By charging up battery cars where renewable energy is cheap and delivering the power to where it’s needed, this startup thinks railroads could break the clean energy transmission logjam.
Electricity moves down a wire at close to the speed of light. In March, a tiny tech firm in San Francisco drew a crowd to witness power moving 100 million times slower, at the very modest pace of a freight train bumping around a rail yard. And I mean literally at freight speed, because the aptly-named startup, SunTrain, convened us to watch a diesel locomotive hauling solar energy.
The star of this demonstration at the Port of San Francisco’s Pier 96 rail yard was a freight container that SunTrain had crammed full of lithium ion batteries and mounted on a standard 27-meter railcar. We watched as techs for SunTrain disconnected their battery-packed rail car from a trackside solar array. We watched a diesel engine push and pull the 50-ton battery car towards a parking lot 400 meters away.
I would have thought that storage at the generation end could help to even out the pressure on the transmission grid and therefore reduced need to upgrade the grid. I would also have thought that storage at the usage end would in like manner reduce the need to upgrade the grid.
Perhaps there are too many organisations involved, each of which is unwilling to agree what would be a fair share of the bill for them.
This is perhaps the worst use of batteries ever…
However re using rail to transfer energy, what IMHO would be a great idea would be to transport waste heat from nuclear plants, i.e. the heat that is otherwise just disposed of in nearby lakes or whatnot, by rail to nearby cities to use for district heating.
Since the water is pumped in from a nearby lake or whatnot each time, and since the transport isn’t instant, any radiation leak into the water would be detected before it reaches the district heating heat exchanger, so the risk of radiation entering the district heating is effectively zero.
I think that this is something that both people who are pro-nuclear and who are anti-nuclear should be able to agree upon that it’s a good idea.