me explain, the two—the red and the blue lines at the bottom are for the two different designs, the Van Hool fuel cell electric bus and then the American fuel cell bus. And that is the overall miles between road calls for—all road calls for the bus, all chargeable road calls. So it wouldn't include things like head signs or fare boxes or radios, but it would include things that went wrong with the bus. So you can see that the ultimate target is 4,000 miles between road call, and both these designs have risen over time and are both over the ultimate target.

The two lines at the top, the green line is the American Fuel Cell Bus, the fuel cell system only MBRC, and then the purple line is for the Van Hool bus. And I separated these out. I mentioned we're not collecting as much data on the AC Transit Van Hool buses, but I wanted to show how they have improved in reliability, and part of that really shows how the agency is learning to anticipate problems ahead of time. And so we see that number climbing. There is some jaggedness to the American Fuel Cell Bus line. Part of the reason is that there are more than one fleet included in that line, and so one—and there's only five buses, so it's very sensitive to the number of buses. So you get a road call and if there aren't as many miles it will drop that number down and so it fluctuates some. We are seeing it rise and we expect it to continue to rise.

Cost is one thing that the transit agencies are very concerned about. This chart shows the fuel cell bus compared to our CNG-based lines, diesel-based lines, and then I've included one of the battery electric bus fleets that we've collected enough data on to present here. The majority of the cost it shows is for labor, troubleshooting, and sometimes training will increase those labor hours. In some cases for a preventative maintenance there might be three mechanics working on it at the same time; you've got one mechanic that is teaching the other two. So we'll have double and triple labor hour cost. As that learning curve goes up we expect those costs to go down. Then as the buses are still under warranty we don't see those costs; we don't include warranty costs in these numbers, and so those are provided by the transit agents or provided by the OEM, so we won't see those until the buses come out of warranty.

The fuel cell buses here, some of them are out of warranty, so we're seeing some of those costs increase. The CNG buses here are mostly out of warranty and so are the diesel buses. The battery electric buses that I have here are just now starting to come out of warranty. And as I mentioned, the cost-per-mile calculation is sensitive to the number of the buses in each fleet, so the fuel cell electric bus line is five buses, the CNG and the diesel are both ten buses, and then the battery electric bus line here is 12 buses.

If I take those costs and break then down by system, that's what this chart shows. So you can see that the highest cost that's so far within the fuel cell buses are for propulsion-related issues. And a lot of what we've seen are things like cooling system leaks, some low-voltage electrical problems, we've seen problems with a low-voltage battery that has caused some higher costs, and those are not—they're not the high-voltage battery for the hydro grid electric system, they're the lower-voltage battery that takes care of some of the other systems on the bus. And then the fuel cell bus problem is mostly balanced for plant issues. We've had some other issues, bus issues that were with the air compressor and suspension.

In this chart I wanted to show some maintenance cost trends over time. One of the questions I've been asked is how does this compare—how does the cost over time compare to conventional technologies. So this chart shows the cumulative maintenance cost from the start of service for a number of different fleets. We've got the Fuel Cell Bus Fleet, which is the American Fuel Cell Bus, in the darker blue; then I've got our diesel fleet in the light blue with the triangles; and then we've got two different CNG baseline fleets shown here, the circles with the teal blue and then the orange, and then the battery bus fleet that we've been working with in the green. And the numbers correspond to where we see the reasons for those costs. So if you look at the number one, that's the introduction of the technology; they're not operating the buses on as many miles, they're just starting to break them in and they've got some higher costs because it is an early introduction with fewer miles.

Then as you get to stage two you see the miles are increasing on the buses, they're getting them in service, most of these repairs are handled under warranty, so you see the cost drop as they gain miles and they're not accumulating that much cost. And then section three you can see some steady increase and that trend is based on learning curve. The agency staff are starting to take on some of the maintenance work and some of the preventative maintenance and repair and they're learning to troubleshoot. So you see that costs climb with the labor as they're learning how to take care of those buses. And then when you get to stage four you're seeing that cost decrease, the mechanics are becoming much more familiar with the technology and so you see those costs decrease. And then when you hit that lower point between four and five, we're seeing some buses come out of the warranty period, so we're seeing some costs that they wouldn't see under warranty. Parts costs especially can be high, and so I see that cost trend increasing over time.

If you look at the six marks—the battery electric bus fleet that we've worked, at this point the maintenance work has been mostly handled by on-site OEM staff, but we're seeing the cost increase as the agency is now starting to take over that work and the warranty period is ending. And then under each of the legend I've got the total of the cost per mile for each of those at the end of that data period.

Some of the technical issues that are affecting the cost, you know, understanding these issues helps guide future R&D needs. I mentioned the fuel cell system; the majority of things that we've seen were due to balance of plant. Things like air handling, blowers failing, cooling pumps and plumbing. Sometimes they find leaks in that plumbing and they're hard to troubleshoot. We've seen some electrical system problems. These load voltage batteries, some of the electric accessories like the farebox and the radios and the cameras cause a continual drain, so we're seeing some shortened battery life. We're trying to investigate what that means for these buses. We're also seeing that issue with the battery buses.

Then cooling system leaks, in some cases if they're in hotter climates, for instance, some of our buses are at SunLine Transit Agency; it's a hot climate there, it's kind of hard to locate a leak because usually you locate a leak when you see water and it evaporates really fast in the desert. So that has made it very challenging to locate some of those leaks. And then added labor for hours or troubleshooting problems is something that we've seen in early stages and we expect that to go away as the mechanics become more familiar.

Remaining challenges and barriers. We'd like to see a robust supply chain for the components and parts to lower that cost in the downtime. We are seeing this happen now; some of our manufacturers are standardizing with their conventional bus components and we expect that to lower the cost and to help with that parts cost availability. Multiple component suppliers will be very helpful. In some cases we've seen component suppliers go out of business and then the transit agency is stuck with a bus and they have a hard time finding an alternate source for those parts.

Deploying larger fleets, some of the agencies that we have worked with have a one-bus fleet in a large fleet and that makes it really challenging, it requires a commitment. And it's really easy if you've got one bus that's a specific design and everything else is different, it's easy just to let that bus sit if it has a problem, so that affects the availability numbers, while if they were a little more committed they might find it easier or quicker to fix the bus and get it back in service. So that affects our availability numbers over time. And then we'd like to see the costs come down, and we expect that; as the numbers of buses increase you'll see some reduction in capital costs. And then operating costs will come down as the transit agency staff become more familiar and parts and labor also increase the cost as the fleets get past that warranty period. Then fuel cell buses are also competing with other zero-emission technology. So that's a challenge for fuel cells when you're looking at battery bus fleets that are becoming very popular and getting ordered all over the country.

This chart shows our current and our potential evaluations. I mentioned 33 buses in service; the ones that we're actually working with are a total of 25 fuel cell electric buses at six transit sites. There are more sites coming online and we're hoping to have the funding to evaluate those. It could add as many as 44 buses and some new designs, which are interesting to us because we've collected a lot of data on two designs and we're hoping to collect on some of these newer designs as they go into service.

This last chart summarizes the progress towards meeting those targets. So if you look at the three columns to the right in the orange color, that gives you the interim target, the ultimate target and we tag whether that target was met or not. And then the lighter blue on the left-hand side is our average from 2017, and then the two darker blue bars that say "2018 fleet max" and "2018 fleet average," that's the current numbers through the end of February of this year. So the 2018 fleet max, what that is is if we look at all of our buses as a whole, what was the maximum amount? We have some very new buses. This shows our older buses, the average, or the bus lifetime is over, is almost 200,000 miles, power plant lifetime, our highest power plant is over 27,000 hours. The bus with the highest availability is 90-percent, and then the road call frequency. So that shows you just kind of the maximum that we're seeing as a whole. And then you look at the 2018 fleet average and that's if you take all of those 25 buses as a whole, what is the average for those?

And you can see that we've met the target for power plant lifetime, we've met the ultimate target with one bus, and then we've met the interim target with a number of buses. We've met the road call frequency with the AC Transit buses and then I should probably put down that the range in miles is close to being met as well.

Then I acknowledge our funding partners. I mention the Fuel Cell Technologies Office within EERE provides us with funding for some of our fuel cell bus fleets. And then the Office of Research Demonstration and Innovation that's within the DOT Federal Transit Administration also provides money for us to do both fuel cell and battery electric bus fleets.

And that was the end of my presentation.

Eric Parker

Thanks, Leslie, for a great and informative presentation. I think we're going to transition to the Q&A portion now. On screen you'll see another reminder to please submit any questions you have to HOST via the WebEx panel and we'll do our best to get to all of them. And Jason has some questions to get us going.

Jason Marcinkoski

Thank you, Leslie. Thanks for the very informative talk. And we can see that there's been a lot of progress made in fuel cell buses over the years, and, you know, meeting the durability target is a huge accomplishment. But what can you tell us about the fueling operations for buses, for example at AC Transit?

Leslie Eudy

Just about what kind of fueling they have?

Jason Marcinkoski

Yeah, what kind of—how does the operation go, yeah, what kind of fueling they have, the capacity, the flow, how do they fuel all the buses at the end of the day? Do they fuel all the buses every day?

Leslie Eudy

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, transit agencies typically fuel their buses every day, no matter how long they operate. The AC Transit has two stations, one at each of their depots, and they've got their 13-bus fleets split up into I believe it's nine at one depot and the rest of the buses are at the other depot. They both have liquid storage and delivery, but the station's built by Lindy and they fuel each of the buses at the end of the day in that window.

They have had some issues. The station at their Oakland division fuels—I'm sorry, the one in Emeryville division has been able to fuel as fast as 5 kilograms per minute and they've found that that was a bit of a challenge, because of the fast fueling they don't necessarily get a full fill and so they were topping the buses off again the next morning. They felt like maybe reducing that flow might make it easier and they wouldn't have to do a second fill in the morning. They can talk more to that themselves. But I think they've had a real successful implementation.

For our other fleets, SARTA also does liquid delivery and storage. SunLine has a reformer that they've been—so they produce fuel on site and they also fuel their buses at the end of the day. They're in the process of upgrading their station and putting their dispensers in line with their CNG dispensers, similar to what AC Transit has done with theirs, theirs being on the diesel fuel island.

It takes less than ten minutes mostly. SunLine has a slower fill rate, so sometimes their fill is usually closer to 30 minutes.

Jason Marcinkoski

Okay. So it takes the whole evening to get through all the buses, they fill one at a time?

Leslie Eudy

They do fill one at a time and it doesn't take the whole evening; it just depends on how long it takes the fuel hostlers to go through and do—'cause what they do is they dump the farebox and they do all the prep work for the bus while it's on that fueling island. It usually takes about ten minutes to do that, and their buses have been able to fuel pretty close to ten minutes; it might be a little longer in some cases, but I think they've been able to make that target.

Jason Marcinkoski

Okay. Can you comment on the level of hybridization of the fuel cell buses? Is there a trend in terms of fuel cell dominant versus battery dominant?

Leslie Eudy

The first bus that we worked with I mentioned was not a hybrid at all, so it was a straight fuel cell. And the fuel economy was lower than the diesel baseline. So the OEMs have pretty much moved to a hybridized design. The ones that were developed after that were more fuel cell-dominant. I couldn't tell you the percentage but some of the newer designs are coming out with—the fuel cell manufacturers are producing fuel cells that are less kilowatt hour total, and so more batteries are needed to meet that. So I think some of the newer buses that we're going to look at will be more of a battery dominant, where a fuel cell is more like a range extender. I think the idea behind that is smaller fuel cells, lower cost.

Jason Marcinkoski

Okay. Somebody is asking about more detail on the fuel cell cap load air compressor blower failures. Can you elaborate at all on that?

Leslie Eudy

I can't elaborate a lot. I'd have to talk to our transit agencies. I just know that it's for our older buses and those blowers are failing. I don't at this point know the reason behind that, but it's something that I definitely want to investigate.

Jason Marcinkoski

Okay. I have a good question here. This is one that I was wondering too. What's going on with the cost of fuel cell buses?

Leslie Eudy

They've definitely dropped over the years. The first ones that we looked at were about $3.5 million apiece. The most recent order that we've seen was closer to $1.2 million. The manufacturers are on—they claim they're on target to reach the DOE/DOT target of $600,000.00 per bus. That seems a little low to me because hybrids are more than that at this point, and diesel buses have definitely come up in cost. But they claim that they're going to easily get under $1 million with orders in the range of—I have to remember correctly—40—you know, once you get to 40 to 100 buses they can get those costs down quite a bit. And they expect to make that target.

Jason Marcinkoski

Okay. Can you comment anymore on the infrastructure challenges; equipment standardization, fueling protocols, testing, reliability?

Leslie Eudy

I'm not sure that there's been any big reliability issues. The stations that we've worked with have been fairly reliable. The two at AC Transit are operated by Lindy under contract, so they have to make sure those stations work, so there's been only a few occasions where they couldn't get fuel. There was one incident several years ago where the station at Emeryville was down for a number of months because of an incident, but that's never been repeated. They figured the root cause of that out and it hasn't happened again.

SunLine, their station is much older. They've got a reformer that's ancient. It was a prototype and they're still making it run, and they have had some issues with that. But for the most part the downtimes at the stations have been very few and far between.

Jason Marcinkoski

Okay. We have a question about DOE establishing technical targets for trucks. So I'd like to mention that we did have an RFI that was open, but we can entertain any input that we have so you can reach out to us. We have some contact information on the last slide. We'll put that up. But you can reach out to me and provide any input you have and we can also put you on to be contacted if we have any workshops. So we're actively planning a workshop for later this summer. Once we finalize that we can distribute that information and we'll publicly announce it.

So we have another question for Leslie. Have you noticed any variance in fueling time and mileage for buses due to weather changes? And specifically, temperature.

Leslie Eudy

I haven't noticed any difference in temperature for fueling times. Not that I'm specifically aware of. We have seen some fluctuation in the fuel economy based on temperature. In some cases, you know, the air conditioning definitely taps the power and we see a reduction in fuel economy during the summer months. But in some of our past fleets, where we had some cooler temperatures, the heating system can definitely lower that fuel economy as well.

Jason Marcinkoski

Okay, here's another question—uh-oh, excuse me. We rolled off the screen here. Are these buses running in specific routes every day or are they rotated on all the routes?

Leslie Eudy

Most of our buses are rotated on a number of routes. Our transit agencies are not typically putting them on commuter routes because they're not commuter buses, but AC Transit has moved from a selection of routes to more of a random dispatch. You know, it depends on the dispatchers whether they put them on the same routes or not, but they're going on a variety of routes.

The buses in SARTA, right now they have two specific routes they've selected, partly because they see more passengers that way. SunLine is running them on any of their possible routes; they have about four that they typically cycle them through. But they can pretty much do most of the routes at the transit agencies.

Jason Marcinkoski

Okay. I'm trying to decipher this question. So you mentioned the battery buses would be dominant while fuel cell buses would be a range extender. Does this mean having a battery and fuel cell in the same bus, or do you mean use fuel cell buses for longer routes?

Leslie Eudy

Okay, I think I understand that question. The buses that we have are hybrid electric buses, so they're electric buses that have a fuel cell to power them and keep the batteries charged. So they do have batteries as well as a fuel cell. So battery-dominant would be just more battery with a smaller fuel cell.

Jason Marcinkoski

Okay. Thank you for that clarification. Do you expect improvements in fuel economy for fuel cell buses? And do you expect further weight reduction, for instance, to contribute to that?

Leslie Eudy

Weight reduction can always contribute to that. And I do expect some increase. It is very dependent on how the buses are operated. The highest fuel economy we saw was some of the AC Transit buses operated by a different fleet and they got over nine miles per kilogram, which was pretty good. It seems to have settled down to more like six. We are seeing some drop in fuel economy I believe that's connected to a number of factors, one being degradation of the fuel cells. So I'm looking forward to seeing some of these newer designs to see what the fuel economy on the brand new designs are myself.

Jason Marcinkoski

Okay. And I think we've talked about that before. I think it's a little bit unfair to judge the fuel cell efficiency at the end of life while our other technologies are always judged at the beginning of life. But I'll leave that debate for later.

So this question is about the storage. First of all, I think most of the buses that you're looking at are 350 bar, can you clarify that?

Leslie Eudy

That's correct.

Jason Marcinkoski

[Inaudible]

Leslie Eudy

Yeah, that's correct.

Jason Marcinkoski

Okay. So what is your perspective on the need for 700 bar storage for buses? Is the range adequate in the 350 bar or do you think 700 bar is necessary? Obviously there's a higher operation cost for the 700 bar station than the 350 bar.

Leslie Eudy

Right. The higher pressure certainly could add to the range and there has been some range anxiety for these buses on some of the longer routes. I'm not sure—from what I understand, the OEMs here in the States don't have a huge interest in going to that higher pressure because of the cost, but I know that both Toyota and Hyundai are looking at that higher pressure for the buses in Asia. And their reasoning behind that is that they're both car manufacturers and what they are doing is doubling their systems and, you know, they're adding—they're taking the same tanks they would have on the light duty vehicle and just multiplying how many tanks they need for the heavy-duty vehicle. I know Toyota's new fuel cell bus has two light duty fuel cell systems and then I'm not sure how many tanks, but it's the same tank they use on their light duty vehicles. So they can get a volume and make those costs down. Here in the United States our bus manufacturers are not also light duty manufacturers, so that one might be a challenge for them.

Jason Marcinkoski

Okay, here's another question, are these vehicles instrumented to record the routes, fuel cell, and motor operating conditions? If so, is the data available to DOE labs?

Leslie Eudy

My understanding is that some of them, if not all of them, are capable of collecting that sort of data. We have not had access to that. We've asked for it in the past. I think part of the challenge is the fuel cell manufacturers are not always comfortable with us having that information, so I don't personally—we don't at NREL have that data available.

Jason Marcinkoski

Okay. Here's a question about whether there have been any safety issues with hydrogen refueling in the bus program?

Leslie Eudy

With the fueling itself, as far as the buses, there have been accidents and no incidents with the buses. Even when there were accidents they were pretty minor and there was nothing—the hydrogen was never involved. For the stations, we had the one incident at AC Transit where a PRD failed and nobody was hurt. There were some singed canopies, but it was really, really loud. And it's in an area with a business park type setting, right across the street from Pixar, and they had to evacuate a school and Pixar. And so it was a scary situation for the people that experienced it, but there was really very little damage. They figured out what the problem was, it was a problem with the PRD, the materials inside the PRD, if I remember right. There was a report that was put out by Sandia on that, if anybody needs the details. But that's the only station incident that I'm aware of.

Jason Marcinkoski

There's also a—on our website, H2Tools, you can get more information on safety across the entire fuel cell program, or contribute your safety incidents to that database. So that's a good reference for those that are interested.

Also just FYI, PRD is pressure-release device, and it's on the station, not on the bus. So just some clarification there.

I think we'll do one more question. Are there DOE maintenance cost targets for the fuel cell bus and for the fuel cell module?

Leslie Eudy

There are cost targets—maintenance cost targets for the bus as a whole. I didn't list those in the table, but if you go to the record that was referenced in the beginning it gives all of those targets, including some capital cost targets and targets including bus—total bus cost and then component fuel cell cost targets.

Jason Marcinkoski

Okay. I'll do one more because it's a good question. Do you have any information on battery degradation for hybrid fuel cell buses or any buses for that matter?

Leslie Eudy

For the battery degradation, we do not. With our battery bus fleets that we're working with we hope to have some of that data, but we've only been following those fleets for a few years. We've got one fleet that we followed for three years now and some of the other ones we've just got a year's worth of data and we don't have the detailed data on all of those fleets.

Jason Marcinkoski

Okay. Thank you very much, Leslie, for all your responses to all the questions. That's all the questions I see coming through, so we're going to wrap it up.

Eric Parker

Yep. Thanks to both of you for helping us out today with the presentation, and that's going to conclude our webinar for the day. If we didn't get to a question you had please feel free to e-mail Leslie, Jason, or the FCT webinar mailbox and we'll get to it. So thanks, everyone for joining. And as a reminder, a lot of you have been asking, we will be posting the full webinar presentation and the full recording with audio on line at the DOE webinar—FCT webinar website that you see down at the bottom there. Please be sure to check that information out.

Also, I encourage everyone to sign up for monthly newsletters. That includes information on future webinars and registrations for events. You can sign up on that website.

And with that I will wish everyone else a good day and goodbye.

[End of Audio]