Virya Energy en Taxis Verts
Brussels welcomes first green hydrogen taxi
The city of Brussels boasts its first taxi running on green hydrogen. It’s a pilot project of Virya Energy and the taxi company Taxis Verts to see whether hydrogen can be the key instrument to develop a large fleet of sustainable emission-free taxis in our capital.
As from 2025 all new taxis in Brussels have to fit the zero-emission label. Taxi companies are looking into different ways to meet the challenge, such as fully electric vehicles or hydrogen-driven cars.
Compared to electric vehicles, hydrogen cars have two big advantages: they have a bigger range and can be filled in just 3 minutes, providing you have a hydrogen filling station at your disposal of course. The latter remains a problem: Belgium only has five of these across the whole country for the moment.
The hydrogen should be green, which means that the electricity used to make it comes from sustainable energy sources such as wind turbines or solar panels. Green hydrogen is still rather scarce at present. "That’s why we are testing 1 taxi and not 20 or 100", explains Stéphane Windels of Virya Energy. "But we are creating new production units for green hydrogen at present."