Does switching to hydrogen mean completely renewing your fleet? No! Retrofitting is the answer. Vincent Lallemand, Business Development Director at GCK Mobility (Green Corp Konnection) and expert in the retrofit of heavy vehicles explains the solutions available to you.
Vincent Lallemand: A retrofit is when you convert the drive train of a combustion engine vehicle to electric. In other words, you install an electric engine (in place of a combustion one), which is then powered, either by electric batteries of by batteries and a fuel cell. So you have either, on the one hand, a 100% electric vehicle, or, on the other, a “hydrogen vehicle” (which is really an electric vehicle powered by hydrogen).
Yes. From light duty vehicles and cars to heavy vehicles, we even recently had a snowplough approved! If it’s a vehicle we’ve done before, the project can be done very quickly. If it’s a new product, we create a prototype (with no need for the manufacturer’s approval since 2020). Once the prototype has been produced, it must then receive European approval. We submit a request to the CNRV which carries out normative tests and issues approval to the manufacturer – that’s us in this case – for a type of vehicle, with a type approval number. We can then roll-out the retrofitting of this type of vehicle for all our clients.
There are several rules:
In other countries, retrofit is in fact allowed on new vehicles.
The decision to retrofit a fleet is naturally guided by the objective of reducing CO2 emissions, which the electric engine allows. The choice of power supply is guided by the operational constraints of the carrier or mobility operator. The fuel cell gives vehicles greater autonomy and offers a much shorter charging time. For example, for a truck, 10 kg of hydrogen will allow it to travel 100 km and thus provide 150 kWh of electrical energy, which is equivalent to 1 tonne of electric batteries! In terms of charging time, again for a truck, refuelling with 40 kg of hydrogen will take around 30 minutes, whereas electric recharging would take over five hours.
In the short term, we are seeing a real interest in converting fleets of coaches, utility vehicles, refuse collection vehicles, concrete mixers, tractors, etc. The establishment of LEZs (low emission zones) will have a major impact on the carriers that have to access them and they need to start decarbonising their fleets now!
