SWARM

The SWARM project is establishing a large demonstration fleet of small passenger vehicles, at the same time building on and expanding existing European hydrogen refuelling infrastructure. Three regions will be participating in this effort: the British Midlands and Wales (Birmingham, Coventry, and Abergavenny), Brussels and the Wallonia region (Liège), and North Western Germany (Wilhelmshaven) and the Cologne area (Frechen). Each of these regions will deploy a new hydrogen refuelling site delivering 200 kg of hydrogen per day at 70 and 35MPa, built by Air Liquide.

The vehicles employed are low-cost, high fuel-efficiency, hybridised, light-weight passenger cars specifically designed for city and regional transport. These vehicles provide a complementary pathway to commercialisation to the large Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) of hydrogen fuel cell options, by allowing near-term rollout to a wider range of users – in parallel with the planned rollouts for large OEM vehicles from 2017. Their deployment regions will gain the infrastructure, public exposure and technological understanding to act as seed locations for future larger scale vehicle rollout.

In view of the lower vehicle costs, this project will deploy an unprecedented number of road vehicles for a demonstration project, with the two OEMs, Riversimple and MicroCab, and Jade-Hochschule (University) contributing 20, 12 and 2 vehicles, respectively, to the project. These will be built during the project alongside the implementation of the hydrogen supply infrastructure. Europe-wide certification will be sought for the first two vehicles to allow their employment throughout Europe, thus increasing the commercial possibilities of continuing the project without further funding. The equipment will be continuously monitored and improved throughout the demonstration phase and data provided to the central data repository and monitoring of the FCH 2 JU.

The project will develop new hydrogen sites and will subsequently work on attracting further vehicles to the new refuelling infrastructure clusters through an organised industry reach-out activity, by offering cost effective and readily available focal points for additional hydrogen fleets developing around these regions – timed to coincide with OEMs pre-commercial rollouts in the post-2018 period.