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Plug Power Customers Surpass 10 Million GenFuel Hydrogen Fills

Published Date
Author Christian Sebastian

On January 5, 2018, Plug Power customers surpassed the 10 millionth hydrogen fill using a GenFuel dispenser to refuel a GenDrive-powered forklift.  That’s an average of 15,000 fills each day over the last year, which has bumped our count total from 5 million to 10 million in just eleven months.

10 million hydrogen fills

What does this mean to the thriving industry?

  • Plug Power’s customer fueling numbers are growing at an exponential rate.
  • On average, every 5.7 seconds, an industrial electric vehicle refuels at a Plug Power hydrogen station.
  • Enough hydrogen has been dispensed to take your car to Mars and back…twice. That is, if there was a road to Mars.  On good old Planet Earth, you could drive around the entire globe 22,489 times.
  • A single distribution warehouse customer site today uses as much hydrogen in one day as a consumer hydrogen fueling station expects to use in the year 2020.
  • If we total up all the time spent refueling, customers have spent 56 years at a GenFuel dispenser. If using traditional battery-power, the same fleet would have used 284 years of manpower changing batteries and 11,400 years charging them.
  • Electric lift trucks have operated for approximately 34 million run hours on 6 million kg of hydrogen pumped from Plug Power designed hydrogen stations.

What innovations are enabling the adoption of hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles?

Fifteen thousand hydrogen fills each day is a solid number, but Plug Power is working to enable an even wider cross-section of material handling facilities to convert their operation to hydrogen and fuel cells.  Here’s how we’re doing this:

  • The basic hydrogen storage and dispensing station at a customer facility is most cost-effective at high use facilities running more than 50 vehicles for 2 to 3 shifts.
  • Smaller facilities are beginning to adopt Plug Power’s hub & spoke model, wherein a fleet of high-pressure tube trailers is used to economically transport gas from a larger site to a smaller one. The parent site acts as the “hub” and the “spokes” are the satellite users. This enables operations with as few as 10 forklifts to economically adopt hydrogen and fuel cells.

hydrogen hub & spoke model

  • Other solutions including fuel reformers, electrolyzers and other small scale innovations are increasing the potential hydrogen and fuel cell market within the material handling world.

Hydrogen solutions

 

How is hydrogen moving beyond forklifts and into new markets?

Plug Power isn’t stopping with material handling.  That’s just the beginning.  Our work with airport ground-support equipment, automated guided vehicles and on-road delivery vans is continuing to expand the market for hydrogen and fuel cells.  Ten million hydrogen fills – we’ve only just begun!

hydrogen roadmap

#InfiniteDrive

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