Entering a New Stage of Learning from the U.S. Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle Demonstration Project

The National Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle Learning Demonstration is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) project that started in 2004. The purpose of this project is to conduct an integrated field validation that simultaneously examines the performance of fuel cell vehicles and the supporting hydrogen infrastructure. The DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has now analyzed data from over five years of the seven-year project. During this time, over 144 fuel cell electric vehicles have been deployed, and 23 project refueling stations were placed in use. We have analyzed data from over 430,000 individual vehicle trips covering 2,500,000 miles traveled and over 130,000 kg hydrogen produced or dispensed. During 2010, two of the four project teams will be concluding their involvement in the project, and the other two are continuing. Thus we will be able to focus our analysis efforts on a smaller number of vehicles and stations and enter into a new stage of learning for this project. This will allow us to dig deeper into the data to provide additional technical value to the two remaining teams as they improve their systems’ technical performance in preparation for pre-commercial launch of larger fleets of vehicles in California and New York. It will also give us an opportunity to gather data and analyze performance of improved vehicles compared to those that have been previously demonstrated, since these vehicles are one step closer to commercially available customer vehicles.