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NREL EVALUATION OF A TRANSIT BUSES

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has recently published a third report on its evaluation of fuel cell buses in service at AC Transit in Oakland, California. 

This report provides an update to the previous reports (Feb 2007 & Oct 2007) and includes results and experience through December 2007.  The evaluation covers three prototype fuel cell buses in comparison to six diesel baseline buses operating from the same bus depot.  During the data collection period (Apr 2006 - Dec 2007), AC Transit operated the fuel cell buses more than 62,000 miles with an overall fuel economy of 6.23 miles per kg, which equates to 7.04 miles per diesel equivalent gallon.  For comparison, AC Transit's diesel buses had a fuel economy of 4.2 mpg during the same timeframe.

To download the document, go to:  http://www.nrel.gov/hydrogen/pdfs/43545-1.pdf for the evaluation results and  http://www.nrel.gov/hydrogen/pdfs/43545-2.pdf for the Appendices.

NREL have also recently published a report on an evaluation of similar buses at Sunline Transit.  This report is referred to in another Global Hydrogen Bus Platform News Item