Hydrogen funding expands horizons for H2Accelerate

Daimler Trucks, Volvo Group and Iveco’s H2Accelerate hydrogen collaboration has been confirmed funding for eight heavy-duty hydrogen filling stations from the Connecting Europe Facility, and a fleet of 150 hydrogen fuel-cell trucks funded by the Clean Hydrogen Partnership.

The projects will enable trucks and refuelling equipment to be tested under real-world condi­tions, and are expected to be a crucial step towards the mass commercialisation of the technol­ogy.

The H2Accelerate Trucks pro­ject will fund the deployment of 150 fuel cell trucks across Europe by the mid-to-late 2020s, allowing 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 ranges of at least 600km.

The funding granted by the Clean Hydrogen Partnership of €30 million will enable the coordinated roll-out of heavy-duty, zero-emission vehicles fuelled by green hydrogen, bringing zero emission targets for transport closer.

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.

Meanwhile, the H2Accelerate Inaugural Station Deployment (ISD) project will see eight hy­drogen refuelling stations open in France and the Netherlands. Each station will have 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 Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) corridors, allowing easy access for trucks on major highways.

The project 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 future. The stations will service the growing fleet of hydrogen fuelled heavy-duty vehi­cles, including those deployed by the H2Accelerate Trucks project.