U.S. Department of Energy - Energy Efficiency and Renewable EnergyFuel Cell Technologies Program – Technology ValidationSunLine Transit Agency SunLine Transit Agency provides public transit and community services to California's Coachella Valley. The service area is more than 1,100 square miles and includes nine member cities, as well as Riverside County. Over the years, SunLine has pursued an aggressive strategy for implementing clean technologies into its fleet. SunLine began by switching its fleet to compressed natural gas (CNG), then moved toward more advanced technologies, such as hydrogen/compressed natural gas (HCNG) blended fuels and fuel cells. The agency has established itself as a test bed for multiple vehicle and hydrogen production technologies. In partnership with AC Transit, SunLine purchased one fuel cell bus for the demonstration. SunLine's fuel cell bus was identical to those at AC Transit. The hot, dry desert climate in SunLine's service area helped to further test the performance of the bus under multiple climates.  SunLine has been using compressed hydrogen fuel for several years. In April 2000, SunLine opened a hydrogen generation, storage, fueling, and education facility to demonstrate various approaches to hydrogen production. The fuel cell bus was put into service in December 2005. NREL also evaluated a hybrid hydrogen internal combustion engine bus in operation at SunLine. Contact Leslie Eudy at (303) 275-4412 for more information about DOE's evaluation project with SunLine.  Related PublicationsSome of the following documents are available as Adobe Acrobat PDFs. Download Adobe Reader.
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