H2Accelerate secures €30M of funding for hydrogen trucks and refuelling stations
The H2Accelerate collaboration has today confirmed that its members have secured €30M funding for the deployment of eight heavy-duty hydrogen refuelling stations under the Connecting Europe Facility and a 150-fuel cell truck project funded by the Clean Hydrogen Partnership.
The project will be coordinated by SINTEF with of assistance of Shell, TotalEnergies, and Everfuel as a part of the H2Accelerate TRUCKS project which is a collaboration between leading global OEMs (Daimler Truck, Volvo Group, and Iveco Group), a Finnish research institution VTT, International Road Transport Union (IRU), Romanian National Union of Road Transporters (UNTRR), Italian (Federazione Italiana Autotrasportatori Professionali – FIAP), Austrian (WKÖ) associations, and Element Energy France (an ERM Group company).
This project will fund the deployment of 150 fuel cell trucks across Europe by the mid-to-late 2020s, allowing the development of the technology towards series manufacturing of the vehicles by the three major OEMs in the second half of the decade. The trucks to be deployed in the first stage are expected to be either 4×2 or 6×2, with up to 44-tonne capacity and long ranges of at least 600km.
The trucks will be deployed with trusted customers of the OEMs and tested in real-world conditions over several years in order to demonstrate and assess their technical and economic performance. Results from the project will be used to set the scene for large-scale fuel cell truck deployment in the coming years.
H2Accelerate Inaugural Station Deployment will support hydrogen trucks with a preliminary network of eight high-capacity, high-reliability hydrogen refuelling stations
Benefiting from the success of the H2Accelerate TRUCKS project is the H2Accelerate Inaugural Station Deployment (ISD) project. As announced in September, this project was successful in its bid to the Connecting Europe Facility Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Funding call for funding to support the deployment of eight hydrogen refuelling stations in France and the Netherlands.
Each station will have a higher capacity (>1 tonne/day) than any public stations currently in operation and aim for ultra-high levels of availability through the use of N+1 redundancy in station design (whereby key pieces of equipment are duplicated in station design to minimise downtime in the event that one component fails). Stations will be positioned along key TEN-T transport corridors, allowing easy access for truck end users driving on major highways.
The H2Accelerate ISD comes as the first in a series of planned deployments of hydrogen refuelling stations as part of Phase 1 of the H2Accelerate collaboration. H2Accelerate infrastructure members intend to complement this initial network with the further deployment of stations along strategic corridors between Scandinavia and Northern Italy in the future. The stations will service the growing fleet of hydrogen-fuelled heavy-duty vehicles, including those deployed by the H2Accelerate TRUCKS project.
