Hydrogen vehicles hoping to boost fortunes
More than 10 years ago then-California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and ex-B. C. premier Gordon Campbell promised to turn the West Coast from L.A. to Whistler into a “hydrogen highway.”
The plan to build hydrogen fuelling stations along the corridor or anywhere in B.C. has been stalled since.
But the industry now says it’s ready to boost its consumer products into drive, with the opening of the first commercial fuelling station within a month at a gas station on Granville Street in Vancouver, which would be the first retail store in Canada.
Promoters of the technology have been offering rides in hydrogen-powered electric vehicles and showing off the cars at the B.C. Tech Summit running Tuesday and Wednesday at the Vancouver Convention Centre.
The Toyota vehicle test-driven by Postmedia offered a quiet and smooth ride, and it could zip ahead on the road when needed.
But whether the technology will enter and remain in the race for a piece of the zero-emissions personal vehicles market will depend on the number of vehicles that are sold.
Or on the number of hydrogen fuelling stations that are opened.
“You need the chicken and the egg and the farm, the farm being the people wanting to buy (the hydrogen-powered cars),” said Colin Armstrong, CEO of the Hydrogen Technology and Energy Corp.
“Ten years ago, everybody thought there’d be a drive forward” for hydrogen fuel cells, he said. “They’ve been working away on them since. To make it customer-ready, it takes a long time.”
Armstrong owns one of B.C.’s 10 vehicles powered by hydrogen — they work by drawing oxygen and mixing it with the stored hydrogen gas in a fuel cell pack that creates the electricity to run the cars — and fills it at a demonstration station in Surrey.
HTEC is planning to offer hydrogen fills at six gas stations, including one in Victoria, over the next two years and eventually open others in the Okanagan, Abbotsford and Nanaimo.
And it’s hoping to get some traction, after false starts that included the trials of a handful of Ford Focus cars in Vancouver and Whistler’s abandoned experiment with 20 transit buses fuelled by hydrogen shipped from Quebec.
In California, where six or seven hydrogen producers are poised to supply the market, there are only 4,000 vehicles, but three quarters of them were sold in the past year.
They’re priced at US$50,000 but a Honda representative said they’re normally leased for about US$360 a month, which includes free hydrogen.
Armstrong said these vehicles will be priced somewhere between budget and luxury vehicles and hydrogen will be sold at the same price as gas because the value of the gas is in its distribution and volume.
“Setting the price is a choice,” he said. “That’s where we believe we can get to.”