Opening of the International Fuel Cell Bus Workshop
The automobile is only a transitory phenomenon I firmly believe in the horse, Kaiser Wilhelm the Second is said to have remarked. A fallacy that shows, among other things, that fundamental issues of the future should be analyzed, evaluated and decided on the basis of reliable data.
Mr. Inger,
Mr. Colvenaer,
Mr. Achtelik,
Mr. Tuschen,
Dr. Bonhoff,
Ladies and gentlemen,
On behalf of the Senate I welcome you most warmly to Hamburg for this international workshop on fuel cell buses.
Im very pleased you have chosen our city as the venue for your conference on the fundamental questions of future mobility. Hamburg is exactly the right place for it. Because scarcely any other metropolitan region is working, as we are, on a holistic plan for the energy turnaround in which transport plays a significant role.
Besides energy generation with alternative technologies we are giving special support to applying new storage technologies like hydrogen to climate-friendly means of transport. And on the way to emission-free mobility we need technical innovations that we hope to implement across the board in the near future. That will also strengthen Hamburgs future position as a business location.
So we regard your conference here in Hamburg as an acknowledgement of our commitment in the context of international cooperation and also as an encouragement to intensify our efforts together with you as our partners from other cities and regions that are seeking, like us, to introduce climate-friendly transportation. We hope todays workshop will take us a step forward towards our goal of making fuel cell buses suitable for general use by the end of this decade, with the economy necessary for regular service.
There are three aspects I consider most important:
The big, expanding cities need an attractive, climate-friendly public transport system for a growing number of residents who are willing to leave their cars in the garage.
That is why Hamburg is investing in innovative technologies and a sustainable infrastructure for clean buses.
And not least: the regions that are playing an active, pioneering role in environmental protection, the European Commission, the individual states and industry must all pull together.
Lets take the first point: the metropolitan regions are expanding all over the world. At the same time their populations are becoming more and more mobile. At present the emphasis is still on private cars, running on fossil fuels. Here we need a switch to public transport, the bicycle, and of course environmentally sound automobiles. Besides electromobility we are also advocating intelligent, intermodal offers, including car sharing.
Like many other metropolitan regions, Hamburg faces the challenge of finding suitable, sustainable solutions for its increasing commercial traffic. In this connection, too, we intend to free the air of our city and at the same time the global climate of emissions from fossil fuels.
The people of our city have a right to a clean and quiet environment. And a healthy urban climate is more and more becoming a relevant factor for the choice of a location. Because good quality of life is one of the aspects that will decide whether we will be able to attract enough qualified employees from Germany and abroad for our expanding economy.
That is why we have geared our policy to a future in which the function of the automobile and its drive systems and uses will change.
Our aim is to develop an intelligent public transport system that dovetails perfectly with other forms of mobility. In some cases we shall even have to re-invent public transport and make it more attractive in the long term. Hamburg as the proverbial gateway to the world, connected up by road and rail, by waterways and air routes, intends to play a pioneering role and that is because, as a hub of trade, we are dependent on efficient transport systems for goods and services.
For our population the important thing is for the transfer from trains to buses, to hired bicycles or their own e-bikes, to a car sharing offer or an electrically powered car, to function smoothly throughout the region. Whatever the destination, we want to have systems that are less and less dependent on fossil fuels and complement each other ideally according to needs and the reason for the journey.
Many of the worlds major metropolitan regions are re-orienting their transport policy much as we are, and they know they will need e-mobility in order to do so. And it can be done: from the technical point of view we already have a large toolbox which we must use to design vehicles suitable for series production, hand in hand with the industry. One example is the first electrically driven cars that we use as taxis.
We are convinced that the storage of excess electricity generated from renewable sources for example in the form of hydrogen and its use in the transport sector will play an important role in future energy systems and especially in the breakthrough of e-mobility. The energy turnaround must be considered as a whole, and the transport sector is one important component. Hydrogen could soon play a key role as an alternative fuel.
Moreover, most of the companies in the wind industry now have their headquarters in the Hamburg area. And in our region we have major research institutions and industrial partners which help us making active use of the considerable synergisms between the fields of energy and transport.
As representatives of politics and industry, we in Hamburg were recently able to present the results of a joint study investigating the potentials of the production and use of hydrogen produced with wind power. Because of its high winds, the large number of competent partners in the technical industries and its proximity to demanders, the metropolitan region of Hamburg offers unique opportunities in this field.
Hamburg has a particular interest in ensuring a supply of hydrogen produced from renewable sources in the region hydrogen that can be used in the transport sector. That is why we are currently collaborating with our neighbouring states of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein and working with industry towards finding concrete, practicable means of realizing this, also using the hydrogen already produced in the region. One of the projects we have actively supported is the construction of a power to gas plant that is already in operation in the Reitbrook district of Hamburg.
We participate actively in innovations of this kind because we want to make hydrogen and fuel cell technology practicable and ready for the market as soon as possible within a strategic
alliance. So it is essential not just to realize lighthouse projects; we must also take care to bring marketable innovations to our energy networks and onto our roads in the near future.
Hamburgs public transport company Hochbahn has been testing fuel cell buses on its routes since 2003. There are still questions to be answered, but technological leaps forward have been achieved too. For example, the hydrogen consumption has been more than halved from the last-but-one generation of vehicles to the present. But we need further optimizations and cost reductions, and these we hope to realize jointly with you.
That is why Hochbahn has joined the Clean Energy Partnership. In the Clean Hydrogen in European Cities project (=CHIC), it is helping to test fuel cell buses, and it was one of the founder members of the Hydrogen Bus Alliance so that it can cooperate with you in acquiring the practical experience necessary for implementing this technology on a large scale in the near future. And we are confident that we shall succeed.
The Hamburg Senate has decided that from the year 2020 on, Hochbahn will only acquire emission-free buses.
Ladies and gentlemen,
that takes me to my second point: Hamburg is also investing in its infrastructure.
Besides implementing emission-free technology we intend to make bus transport more attractive in general in order to convince a growing number of customers of the important role of public transport in protecting the climate. We will have to enlarge our capacities because the number of passengers using Hamburgs public transport system has increased meteorically in recent years much faster than the average for Germany. And we expect this trend to continue.
To ensure that Hamburg is prepared for the future we intend to develop the existing bus system into one of the most modern of its kind in Europe.
One important element of this is the bus acceleration programme; that applies especially to the heavily used MetroBus routes. We have made quite ambitious plans:
We shall give our heavily frequented MetroBus routes permanent right of way at traffic lights;
We shall introduce bus lanes and
alter intersections and bus stops;
We shall improve accessibility for disabled persons
and re-arrange street space where necessary.
On this basis we can improve our offer by making services more frequent and thus increase overall utilization of the bus system. We are expecting to enlarge our capacity by as much as 20 percent.
The Senate has made over a quarter of a billion euros available for this programme: that is a large sum even for Hamburg, and it takes me to the third aspect: cooperation between individual states, industry and our cities.
Specialist events like this International Fuel Cell Bus Conference are important forums for an exchange of opinion between experts on bus technology and operational issues.
But and this takes me to my third fundamental point we must also harmonize and concentrate our political initiatives in order to achieve a faster pace in cooperation with the European Union, the national governments and industry.
So as the Hamburg Senate we are seeking negotiations with the Federal Government and the EU Commission in order to ensure that the funds for fuel cell buses which are rather limited in any case remain available until the systems achieve market maturity. We hope to involve our international partners in these negotiations too.
Our joint initiatives include reducing the cost of the individual buses, making them more suitable for everyday operation and prolonging their useful life. Because ultimately we want to offer industry the economies of scale that they need for series production of fuel cell buses. And here, demand plays a major role.
In this context we hope to step up our cooperation with the manufacturers. For we can only achieve such economies of scale if the buses are soon able to operate economically with other municipal bus companies and perhaps even with the long-distance bus services which are gaining significance here too. We have plenty to do!
Nevertheless, the chances and benefits offered by fuel cell buses are already clearly apparent, for example their flexible use and the more modest need for a decentralized infrastructure as compared to battery buses. The important thing now is to show patience and perseverance, also where funding is concerned not for ever, of course, but for the necessary transition period up to the year 2020. But funding should be firmly coupled to the achievement of intermediate objectives, for instance concerning the availability of the buses.
And that is where industry comes in again. Because we have to admit that the interest of the bus manufacturers in developing innovative, clean vehicles is still not as great as it should be in view of the future requirements of climate protection and a transition to more attractive public transport that includes the use of buses.
So Hamburg is setting a clear signal that we intend to cooperate chiefly with those bus suppliers who put the necessary number of innovative, clean vehicles on the market in good time. To put it in a nutshell: you build the buses, and we will buy them!
Ladies and gentlemen,
I thank you for cooperating with us in our efforts to put clean buses on the market. I wish you an interesting conference with a host of stimulating discussions, and I hope you will all enjoy your stay in Hamburg.
Es gilt das gesprochene Wort.