“The most disappointing example of this was when the Queensland government recently invested in [630 diesel buses]. Just when Australia is running out of diesel, these chaps are accelerating the problem. (https://www.smh.com.au/national/queensland/back-to-diesel-lnp-dumps-queensland-s-electric-bus-program-20260901-p60tg4.html).
Natural Gas maybe.
I’m sure we can throw in a long and expensive process to convert all these diesel buses over to natural gas to solve the problem that we shouldn’t have encountered in the first place, for just twice or three times the cost of buying electric buses in the first place.
Are we running off natural gas too? But LPG would make more cense. Electric buses which have same endurance as diesel jut do not exists. For dense cities electric can work, recuperation is a king. For spread around cities not that much.
Have you looked at the hydrogen (fuel cell) buses. We have a handful on trial down here on Hobart. They are rated up to 400km of a full tank and it only takes 15 minutes to gas them up. The fuel cell itself is quite lightweight and so overall the vehicle can be lighter. Biggest obstacle seems to be the refueling infrastructure needing to be built out.
Hydrogen has a very low round trip efficiency (less than 30% compared to batteries at 85%+). The energy efficiency is a physics hard limit, not just something we haven’t solved yet.
The “cheap” hydrogen comes from natural gas (methane) through steam reforming, and actually contains less energy than the natural gas it came from.
The hydrogen from renewables currently costs about 50x as much as petrol for the same distance driven, and makes up less than 2% of all hydrogen used.
South Australia has tried both battery and hydrogen busses. It has just bought more battery busses, and has no plans for future hydrogen busses. Hydrogen for energy storage just doesn’t make economic sense.
Don’t know a heap about it if I am honest. I know we are using green hydrogen at a pilot facility. Where excess power exists on our grid down here it is inherently “green” energy from renewables so the big point being made was that it’s 100% green energy. Like all things it probably depends on if the process is economically scalable to seperate an interesting test case from mass market. Of course the current bunch of numpties will likely cancel the scheme at the end of the trial so they can give the power away for pennies on the dollar to Firmus for use in a data centre, so yay everyone loses.