In my role at the Carbon Trust, I have been working for a number
of years to accelerate hydrogen powered fuel-cell electric vehicles
to market.
Our analyses suggest that this less fashionable technology is
likely to make the largest ultimate contribution to reducing carbon
and other emissions from road vehicles. While battery-only electric
vehicles (BEVs) are now on sale, the high cost of battery packs
able to offer useful range means that these are still more
expensive than most customers are willing to pay: Ricardo is
predicting that BEVs will only make up 3% of vehicle sales in 2020!
Even if a breakthrough in battery technology were to result in more
affordable BEVs, there will be fundamental limitations on charging
time and range that will limit their use to urban commuter
journeys.
Fuel cell technology offers a route to lower cost electric
vehicles with long range; it is much cheaper to store most of the
energy on board the vehicle as hydrogen than in large battery
packs, then use a fuel cell to convert this to electrical energy
and a much smaller battery to manage variable power
requirements.
Two roadblocks remain before hydrogen fuel cell cars can become
mainstream however: a reduction in fuel cell system costs and
clean, affordable hydrogen fuel distribution. Recent analysis by
McKinsey and others shows that the infrastructure challenge can be
addressed in an affordable manner - initially through production
from natural and biogas - and this is something the governments of
Germany and California are already committed to. We further expect
that improvements in fuel cell technology will lead to a sharp
reduction in capital costs over the next 10 years. By 2020, our
analysis calculates that fuel cell electric vehicles could be on a
par with the cost of plug-in hybrids, ~£15,000 for a mid-size
passenger car with 550km range, while being able to offer
substantially lower carbon emissions.
Given the scale of investment in automotive battery technology
in Asia, China in particular, it will be very difficult for the UK
to benefit materially from deployment of batteries in vehicles.
However, this country has a great heritage of fuel cell
development, and if fuel cell powertrains are developed to meet
mass market requirements, the UK economy could benefit
substantially. However, it will be necessary for the government to
commit to supporting the roll out of hydrogen infrastructure, as
the Germans and Californians have done, in order for the UK to
capture full value from this opportunity.
Read more about the Carbon Trust Polymer Fuel
Cells Challenge.