Vehicle Technology and Aviation Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Steve Baker and Gareth Snell

Tuesday 14th March 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

Q Thank you, Chair. If the Government were to pick a winner at this stage, do we not run the risk of skewing future research and development investment by saying to developers, “The traditional battery is the route we are going down”? If hydrogen is 10 years away, we run the risk of it becoming further away because we are not putting the investment into it now to ensure that technology is comparable in the future.

Quentin Willson: That is a hard question to answer. If you look at the price of the Toyota Mirai, which is a hydrogen car, it is £60,000. Volume and economies of scale make it an enormously difficult task to get that to a consumer level of £15,000. I think the OEMs will find it very tough to find this fuel technology at a cheap enough price point to make it viable. In terms of commercial vehicles and buses, I think it has a greater resonance, but in terms of consumers, if I were sitting at the board table of BMW, Mercedes, Audi or VW, I would be looking at electrification rather than putting all my eggs on hydrogen.

[Mr Baker]

Q I think that you just hit on the nub of the matter. A board director has major capital investments to protect, which means that they are inclined to stay within trammels once a technology is established. That is very much the point that my hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire has been making: there is a danger that we could end up choosing the wrong technology because a whole system of incentives sets up people to stick with electric.

Quentin Willson: The brutal fact of the matter is that getting hydrogen from point A to point B requires pipework. You can have static hydrogen stations that manufacture it, but they will be the size of shipping containers. If you look down the road, creating infrastructure and points, keeping it cheap and making it not a by-product of refining chlorine are all barriers to entry that are much greater than for electrification, which is simple and understandable; it is a currency that we are familiar with now, and we have the electric network. These are the major barriers to hydrogen uptake.

Robert Evans: To follow up on that point, Innovate UK and the Advanced Propulsion Centre are funding research and development projects involving hydrogen fuel cells, and they have done so throughout the period of the low-carbon vehicle innovation platform. The Office for Low Emission Vehicles recently put forward funding for both hydrogen stations and vehicles in deployment.

I think the challenge at the moment is that you could put a very large amount of money on the table and say, “Here’s the money; will you bring the vehicles?”, but the supply of vehicles is very limited. Quantities are still small, as has been explained, and they are very expensive, so the car industry is not looking to flood the market with these vehicles. What we are doing in the UK is being ready for the time when the vehicles will come in larger volumes. We will have a receptive market, and we have infrastructure here in London. What London has done is really positive progress that is viewed as a beacon for how the rest of the UK could be ready to deploy hydrogen fuel cell vehicles when they are ready and cost-effective, and when the supply comes to the UK.