California’s Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) has signed off a $78m plan to buy 50 zero emissions buses, 40 of which will be powered by hydrogen fuel cells and the remainder powered solely by batteries.
The 40 hydrogen fuel cell buses from Canadian manufacturer New Flyer will cost OCTA $63.3m — around $1.6m per bus — while the remaining ten battery-electric models will cost $13.9m, or $1.4m per vehicle.
Both sets of buses, which are due to enter into service in late 2026, will be used to replace existing vehicles powered by compressed natural gas, which are coming to the end of their lifetimes.
This will allow OCTA to comply with Californian regulations demanding that at least 50% of new vehicle purchases by 2026 are powered by zero-emissions technology — a figure that will rise to 100% by 2029.
By 2040, all vehicles owned by public transit authorities in California, both existing and new, must be zero emissions.
The decision to lean so heavily into hydrogen fuel cell technology comes after OCTA conducted trials of ten each of H2-powered and battery-powered models in 2020 and 2022 respectively.
The ten hydrogen buses tested as part of the trial are still in service, meaning that Orange County will have 50 hydrogen buses on the roads when the new models enter operation, while OCTA’s Santa Ana bus depot, where the vehicles are housed, also hosts the US’s largest hydrogen refuelling station.
However, OCTA has not made public the results of the trials, nor revealed its reasoning for buying four times the number of H2 buses as battery-electric models. The organisation had not responded to queries from Hydrogen Insight at the time of publication.
Funding for the buses has been provided by the Federal Transit Administration and from California Climate Investments, which is in turn funded by proceeds from the state’s cap-and-trade carbon programme.
Orange County — which includes parts of Greater Los Angeles such as Anaheim, the home of Disneyland and Huntington Beach (aka Surf City USA) — is just the latest county-level transportation body to opt for hydrogen buses.
Last month, the public transit authority in San Mateo placed the largest ever firm order for hydrogen-powered buses in North America, with a deal for 108 of New Flyer’s Xcelsior Charge FC vehicles.
That organisation agreed a deal with New Flyer worth $168.25m for the buses, implying a cost of around $1.6m per vehicle.
And Santa Cruz Metro said in October last year that it had signed off $87.4m (around $1.5m per bus) to buy 57 hydrogen fuel-cell buses.
