Rail company that launched first H2 line opts for all-electric future
hydrogeninsight.com
hydrogeninsight.com
Hydrogen will probably see some use in railways, but more for freight and long-distance applications, mostly outside of Germany. I wouldn't be surprised if a large part of freight and long distance service in the US ran with hydrogen, with commuter trains mostly using batteries and conventional overhead electrification.
Trains, especially freight trains, aren't that weight sensitive, since they tend to mostly roll along at the same speed.
Such trains could be fitted with a pantograph and operate directly off OHLE when possible. Actually, don't recall the class but I'm fairly sure the UK has a variant of one it's commuter EMU with a small built in batter. The route it travels has a few miles without wires where is impractical to add wires so it uses batterys to cover that gap.
Likely sodium-ion, which is projected to be significantly cheaper due to abundant materials, safer due to its chemistry, more tolerant to hot/cold weather, and it's main drawback of lower energy density isn't a big deal to trains.
a 4000 HP train is ~ 2,000 kWatts. The average diesel-electric locomotive uses 3.5-4 kwh / mile of electricity (according to chatgpt). So to go 500 miles we're looking at 53,000lbs / 26.7 tons of _just_ battery (doubled up weight to account for non lithium). The locomotive itself can weigh 120-220 tons. A freight railcar can weigh about 100tons.
For a yard locomotive where they are just moving things around this could be super useful. For hauling freight around it's a potential? You're basically losing a freight car of cargo per 500 miles.
And I would really want this thing to be NOT made of lithium ion cuz if the train derailed it would be fairly destructive.[
A typical locomotive carries approximately 5,000 gallons of diesel fuel, which at 7lbs a gallon is already 17 tons, not counting the weight of the tanks.
The diesel engines will be even heavier (and they're Diesel Electric, so they already have electric traction motors, and the related electrical equipment).
Train's don't haul just one car, they haul dozens or even hundreds.
25t of batteries and you save all of the hassle and maintenance of combustion.
http://reasonrail.blogspot.com/2015/09/a-cost-to-benefit-ana...
It looks like 22-66 kWh/mile, depending on size of train.
In reality, this is one of the silliest stories of the year. I'm guessing this is probably some kind of subsidy harvesting scam.
This means that for large parts of the network there is some traffic, but far from enough to justify electrification which costs around 1M€/km (and, with some tunnels, might even mean expanding the tunnel diameter). There is a reason DMUs are widely used for these lines, and expectations are that BEMUs might be even cheaper to run.
More lines should be electrified, but expecting it to cover everything is not realistic nor economically justifiable. See https://vm.baden-wuerttemberg.de/fileadmin/redaktion/m-mvi/i... for a study on how to run non-electrified lines in Baden-Württemberg which comes to result that BEMUs are cheaper for around half of the lines that full electrification.
I'm not aware of BEMUs getting some special subsidy (meanwhile electrification is heavily subsidised, IMHO for good reasons), looking from the perspective of the ones financing and specifying the operations.
Which is why this decision is nonsensical and seems like some kind of subsidy related scam. Whatever the motivation, it cannot be based in rational thought.
Building new catenary systems can be expensive (anywhere between $1M-$5M/mile in the US), but can possibly be avoided with batteries and charging at stations (or energy provided via rails).
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/clean-energy-green-hy...
Can you just hire Japan Rail to build it for you, then?
The third-party claims about the SNCF proposal mutated a lot in response to evidence that seemed to contradict them, the most recent form of it acknowledging that SNCF publicly supported the CV alignment that the story says they later opposed, and also paints the opposition coming after federal funding waa committed under ARRA tied specifically to specific projects in the Central Valley alignment that SNCF America was said to have then opposed.
When the UK electrified the East Coast Mainline in the 80s, that cost an inflation-adjusted GBP 600M, for 397 route miles. At that time 1 GBP was approx 1.5 USD.
Using 1.5, that's $2.26M/mile.
PS: Even in Japan, almost all freight travels by diesel to this day... they run on separate tracks to the passenger trains, although freight in general in Japan is less important since they don't have much bulk cargo, being a major exporter of neither food nor minerals.
Like what's the cost per mile to install overhead wires? Comments in an online magazine says $1M/mile[1]. You can buy 5-10,000 kwh worth of batteries for a million bucks.
EU wide it's 56%, brought up a good chunk by Scandinavia and Switzerland. Italy and Spain are the only two countries in Southern Europe over 50%.
There are a LOT of infrequently used industrial lines that see no passenger traffic, and maybe only see a freight train once or twice a day, if that.
Sorry, but never heard of that here, neither for the local trams, nor the >50% electrified on rail.. it is more likely some unhappy guys cut the signaling wires. Where is that?
If it's happening all the time you're doing something wrong.
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/one-injured-after-overhead-m...
https://sf.streetsblog.org/2020/09/02/bad-splices-point-to-f...
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/muni-wires-fall-on...
HEMUs for these types of services I don't understand. It's laudable that transit providers want to get away from fossil fuels (and putting up overhead wire is a long and arduous process, fraught with delays), but getting hydrogen today almost certainly isn't "green". Maybe "Technologieoffenheit" virtue signalling.
But looking at the plans of various german transit agencies for future service on non-electrified lines, it's pretty obvious that hydrogen has already lost for rail-based transit, with almost every tender that doesn't prescribe a technology going to BEMUs and studies showing that BEMUs and partial electrification or full electrification almost always makes more sense than HEMUs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...
If the line is electrified then freight travelling on it will be travelling on electric trains.
The level of rail maintenance in America (barely any) is illegal in the rest of the western world. Tenders for maintenance specify certain speed and safety limits that basically require rebuilding every few decades.
Only on private rail could a hedge fund approach work, where the capital of the infrastructure is extracted by way of not maintaining it, but instead slowing trains down and increasing their length to compensate for bandwidth loss.
Rebuilding tunnels and bridges is expensive - tunnels especially are practically never built much larger than required. Stations, depots, carriage washers, and other related infrastructure will need to be rebuilt or heavily modified to account for the extra height of the panto, wires, and poles.
If you're building NEW track, sure, OHLE is the way to go. But there is well over 1 million route kilometers of rail in the world, and less than a third of it is electrified. Of the countries having at least 20,000km of track, only India and Japan are above 70% electrified. Cost of electrifying is estimated at at a miniumum of $1 million per track kilometer. (10 route km of a quad-track mainline would be 40 track km).
A large freight yard might be 40 tracks wide by 2 or 3km long... that's over $100m right there, and that's assuming the yard tracks are spaced widely enough, which they aren't always.
A diesel will have to be dispatched… except it’s entirely possible it won’t be able to get you because there are trains stuck between you, and it’s not like they can pull onto the shoulder.
These sections are sometimes miles long.
[1]https://www.power-technology.com/news/man-ammonnia-engine-te...
Why would that be, except maybe in rare cornercases? You can electrify almost anything, and it'll be more efficient and less polluting.
For transit use, a rule of thumb is if you have a bus every 10 minutes or less then it would be more cost effective in the long run to have wires to the bus (better than diesel or battery buses). However even when you have a bus every 10 minutes odds are you have enough other routes that don't have that frequency and so overall it isn't worth it even though in some places it would be.
Rail networks with large stretches of non-electrified lines are extremely costly to upgrade, so battery-electric and hydrogen are the likely solutions unless there is massive investment in electrification. The US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Australia are prime examples of this.
Currently CPKC is working on a number of HFC locomotives that are showing very promising results.
It's very easy and fast to turn off a solar power plant. Without subsidies, nobody will pay to feed power into the grid.
And that's okay, ~0 is a good enough as a price.
Without subsidies, somebody feeding solar from their rooftop into the grid will need to sell the power on the stock exchange, usually through a power broker company that adds them to their portfolio. (In Germany this is called "Direktvermarktung")
This power broker will remotely curtail (turn off) the solar infeed when the spot prices turn negative.
I'm also don't understand why a fixed feed-in price has to be a subsidy? Is a fixed electricity price or a fixed gas price a subsidy? It could be that home owners are more comfortable selling their electricity for a fixed price and power brokers have determined that accurately measuring feed-in over time and adding remote-curtailment functionality is not worth the cost for small installations. I doubt we will see feed-in prices without any subsidies in the near future, but it could certainly happen.
And your second point is also valid, a small flat rate infeed may be easier to bill for the broker than per-minute pricing with curtailment. But this will only be the case if prices aren't negative for too long.
If it weren’t for the subsidised price and general resistance of consumers to spot pricing we would have someone offering a service offering supply management by rooftop solar installations to increase the spot price, fewer green energy certs being sold, and way fewer installs. We would also see increased battery storage.
In the very long term we would expect electricity generation to become slightly more expensive than free.
People with solar talk a big game but the vast majority of them are thinking about their pocket and just hate our energy industry.
The fact is that if anyone other than a highly niche purely spot pricing business offered a truly fair price for solar the market regulators would be overruled by the government because of the political optics.
And it’s a subsidy that is paid by those who do not have solar.
I just don’t think your comment applies at all here. Perhaps there are other markets and societies but it’s not us. And we have the most rooftop solar per capita on earth.
I unfortunately haven't been able to find great timelines for electrolyzer costs apart from https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Cost-of-electrolyser-tec.... This suggests that costs fell around 50% between 2000 and 2015. Solar panel prices fell around 90% in the same timeframe: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices?time=2000... (and even faster between 2006 and 2021 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices?time=2006...).
Solar cost decreases have been amazing, but for example wind was less impressive and solar thermal didn't scale well.
https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/22002-historical-cost-r...
Compare alternative fuel vehicles and you'll see that hydrogen vehicles are really quite impractical.
Hydrogen vehicles require tanks at extremely high pressure, and they might become fragile from the hydrogen.
Actually, natural gas vehicles (CNG) were more practical and still didn't go that far without subsidies. Note that although natural gas is found natively - in the ground - a significant amount of energy is required to pressurize it to ~3600 psi for transportation.
Now I would agree with you if your statement said diesel instead of hydrogen.
For vehicles like trains it can still be advantageous compared to batteries if you have very long ranges you have to drive without the possibility to recharge. Batteries simply get too heavy, bulky and expensive then.
Hydrogen is still useful as a store of energy to smooth out seasonal variations in solar and wind production though. On a large scale it's more difficult to store than natural gas due to embrittlement but not impractical.