Ballard is King Ballard has a long record of having its PEM fuel cell technology and products integrated into FCEVs to provide zero-emission motive power for vehicle propulsion. This includes in excess of 570 fuel cell electric buses (FCEBs) and 2,000 commercial trucks currently deployed in Asia, Europe and North America. Some of the FCEBs that have been operating for over eight years in the field have now exceeded 35,000 hours of revenue service with no major fuel cell maintenance requirements.Ballard's unmatched field experience -- through eight generations of fuel cell power module and a wide range of duty cycles, climate and road conditions -- has enabled an effective feedback loop for our product design and development efforts, resulting in the fuel cell industry's highest performance products designed for heavy- and medium-duty motive applications, including bus, commercial truck, train and marine."Ballard products have been deployed in the field are strongly aligned with use cases examined in the Hydrogen Council's "Path to Hydrogen Competitiveness: A Cost Perspective" report and the Deloitte China-Ballard.
Despite the fact that China is home to some of the world’s largest manufacturers of batteries for electric vehicles, and also has the largest populations of battery electric vehicles in the world, China has decided to phase out government subsidies for battery electric vehicles and to introduce large subsidies for vehicles that are electrified with fuel cells. Since the end of last June when the subsidies were scrapped, the demand for electric vehicles in China has dropped substantially. According to the China Association of Automobile Manufactures, domestic sales of battery electric vehicles dropped by 80,000 in last July. According to the news site 24/7 Wall Street, lower Chinese sales was the main reason for why the month of July marked the first drop in global sales of electric vehicles since 2008.“China has tried to electrify its automotive fleet with Lithium-ion battery technology but has concluded that it is not a viable option in a country where a large part of the population lives in apartment buildings in mega-cities ,In addition to the problem of how to build enough charging stations, the Chinese have come to realize that industrial grid capacities is a bottle neck when the total proportion of battery electric vehicles becomes too high. This is a development that the West and world will experience as well and that makes hydrogen and fuel cells the only long-term viable alternative for the needed electrification of the automotive future sector.