One of the most interesting news of this week was the arrival of an Opel Vivaro with fuel cell. Maybe because I just got out of an electric Vivaro, I quickly saw the potential use for it.
The state wants to electrify the rather filthy company car fleet as soon as possible. Those electric buses are excellent tools for that. They drive well, you can sometimes just hang up to 1,000 kilos on the towbar, the range is starting to look like something. The Opel Vivaro-e with a 75 kWh battery can easily reach 300 kilometers.
For many small players in the market, that’s enough – if they can afford it. Still, I can imagine that parcel deliverers or installers, the guys who really have to make progress, will not start doing it despite a subsidy bonus and the attractive Total Cost of Ownership. Three hundred listens too closely, the risk of incidents is too great. One defective charging station, one remote rush job can be the last straw. In many villages it is difficult to charge fast, and you do not queue at Fastned. Time is money.
Then hydrogen. Refueling is a piece of cake. I filled up the new Toyota Mirai at Shell station Den Ruygen Hoek along the A4 within five minutes. You want that. But yes, find a hydrogen station. This is possible for the public in five places in the Netherlands and you will not find them in the far north yet. With the Mirai it was quite a nervous situation. As a Groninger, I don’t get any wiser from Rhoon, Arnhem and Amsterdam. The Holthausen Energy Point Westpoort in Groningen and the green hydrogen pump of the ‘multifuel filling station’ Green Planet along the A28 at the Drentse Pesse are not yet operational. That is not very helpful, while in this country you can now buy two excellent hydrogen cars for not even insane amounts. Then everyone can start nitpicking about costs, returns and ecological footprint of hydrogen extraction; it can be done clean, you drive emission-free and the friendly manners make it a godsend for professional transport.
How hard can it be? Give me a nationwide fuel network of between twenty and fifty stations and I can drive Mirai, or an Opel Vivaro-e Hydrogen. As a van driver, I would not hesitate if I had to choose between the electric Vivaro or the hydrogen variant. The fuel cell model comes a hundred kilometers further with exactly the same cargo space and an even slightly higher payload. For the last fifty unforeseen kilometers, it is an old-fashioned plug-in too.
What do we Dutch do then? Waiting for Shell to cross the bridge and for the government to open massive subsidy taps. You don’t have to do that as an entrepreneur. At the company Resato in Assen, as a fleet owner, you can buy a filling point for your own fleet for about 200,000 euros, the H2 Refuel Fleet Owner Station. That is slower, but in your own yard. A sustainable installation company in Drenthe bought a fleet of hydrogen Hyundais plus such an installation. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. The real revolutions come from below and never from above. Nobody has to wait for Shell. Shell does not want revolutions. Shell wants control.
I think hydrogen is far from dead.