As day turned to night on December 13th FCEV owners in the Sacramento area found their already challenging fueling situation getting even worse. According to the California Air Resources Board (CARB) there are about 1,000 FCEV owners in the greater Sacramento area, and under the best of circumstances there are only three hydrogen stations where residents and people passing through the area can fill-up. The West Sacramento station is owned by Iwatani and the other two are owned by Shell.
Unfortunately, Shell has a track record of being unable to keep its stations online consistently, and December 2022 is no exception to that fact. Both of Shell’s stations have been offline for the majority of December thus far, and its station on Fair Oaks Blvd is expected to remain offline until the end of the month. (There is no note on the h2fcp.org website as of December 13th as to when the other Shell station may come back online.)
This has resulted in Iwatani’s station being the only station online to provide fuel to FCEV owners in the Sacramento area. Unfortunately, Iwatani’s station is not designed to handle the refueling needs of 1,000 FCEVs. Early in December Iwatani implemented a forced 10-minute delay between refuels, and today according to h2fcp.org the delay between refills has now increased to 15 minutes.
Even if it is assumed that only 50 FCEVs from the local area refuel on any given day with a 15-minute delay between refuels and assuming each refuel takes 5 minutes, then at most only three FCEVs can refuel per hour. How many people can afford to wait hours to refuel their vehicle? This does not even begin to factor in any FCEV owner who may have made the mistake of visiting the Sacramento area.
However, the worst part is not that a major metropolitan area could be reduced to only having one station to depend on for refueling, and the worst part is not even the hours a person has to wait in line in West Sacramento to get more fuel. The worst part of the deplorable conditions is the fact that nothing is going to be done to help FCEV owners in Sacramento and the surrounding communities. There is no new station scheduled to come online within the next 6-12 months to help Iwatani’s station, and Shell clearly feels no responsibility to admit its failures and work diligently to keep its stations online at least 95% of the time going forward.
While the situation is Sacramento is definitely grim with no hope in sight, FCEV owners have no real hope in the rest of California. True Zero’s station in Truckee California has only been online two days so far since the 2nd of December. Your correspondent has called True Zero multiple times regarding the situation with the Truckee station. First the calls start off with the True Zero representative acting like he or she has no idea of where Truckee or Lake Tahoe are. Then the person takes down your correspondent’s name and phone number for the purpose of having someone call back from True Zero who may have an idea of when the station may come back online. Unfortunately, True Zero is even less interested in calling people back than it is with keeping its Truckee station online. If a person wants to enjoy some world-class skiing at Northstar or another ski resort in the Truckee area, then a person better have access to a second vehicle. Otherwise, a person may get to Truckee and find out he or she will be there for far longer than a person may want to be.
Beyond the rather hopeless refueling situation in places like Sacramento or Truckee things are not much better in the rest of California. The state presently only has 56 refueling stations and on any given day at least 10 of those stations are offline, although it is not uncommon for that number to be closer to 20. Or to put it another way, according to CARB the daily availability of the stations in the second quarter of 2022 was 75% of the time. In other words, most people in California do not have access to reliable refueling. At worst, a person may live in a city like Truckee where the only pump goes offline for day or weeks at a time.
It is also worth noting that there is no master plan being executed to not only remedy the lack of reliable refueling but also correct other injustices, like the lack of refueling stations north of Sacramento. However bad today is tomorrow is not going to be better in the near future.
Yet, there are organizations, like the United States Hydrogen Alliance, that is eager to talk about spreading hydrogen across the United States. But how can hydrogen spread outside of California if it has been unable to be implemented thoughtfully and responsibly within California? How can the failures in California possibly provide a reasonable blueprint for successfully deploying hydrogen in the rest of the United States?
Ultimately, though, the current horrible refueling circumstances in places like Sacramento and Truckee are anything but surprising. California’s governors and legislature never felt the need to pass responsible legislation to ensure that station owners felt the need to ensure their stations are online at least 95% of the time, and of course no laws were passed that established a committee with the authority and task of responsibly deploying hydrogen refueling throughout the state. Instead governors and the legislature maintained a largely hands-off approach, which has resulted in insufficient reliable hydrogen production and a hydrogen refueling network that has only passing familiarity with the term reliable. And now the consequences of that inaction are making CARB’s ACC II rule seem like something tens of thousands of light years away instead of being within reach, meanwhile FCEV owners are left in the brutal cold by a careless government and a thoughtless hydrogen and fuel cell industry.
Jesse Lyon, Contributor
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