In an exclusive interview with Global Mass Transit, Oliver Walter, Consulting Senior Associate, ERM, discusses the deployment of hydrogen fuel cell buses in Europe, drawing on the experience and lessons learned from the JIVE and JIVE 2 projects — the continent’s largest fuel cell bus deployment initiatives. He highlights the major challenges affecting large-scale hydrogen bus adoption, including supply chain disruptions, hydrogen price volatility, infrastructure reliability, and the evolving maturity of the hydrogen mobility ecosystem.
Walter also shares key technical and commercial insights from the JIVE programmes, including improvements in fuel efficiency, vehicle availability, operational range, and reductions in procurement costs. The interview further explores the role of public funding, joint procurement strategies, and hydrogen production support in accelerating adoption, while outlining expectations for Europe’s hydrogen bus ecosystem by 2030, where fuel cell and battery electric buses are expected to complement each other across different operational requirements. Excerpts…
- What are the biggest challenges in deploying hydrogen buses at scale?
There were six key challenges to the deployed of the JIVE projects’ fuel cell buses:
- COVID: the pandemic significantly disrupted procurement, manufacturing, delivery, and the execution of public transport operations.
- Data availability and delivery: delays and gaps in delivered data limited the scope and speed of analysis.
- Fuel cell degradation: some sites experienced lower fuel cell performance when FCBs were operating outside of their design specifications, highlighting the need for monitoring, maintenance strategies, and collaboration with OEMs to improve long-term durability.
- Hydrogen sector & bankruptcies: in recent years, the hydrogen mobility sector has experienced market turbulence over the course of the project, including bankruptcies of key suppliers (e.g. bus OEMs).
- Hydrogen prices: Elevated hydrogen prices, partly driven by the electricity price crisis in 2022 and 2023, had a significant impact on operations at several sites.
- Hydrogen refueling station (HRS) and fuel cell bus (FCB) availability: Lack of station redundancy led to HRS operations being highly vulnerable to technical issues and in turn to downtime. Long waiting times for spare bus parts and maintenance services impacted FCB availability.
- Key takeaways from the JIVE and JIVE 2 projects?
The JIVE and JIVE 2 projects have deployed 290 fuel cell buses across 16 sites in 7 countries from 2017 to 2025. These projects represent the flagship deployment project of FCBs in Europe and generated significant technical and economic learnings. As of the end of March 2025, the buses travelled >24.5 million kilometers.
On the technical side, the buses performance was substantially improved compared to previous projects. The vehicles’ fuel efficiency ranged between 6.3 and 9 kg/100km, well under the projects’ target of 9 kg/100km. Bus availability also improved compared to previous projects, with an average availability of approximately 90%. The causes of vehicle downtime were typically not caused by the hydrogen drivetrain, which was an important validation of the fuel cell technology. Significant improvements in range were also realized, alongside the participation of several vehicle OEMs.
One of the projects’ core goals was to realize cost reduction targets in the base price of the fuel cell buses. This was successfully achieved, with the JIVE project buses being purchased at or below €650,000, and the JIVE 2 buses purchased at or below €625,000. This was an important step towards the commercialization of fuel cell buses.
The JIVE projects organized four hydrogen bus roadshows across Central, Eastern, Southern, and Northern Europe to increase the uptake of fuel cell buses in European countries not included in the project. Over 7,800 km was travelled by a fuel cell bus and 100% of the cities visited announced a formal interest in deploying fuel cell buses, with many moving towards demonstration and deployment since. These initiatives have been effective in bringing the JIVE projects’ learnings to a new audience and expanding the understanding of fuel cell buses.
- Are the current funding mechanisms enough to scale hydrogen mobility?
The JIVE projects have made significant inroads towards the commercialization of fuel cell buses. One of the project’s key takeaways has been the need for continued public funding to support larger deployments and kickstart a self-sustaining supply of cost-effective green hydrogen and affordable fuel cell buses. At the same time, the projects have shown the importance of developing innovative approaches to procurement. The JIVE projects also sought to investigate joint procurements as a way of reducing costs through economies of scale, which has been identified as an important component of the sector’s future development. While the procurement of vehicles and infrastructure is important, it also became apparent that public funding needs to support hydrogen production to ensure there is sufficient, and affordable, green hydrogen available for PTOs/PTAs considering fuel cell buses.
- What does Europe’s hydrogen bus ecosystem look like by 2030?
The experience in the JIVE projects suggests a few potential qualities of the European hydrogen bus ecosystem by 2030. It is evident that the bus fleet of the future will be a combination of electric and fuel cell platforms. Fuel cell buses are well positioned to operate on battery electric challenging routes that are characterized by long duty cycles, limited opportunities for mid-day charging, and depots that cannot support large-scale battery electric bus charging infrastructure. By 2030, it can be expected that there will be regional pockets of strong uptake, heavily influenced by local electricity prices, grid capacity, and policy choices. The experience of the JIVE deployment partners suggests that the focus will be on developing hydrogen infrastructure to support the eventual large-scale deployment of fuel cell buses. This was a key takeaway from the project and has been recognized across the sector as a key priority.
