Cummins Inc. recently received two awards from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy for nearly $7 million. The awards are for Cummins’ continued work on fuel cell powertrain solutions for heavy-duty applications for on-highway tractor-trailers and buses.

As project lead of the DOE’s H2@Scale initiative, Cummins is working with a number of public and private partners to develop affordable hydrogen production, storage, distribution, and use.

“Programs like H2@Scale are essential to gain the scale and investment needed that will lead to faster adoption of hydrogen fuel cell technologies,” said Amy Davis, president of New Power at Cummins. “The work we are doing with the DOE and our partners will help improve cost and operational performance of hydrogen fuel cell technologies to achieve greater parity with other available power solutions.”

The first award of approximately $3.5 million will be used towards the development of an integrated fuel cell electric powertrain for heavy-duty trucks and transit buses, one that is highly manufacturable and scalable with a proven range of 300 miles or more and improved fuel economy over current heavy-duty trucks and transit buses. The project also entails achieving, meeting, or exceeding conventional diesel powertrain performance requirements and reducing the upfront capital costs by 35%.

The second award for $3 million is to develop and validate a high pressure, modular, 100 kW proton exchange membrane fuel cell stack and system to power heavy-duty applications of this technology, optimizing the fuel cell stack for efficiency, power density, space, and cost.