This in part of a series of posts on the presentation given by Lisa Hinz at the SacRT Board Meeting on 2025-07-28. The audio accompanying the presentation slides is key to understanding them, so we recommend that you also view the meeting recording on YouTube.

This will be the last post on this topic today. STAR is out of time and energy! There may be additional posts on the Hinz presentation and the related Araujo presentation.

Slide 12 (starting 43:00) is about zero emission bus implementation (ZEB) and a bus maintenance facility (BMF 2) at McClellan. It continues SacRT’s fuzzy communication about this project. Was the grant just a planning grant? Was it for new buses? Was it for a natural gas to hydrogen plant? Was it for a bus maintenance facility? Though $77M sounds like a lot, it could not even begin to cover the cost of all of these. SacRT has not shared the grant application with STAR, and in fact it was a request for a letter of support, without any detail on the grant application, that caused STAR to implement a new policy of requiring documentation before a letter of support could be provided (https://star-transit.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/star-2025-02-20_policy-letters.pdf).

STAR has criticized both SacRT’s seeming all-eggs-in-the-hydrogen-basket approach, and the implied use of grey or dirty hydrogen to fuel hydrogen fuel cell electric buses (see SacRT electric or hydrogen?, hydrogen?, and hydrogen is too expensive). Hydrogen is indeed zero emissions at the point of use, but the generation of grey hydrogen can induce carbon emissions as great or greater than the generation of electricity from dirty sources.

Lisa stated several times that SacRT’s implementation will meet or exceed CARB (California Air Resources Board) requirements for ZEB. What she does not mention is that CARB has been severely criticized for not specifying that hydrogen must be green hydrogen. She said that the concern expressed by transit advocates about the type of hydrogen is premature, as it has not been decided. They got a grant without addressing this? Hmm. A feasibility study is apparently underway, which will address hydrogen type and source, and the hydrogen bus fleet. STAR was not aware of this study. Again, is this a planning grant or an implementation grant?

The New York Times today had an article, America’s Clean Hydrogen Dreams Are Fading, Again, which casts doubt on the availability of green hydrogen.

The map included on the slide, showing ZEB bus routes for the SacRT system, with fuel cell, battery electric, and CNG (compressed natural gas), has never been made public before, but Lisa did not mention it.

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