The Greater Lafayette Public Transportation Corporation (CityBus), the provider of bus transit services in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, contracted with the Center for Transportation and the Environment (CTE) to provide project management, technical advisory, deployment support, and performance validation services for its procurement of four 40’ New Flyer hydrogen fuel cell electric buses (FCEBs) and a hydrogen fueling station. CTE’s hiring followed a successful grant application to the Federal Transit Administration’s 2023 Low or No Emission (Low-No) grant program, which CTE supported. This deployment of FCEBs will be CityBus’s and Indiana’s first.
The project kicked off in November 2023. Initially, CTE’s focus was to assess the feasibility of 40’ New Flyer FCEBs completing CityBus’s blocks. After collecting and analyzing performance data of buses operating CityBus’s routes, CTE delivered its modeling results in March 2024. CTE estimated that CityBus can operate FCEBs on any of its blocks during nominal temperature conditions. However, during strenuous temperatures, 18% of CityBus’s blocks are not serviceable by FCEBs.
Concurrent to its feasibility analysis, CTE supported CityBus in working with a hydrogen infrastructure partner to site, scope, and assess the capabilities of a hydrogen station offered by the partner. Ultimately, after several months of effort, CityBus decided to instead pursue a competitive public solicitation for a hydrogen station to support the fueling needs of its future FCEB fleet.
Currently, CTE is supporting this modified hydrogen station procurement strategy by developing key inputs for a request for proposal document package, including its scope of work, technical requirements, and evaluation criteria. Additionally, CTE is developing comparative estimates of hydrogen fuel costs and usage across multiple station scenarios using a custom-built tool.
Over the next year, CTE will aid CityBus in executing its competitive procurement for a hydrogen station. Once CityBus’s hydrogen station and buses are deployed in Q1 2026, CTE will help to validate the performance of these critical assets.
