UITP International Union of Public Transport : JIVE 2 - shifting to a commercial FC bus market

Fuel cell buses are one of the few available zero emission transport solutions. This technology has emerged in recent years and has been gaining interest since then, mainly due to short refuelling times and long ranges of the vehicles.

Fuel cell buses can therefore replace diesel buses without a need to compromise operations, productivity or quality of service. However, because of high upfront costs and hydrogen prices that have been blocking the large-scale deployment, the hydrogen bus market still remains underdeveloped.

The underlying objective of the JIVE 2 project is to support the transition of fuel cell buses from technically proven but high cost demonstrators, to a more mainstream choice for public transport authorities and operators across Europe.

JIVE 2 builds on the activities of existing initiatives, in particular the closely-related JIVEproject that started one year earlier, with an additional focus on preparing the market for wider scale roll-out from 2020. This will involve addressing several outstanding challenges for the sector, such as reducing vehicle ownership costs, increasing choice of hydrogen fuel cell bus models, or proving the feasibility of operating large fleets of fuel cell buses.

JIVE 2, coordinated by Element Energy and co-funded by FCH JU, is the next phase in this transition to a commercial hydrogen fuel cell bus market and will involve the deployment of 152 fuel cell buses in seven countries across Europe. Together with vehicles delivered via other projects, this timely initiative will see nearly 400 fuel cell buses introduced to European cities by the early 2020s.

UITP actively participates in the project and convenes an unbiased User Group composed of its members to review the methodology and emerging results from the data collection process. Additionally, UITP will organise a series of workshops to study different aspects of this technology more in depth.