Written evidence submitted by Riversimple Movement Ltd. (EVP0132)

 

Evidence submitted by Hugo Spowers, representing Riversimple Movement Ltd.

 

Introduction to Riversimple:

I am submitting evidence to this inquiry on behalf of Riversimple.  We have been developing Hydrogen Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (FCEVs) for 20 years.  I am an ex-motorsport engineer and I changed career for environmental reasons.  I set up Riversimple as a sustainable car company rather than a hydrogen car company but I concluded that nothing else can be as efficient as an FCEV for the sort of range to which we have become accustomed.  We are currently in low volume production building a fleet of 20 cars for a trial in Monmouthshire, with support from OZEV under the Hydrogen Transport Programme.  We have installed a hydrogen refuelling station in Abergavenny and the trial will start as soon as Covid restrictions allow.  The 2 seat Riversimple Rasa has a range of 300 miles, does 0-60mph in 9.5 seconds and has energy consumption equivalent to 250mpg.

 

Reason for submitting evidence:

I am submitting evidence because, although I now have a commercial interest in the appropriate use of hydrogen, I have come to this through a focus on sustainability.  I wish to suggest smart strategies for transitioning to a sustainable energy and transport system, and the role of hydrogen within it, from our current starting point.

 

Summary of key messages

 

 

 

 

 

 

Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) and hydrogen Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (FCEVs):

Both need to be encouraged by government to meet the 2030 target

 

1.              The transition to zero carbon cars by 2030 is without doubt feasible if we pursue both technologies in parallel.  We need both BEVs and FCEVs, different solutions for different applications.  They are complementary and we can decarbonise the transport sector more quickly with both.  We don't argue about whether solar PV or wind turbines will 'win' the renewable energy race; they're different and we need them both.  The same is true of BEVs and FCEVs.

 

2.              The criteria for making the choice between BEVs and FCEVs are range and utilisation.  Note that size is not one of the criteria for choosing between batteries and hydrogen; the same criteria apply irrespective of size, from HGVs to forklifts – which is why hydrogen forklifts are the first sector in which hydrogen fuel cells are commercially established.

 

3.              FCEVs are better suited than BEVs to three challenges that we face; a) longer range applications, b) vehicles with high utilisation and c) vehicles that carry heavy payloads. 

 

a) Range:

4.              BEVs are very efficient for short range applications but the efficiency of a vehicle also depends heavily on weight.  Batteries are heavy and so, as the range for which a BEV is designed increases, it rapidly becomes very heavy and the efficiency collapses; every additional battery adds less range than the previous one.  This is the principal reason why the likes of Toyota have been very consistent for over 20 years that FCEVs are the answer for cars with the sort of range to which we have become accustomed.

 

5.              This point is often obscured by the Pareto principle for cars that 80% of journeys are of less than 20 miles; this is used to argue that a short range is enough for most people.  The corollary of this is that 80% of the miles are driven in the other 20% of journeys so 20% of journeys account for 80% of the problem.

 

b) Utilisation:

6.              The problem with vehicles with high utilisation is downtime required to recharge the vehicle.  A standard petrol pump transfers energy at 20MW into a petrol tank; this is over 150 times as fast as even a Tesla Supercharger.  Cars could be charged with higher power chargers but the capital costs go up, the spikes on the grid get more severe, the safety risks increase, the efficiency falls and the battery life suffers; it is simply a brute force approach to the problem and we need a bit of Aikido thinking if we are to build resilient solutions.

 

c) Payloads:

7.              As discussed above, batteries are heavy and more batteries are needed the heavier the vehicle.  HGVs are an extreme example of inappropriate use of batteries because not only are so many batteries required but they also compete with the payload.

 

HGVs

 

8.              The 10 Point Plan highlights the need for hydrogen for HGVs; this is certainly the case but it has nothing to do with their size.

 

9.              As in Point 2 above, the choice of batteries or hydrogen fuel cells is dictated by range and utilisation and this applies for any size or weight.  It would be easy to build a battery HGV with a 50 mile range but for the range required in long haul transport, and the utilisation, the weight of batteries and the recharge time can never match the performance of hydrogen, or the cost.

 

10.              Furthermore, HGVs are generally long haul vehicles and so need a nationwide network of refuellers in order to create a market – a significant investment with a long payback – so they are not a realistic starting point for an infrastructure strategy.

 

The infrastructure transition

 

11.              Transport is the primary early market opportunity for hydrogen as transport fuels can support a premium over grid energy and it can be introduced incrementally at low risk by focussing on local vehicles.  A focus on local vehicles resolves the oft-cited 'chicken and egg' problem of hydrogen infrastructure for transport – who is going to invest in infrastructure before the cars are on the road and vice versa.

 

12.              The critical scale of infrastructure to create a commercial market for intercity, motorway vehicles in the UK is of the order of 300 refuelling stations – a nationwide network and a significant speculative investment that will take years to break even.

 

13.              On the other hand, the critical scale of infrastructure to create a commercial market for local vehicles – local cars, buses, last mile delivery vans etc. – comes down from 300 filling stations to just one; if 100 vehicles are deployed in that city, rather than spread around the country, the filling station has 100 captive customers straight away and quickly breaks even.

 

14.              The refuelling network can be expanded one filling station at a time; each station is a commercially viable investment and this allows the development of a nationwide network without ever taking a nationwide gamble.

 

15.              Green hydrogen has to be the endgame but FCEVs and the sources of green hydrogen can and should be developed independently.  Mandating the use of green hydrogen only would be a sub-optimal deployment of our growing renewable energy resources, as these should be allocated to displacement of as much carbon as possible as quickly as possible; forcing green hydrogen and FCEVs to evolve in lockstep would hobble them both.

 

16.              Over 60M tonnes of hydrogen are produced globally each year, c.85% from natural gas.  This process is 50% more efficient than electricity from natural gas.  Therefore, until we have successfully decarbonised our grid, prioritising the grid for any green electricity and using grey hydrogen in highly efficient FCEVs will displace more carbon than using the electricity to generate green hydrogen.

 

17.              The infrastructure challenge for BEVs is greater than for FCEVs, although this is not widely appreciated.  Although charging for BEVs at small scale is more cost effective than hydrogen refuelling, as the penetration of vehicles increases, this situation reverses.  A hydrogen pump can support hundreds of cars, like a petrol pump, whereas a charger can only support a handful.  A Jülich University study recently concluded that at 1 million cars hydrogen refuelling was more cost effective; the UK car parc is over 30 million cars.

 

18.              As an example of the costs at scale, if the 20 pumps in a modest motorway services were to be replaced by Tesla superchargers to support the same throughput of cars, 120 chargers would be required as, generously, it takes 6 times as long to charge.  Each supercharger is 120kW so a 14.4MW substation would be required for that one site.  This is equivalent to the average consumption of 32,000 homes in the UK and, even if power lines were on hand, this is a significant investment.

 

The importance of energy efficiency and whole system thinking

 

19.              To achieve Net Zero as quickly and cheaply as possible, we must prioritise energy efficiency in all sectors.  As with money, sustainability means living off revenue rather than capital, and renewables are a revenue stream in contrast to capital resources such as oil.  We can draw down capital at any rate we like but it won't last very long; the rate at which we draw revenue down is limited – but it lasts indefinitely.

 

20.              Whilst we clearly need to focus on increasing our renewable generating capacity, efficiency reduces demand more quickly and cheaply, reduces the requirement for renewable capacity and accelerates progress to Net Zero.

 

21.              Nothing can match the energy efficiency of an FCEV for the sort of range to which we have become accustomed.  There is an oft-cited argument that the powertrain efficiency of an FCEV can never match that of a BEV, which is true, but it is not well correlated with vehicle efficiency.  The powertrain efficiency measures the proportion of the energy put into the car that gets to the wheels (see Point 22), but not how much energy is needed at the wheels, which also depends on weight.  A high efficiency powertrain in a heavy vehicle will still be an inefficient vehicle.

 

22.              The Bossel diagram, Fig.1, is highly misleading in that it doesn't start at the beginning – electricity is no more an energy source than hydrogen – and it stops before the end of the story – it assumes that all vehicles are the same weight and require the same power at the wheels.  In Fig.2, the diagram has been extended to cover these points and the results are significantly different.

 



Figure 1: Useful transport energy derived from renewable electricity from Ulf Bossel.  (Does a Hydrogen economy make sense? IEEE 2006)

 

Figure 2: Bossel diagram expanded to show relative mileages achieved from same energy input

 

23.              We face multiple environmental and social issues beyond carbon emissions – resource depletion, bio-accumulation of toxic waste, biodiversity loss, energy security – and we cannot pick each problem off independently; we need a whole system approach to solving the gamut of problems.  We cannot address challenges facing the transport sector independently of the energy sector.

 

24.              A single solution, a silver bullet, is always a temptation but channelling all energy through the electricity vector will be much less efficient than an integrated energy system based on electricity and hydrogen; it will require more renewable capacity, more capital investment and more despoiling of the environment.  We can achieve much greater economic utility from a given renewable energy capacity with these 2 energy vectors.  It also allows us to collaborate globally on all our energy and transport technology and infrastructure, whilst every region can use their local mix of renewable energy sources; those sources are spread much more evenly around the planet than oil.

 

Other challenges for BEVs

 

25.              Unlike BEVs, FCEVs demand no behaviour change, as they refuel in a similar time to a combustion-engined vehicle and have a similar range.

 

26.              It should be noted also that 38% of UK households have no access to overnight charging at home; FCEVs offer an alternative to those households.

 

27.              As highlighted in a report to the Climate Change Committee from a consortium of institutions led by the Natural History Museum, meeting the challenge of vehicle electrification with Battery Electric Vehicles alone in the UK requires an unrealistic quantity of finite natural resources.  For 31.5 million vehicles, they calculated that we would need twice the annual global production of Cobalt, a year's production of Neodymium, 75% of a year's production of Lithium and half the annual production of Copper.

 

28.              This is for 31.5 million vehicles; there are 1 billion vehicles on the planet, and growing so, at the very least, to pursue this strategy would pose a huge economic risk to the UK.  Climate Change is a global issue so we need solutions that can scale globally and it is clear that we cannot support the global car parc with batteries as the primary solution; a blended solution will cost less, is achievable more rapidly, will require less natural resources and will consume less energy in operation.

 

Road pricing

 

29.              Transport has significant environmental impacts and demands enormous national infrastructural investment so it is appropriate that it generates significant annual income.  Energy consumption is the best proxy for environmental impact and the degradation of roads, as these are all correlated with weight, so tax on fuel is appropriate, but it is impractical with a shift to electricity and hydrogen.

 

30.              Road pricing is the next best proxy but, due to the correlation mentioned above, it must be pro rata to vehicle mass.  As cars can vary in mass by a factor of 4 or more, it must be more granular than classification as car, van or truck.

 

31.              Road pricing has never been popular but it has previously been an additional tax burden; if it replaces fuel duty and is revenue neutral, a politically acceptable case should be possible.

 

 

Potential value to UK economy

 

32.              FCEVs are much less mature than BEVs and offer more opportunity for innovation, which plays to UK strengths; the UK has the strongest community of automotive technology and motorsport companies in the world.  The real opportunity is to build a different sort of car, with a different pattern of relationships, that makes the most of fuel cell technology and hydrogen's characteristics.  The innovation is at the system level and that is where the UK excels, as evidenced in the UK's dominance of motorsport.

 

33.              As the FCEV industry is immature, there are also significant opportunities to establish an early position in an emerging global supply chain.

 

34.              FCEV manufacturing will also retain more value in the UK economy than BEVs.  A significant proportion of BEV cost is in the battery and 70% of that cost is in the raw materials.

 

35.              Although there is an incentive to manufacture batteries in the UK to increase local content of vehicles, investments already made in battery manufacturing, in China especially, mean that there is no prospect of the UK achieving a competitive position globally.  Battery manufacturing is also an extremely highly automated production process and creates very few jobs.  As demand for commodities goes up, the price goes up, not down, and the likelihood is that battery cost is shortly going to start climbing rather than reducing.  China also controls a significant proportion of those commodity materials.

 

36.              As Baroness Brown recently stated, "The UK missed the boat on wind technology and missed the boat on batteries. We can’t afford to miss the boat on hydrogen.”

 

UK Government approach

 

37.              The UK Government has only cited HGVs as suitable for hydrogen.  As companies like Toyota and Hyundai have consistently suggested (and we ignore their conclusions at our peril), hydrogen has a much wider role to play and this wider role will have compounding benefits.  In particular, infrastructure development will be very challenging if HGVs are to be the target entry point.

 

38.              The government's stance on technology neutrality is not borne out in funding.  The Faraday Battery Challenge alone provides over 10x the funding support to BEVs compared to funding for HFCVs under the Hydrogen Transport Programme (HTP).  Even then, HTP is for the deployment of vehicles rather than for their development and so most of those funds have been used to subsidise the purchase of FCEVs from Japan and Korea rather than supporting technology R&D in the UK.

 

39.              The fuel cell was invented by Sir William Grove, in Swansea in 1839, so would it not be appropriate, and restore technology neutrality, to match the Faraday Challenge by launching a Grove Fuel Cell Challenge?

 

 

February 2021