Dutch province's first hydrogen train tender attracts zero bids

No train manufacturers have bid into the Dutch province of Groningen’s first tender for four hydrogen-powered trains.

These trains were meant to run on the non-electrified rail network between port city Delfzijl and the town of Veendam and potentially into the municipality of Leeuwarden.

While an explicit reason for the lack of bids has not been provided, provincial administer Johan Hamster reportedly told the Groningen provincial council that “the requirements we set, for example for the furnishing, lead to quite a lot of investments in what is in principle a small assignment”.

The tender was set to cost around €66m in total for the four trains and a refuelling station, for which the national government would have stumped up €15m and the European Investment Bank €20m.

Groningen had previously trialled a Coradia iLint train manufactured by Alstom prior to launching the tender in November 2022.

Previous government purchases in Germany for Alstom hydrogen-powered trains have ranged from €93m for 14 units to €500m for 27. However, since these tenders included costs beyond the rolling stock, the actual unit cost per train cannot be extrapolated from these figures.

A spokesperson for the provincial government, which aims to have only zero-emissions trains operating in Groningen by 2035, tells Hydrogen Insight that a study it had conducted in 2018 found that “both full and partial electrification will be more expensive than the hydrogen variant”.

“In addition, the electrification of the railway lines (fully or not) takes a very long time. As a result, passengers will have to deal with long shutdowns of the lines,” the spokesperson added.

“The construction, management and maintenance of overhead lines also requires a lot of specialist personnel,” they noted, adding that “this staff is scarce”.