Thanks to podcast partner Stu Turley for this low-hanging fruit absurdity of the day.
Alex Kimani has a really good piece at Oilprice.com today detailing the decision by city leaders in San Bernardino, CA to fund an enormously costly hydrogen-powered commuter train called “Zemu.”
As Kimani describes it, “Dubbed Zemu for Zero-Emission Multiple Unit, the $20 million train uses a hybrid hydrogen fuel cell and battery system to power the lightweight vehicle capable of ferrying 108-seated passengers on a 9-mile line known as the Arrow Corridor. San Bernardino is notorious for its poor air quality thanks to a high concentration of freeways, rail yards and industrial facilities.”
The pretense used by the virtue-signaling honchos who run the city is its recent failure to pass the American Lung Association’s 2024 State of the Air Index, which is a really good reason to fund a fabulous boondoggle in the eyes of far too many elected officials in America these days. Hilariously, Kimani writes, “Zemu is likely to appeal to riders not only for its green credentials but also because it’s going to run quieter than conventional passenger trains.”
Really? Do we really believe that the handful of people who might pay to ride this thing will do so out of a sense of environmental altruism? Ok, it’s California, so maybe 5-10% of them will have that motive. But the experience in most every U.S. city that has built light rail is that people ride these things mainly because they have no other viable alternative.
So, how is a hydrogen train even viable in San Bernardino given the massive infrastructure and transport challenges hydrogen presents? The answer is simple: It isn’t viable on any sort of scale, which is why it is being targeted to be used on a single 9-mile line.
Kimani goes into great detail about how cost prohibitive hydrogen train tech really is when you’re talking about bringing it to scale. This excerpt tells that story:
As is often the case, high costs are likely to be the biggest barrier to the rapid adoption of hydrogen technology in the U.S. transport sector and other sectors, too. Last month, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) reported that just 12% of hydrogen plants have customers with offtake agreements, with most being vague, nonbinding arrangements that can be quietly discarded if the potential buyers back out. The big problem here is that many industries that could potentially run on hydrogen require expensive retooling to make this a reality, a leap that most are unwilling to make. Indeed, it’s prohibitively expensive to retrofit freight lines in the U.S.
“You’ve got to be selling at least hundreds [of trains] to start to get some scale economies and bring those costs down,” said Lewis Fulton, the Energy Futures Program director at UC Davis’s Institute for Transportation Studies. [Emphasis added]
[End]
This is a virtue signaling boondoggle, plain and simple. But hey, it’s California, so what else would we expect?
That is all.
Maybe they can run it on the bullet train tracks 🤣
"Zemu " - sounds like a woke DEI Disney movie