Largest ever European Hydrogen bus project launches in Germany

The Joint Initiative for Hydrogen Vehicles across Europe (JIVE) project has been launched in Germany to advance the commercialisation of hydrogen fuel cell buses

The project, co-financed by the FCH 2 JU under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 framework, aims to be the largest ever deployment of fuel cell buses in Europe and will introduce new fleets into urban bus operations on a large scale.

The launch of project JIVE took place on Wednesday in Cologne, Germany, in a joint event with EU project MERHLIN, supported by the Connecting Europe Facility programme (CEF), which will deploy seven hydrogen refuelling stations complementarily to the JIVE deployment of 144 buses.

Commenting on project JIVE, FCH JU  Executive Director Bart Biebuyck said: “This launch marks a significant turning point in the decarbonisation process of public transport. The FCH JU is proud of such far-reaching project seeing the daylight which aims at unlocking the economies of scale required for commercialisation.

“Fuel cell buses offer great advantages as they can cut emissions and noise pollution, while providing good quality public transport. Bringing these benefits directly to citizens’ day-to-day lives is one of the priorities of the FCH JU and JIVE clearly is a stepping stone in this process.“

JIVE will be coordinated by Element Energy and a partnership of public transport providers who will work together to procure the buses and refuelling stations from European suppliers.

Buses will be deployed in Cologne, Wuppertal and Rhein Mainz in Germany, London, Birmingham and Aberdeen in the United Kingdom, South Tyrol in Italy, Riga in Latvia and Slagelse in Denmark.