On the show Full House S05E25 the character Michelle was learning to cook. She made tuna flavored ice cream. Uncle Jesse says something to the effect of "It's great that you like tuna and great that you like ice cream. You don't have to combine them."
I try to remember that episode when building tech products. We all like solar. We all like trains. It doesn't mean that we need to have solar panels between the train tracks.
I think that although it could be cool, it seems like train right-of-ways is a particularly harsh environment for solar panels. There's dust, harsh vibrations, heavy cast iron components, and other things right next to a sensitive bit of electronics. It seems like it would be more economical to have a solar farm managed by the train company. This way the panels can be easily cleaned, angled properly, and maintained not in the proximity of giant rolling metal boxes.
That’s what I initially thought, but I could see it being cheaper for the railway company to build solar for themselves. They get the power at cost, and can build a system that can handle lower uptime/greater availability, with storage etc, so that they can avoid paying to upkeep high availability power.
I don’t know though. I assume someone with a really nice spreadsheet has looked at this before deciding to pay to build all this.
I would think a huge additional advantage of this solar and on-car batteries combo would be resiliency to single points of failure and massive long term savings in infra and power costs?
Trains are famously risk-averse designs. They're also really expensive and have to work for decades.
It will be hard sell to convince a train operator that adding literal tonnes of batteries to a train with a complicated mesh of solar microforms spread over thousands of km of track will be a good deal in terms of regulatory approval, cost effectiveness, maintenance overheads in time and money and that your company will still be around in 20 years to run the system rather than going belly up in a tech crash and leaving them with a bunch of bricked hardware.
Why should this setup be locked in to any particular third party company?
How different is it to the train cars themselves being built by some company and then maintained by train company mechanics? And battery + electric motor setups are famously pretty straightforward, so this seems even more true.
I don't disagree on the regulatory stuff being an issue, that's a very good point.
The solar mesh feels like an orthogonal problem, also feels very solvable with just standard interfaces which would surely be mandated. I mean the solar bit is an add on too, you can always fall back to other means for battery charging, but seems like solar is just an obvious economically optimal solution in the circumstances.
I have whiplash from slogging through a bunch of trivialities to get to a couple of absolutely wild boil the ocean ideas. This article is literally the rejects from a plausible and informative article.
I find it helpful to see this the way that VCs do - these projects aren't a result of asking "is this a good way to accomplish this goal?"
They're a result of looking at an idea and saying "I bet I, personally, can make money off of this."
The degree to which VCs decide the direction of human endeavor is disheartening. We have real problems to solve, and in the case of rail, a really robust set of tools and approaches that are proven to solve them.
It's all a grift for people who can't do basic math. I'm seeing heavy, low-speed electric passenger rail needs 15-30 kWh per mile. There's no way they can build out enough solar to meet that demand in the RoW for the tracks. Never mind that now you've cluttered the space that workers need to use when performing maintenance and created a safety hazard for emergency access.
At best they can use some particularly suitable embankments.
Putting solar actually near the tracks is presumably not on the cards: not only because the regulations for bolting techy shit to a railway are there for a reason, but also the vibration, the overshadowed nature of much railway, thick black grime, and difficulty in getting access for maintenance, and impediment and vulnerability to normal railway maintenance. It sounds a nightmare in both operational and capital terms.
And since the trains mostly run at 25kV (the 750V third rail systems are basically a dead end in the UK) it would probably be quite a headache to step a few dozen panels here and there up to that, even if there was a way to feed it in near the panel. So exporting to the national grid is probably more cost effective in many cases.
Then again, it's understandable that if Network Rail has to have the land anyway that it wants to get something out of it rather than it just being a net cost.
The article does a very bad job of explaining the 'why' part, but I think they're saying that the benefit is in
feeding the solar panel output to the trains without going through the (national) grid. It's presumably cheaper because the grid operator isn't taking a cut. Whether it is significantly cheaper when all the other costs are considered is another question.
FTA: “A key barrier to electrification is often the limitations of the local electricity grid – it's hard to get access to a big connection for powering your trains. "That problem has only become much, much worse," says Mr Murray.”
⇒ This moves production close to where power is consumed, removing/decreasing the need for new grid infra.
The article claims this, but the huge amount of electrified rail that already exists, and has for 50 years, suggests the problem isn't as difficult as they make it out.
Kind of a dumb article. Most UK lines were electrified fifty or so years ago. This seems to be about sticking some solar cells up to help provide some of the power.
One problem with electric cars and distributed generation is that it puts strain in the grid. I wonder if we can somehow make train tracks act as makeshift powerlines, to help cope with demand for transmission.
>>A key benefit of the technology, says Mr Paczek, is that it allows operators to bring freight wagons to a stop very quickly – and, as a consequence, that means they could, in principle, safely put lots of independently moving wagons relatively close together on one stretch of rail, increasing the density of freight transportation in a particular area.
Uncharitable interpretation of TFA. “independently moving wagons” are different from a series of linked wagons that all have to leave the terminus at the same time, travel together, and arrive together. This idea would allow independently moving wagons to be dispatched as required from multiple destinations, share the line with others in very close proximity, and break away seamlessly to their different destinations.
Yeah, which is to say not a train of trains but just individual cars, packed as closely as possible together, on a track... you know what the closest you can pack two cars on the same track is? touching each other.
They're not independently moving if they're coupled together. You can fairly argue that the idea is bad, and I know it's not as fun a dunk as "you invented a train", but multiple wagons that can move independently (and can therefore be switched to different destinations) are fundamentally a different thing than a single train.
No. The aim is to “increase the density of freight transportation in a particular area.” That would be maximum tonnage carried through an area over a period, eg a year. It’s possible more tonnes of independently moving wagons could move through an area over a year by being individually dispatched 24/7 in close proximity versus larger traditional freight trains that only run a few times a day.
Which would need completely different signaling systems, where sensors for sections are every few meters instead of like now having sections hundreds of meters or even kilometers long. That's investment of hundred of billions + maintenance.
In Europe we are integrating ETCS since 1996 and it is still not done.
It seems like it's impossible for anyone to develop any new technology for trains without online commenters screeching "THAT'S CALLED A FUCKING TRAIN".
It seems to generally be clustered with a sort of leftish, anti-AI, maybe anti-tech worldview. Like they feel they have ownership of railways as a concept as sort of a charity case, and if "tech bros" are working on improving them, it's sort of like taking their cause away from them.
It's more that people have started realizing that governments and big tech have been playing this game for a long time, where instead of doing the work of using the huge resources they have to build useful infrastructure with the technolgies that we already have, they prefer to invest in useless new tech, coincidentally being sold by their own cronies. And they often have the nerve to do this while claiming that problems that are solved everywhere else in the world, and have been for 50-100 years, are somehow almost insurmountable.
Electrification of a rail is a thing since 1879 and 1881 in regular service. Techbros just figured out how to grasp technology of 19th century. A wire above a rail...
Techbros stopped reinventing trains and now will invest in trains directly. Until next funding round when they will be trying to invent a some kind of pod transportation again.
Everybody wants to ~rule the world~ have their Steve Jobs "one more thing" moment on stage.
Sometimes it feels like that all the tech "innovations" lately have all been due to a certain group of people's desire to experience what Steve Jobs had. A generation of impressionable young people who grew up into a world where tech is going to save the world, and watching Jobs on stage are now trying their hardest to make their dreams a reality.
The real trick to being a Steve Jobs is to have your own MS/RIM/Nokia/Motorola rivals that wait politely for you to innovate everything before they even try to come up with concept material.
A little bit of solar for existing electrified rail lines? Magnetic propulsion for freight cars? This is a strange collection of gadgetbahn ideas.
Are they trying to jam solar panels between the rails again? How many times are we supposed to teach you this lesson, tech bro?
Alongside the tracks, but yes.
This article is confusing : no data, no information, just some narrative to try to make a "new" stance on something quite known (and even mastered).
Once you learn to recognize corporate advertisement journalism, you see it everywhere.
So what's the news here? Other places have fully electric trains since forever and solar power is part of the energy mix nearly everywhere.
Obligatory xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/1599/
On the show Full House S05E25 the character Michelle was learning to cook. She made tuna flavored ice cream. Uncle Jesse says something to the effect of "It's great that you like tuna and great that you like ice cream. You don't have to combine them."
I try to remember that episode when building tech products. We all like solar. We all like trains. It doesn't mean that we need to have solar panels between the train tracks.
I think that although it could be cool, it seems like train right-of-ways is a particularly harsh environment for solar panels. There's dust, harsh vibrations, heavy cast iron components, and other things right next to a sensitive bit of electronics. It seems like it would be more economical to have a solar farm managed by the train company. This way the panels can be easily cleaned, angled properly, and maintained not in the proximity of giant rolling metal boxes.
Seems very cool, maybe a bit of a game changing paradigm?
- solar over day slowly charges batteries in train cars (easy to add, weight issue is trivial)
- train cars dynamically dispatched during night in response to pretty granular JIT demand for next day
- everything can be slow and maximally efficient, the charging, the trains themselves
Seems like potential to cut costs by a lot and enable new usecases
Or: electrify the trains and connect them to the grid. It will be more resilient and less constraining.
At least, one could say: let's occupy the available space between the tracks to produce some energy (https://www.sun-ways.ch/en). At least...
That’s what I initially thought, but I could see it being cheaper for the railway company to build solar for themselves. They get the power at cost, and can build a system that can handle lower uptime/greater availability, with storage etc, so that they can avoid paying to upkeep high availability power.
I don’t know though. I assume someone with a really nice spreadsheet has looked at this before deciding to pay to build all this.
I would think a huge additional advantage of this solar and on-car batteries combo would be resiliency to single points of failure and massive long term savings in infra and power costs?
> easy to add
Trains are famously risk-averse designs. They're also really expensive and have to work for decades.
It will be hard sell to convince a train operator that adding literal tonnes of batteries to a train with a complicated mesh of solar microforms spread over thousands of km of track will be a good deal in terms of regulatory approval, cost effectiveness, maintenance overheads in time and money and that your company will still be around in 20 years to run the system rather than going belly up in a tech crash and leaving them with a bunch of bricked hardware.
Why should this setup be locked in to any particular third party company?
How different is it to the train cars themselves being built by some company and then maintained by train company mechanics? And battery + electric motor setups are famously pretty straightforward, so this seems even more true.
I don't disagree on the regulatory stuff being an issue, that's a very good point.
The solar mesh feels like an orthogonal problem, also feels very solvable with just standard interfaces which would surely be mandated. I mean the solar bit is an add on too, you can always fall back to other means for battery charging, but seems like solar is just an obvious economically optimal solution in the circumstances.
I have whiplash from slogging through a bunch of trivialities to get to a couple of absolutely wild boil the ocean ideas. This article is literally the rejects from a plausible and informative article.
I can't believe I'm flagging for clickbait a BBC article...
I don't understand this article. This a completely solved problem.
Solar is just another component in the grid. Attach solar to the grid if you want, the trains to the grid too.
Like all the countries with electrified railed do.
Electrifying trains with only solar seems a bit stupid IMO, but who am I compared to tech firms betting on electrification.
I find it helpful to see this the way that VCs do - these projects aren't a result of asking "is this a good way to accomplish this goal?"
They're a result of looking at an idea and saying "I bet I, personally, can make money off of this."
The degree to which VCs decide the direction of human endeavor is disheartening. We have real problems to solve, and in the case of rail, a really robust set of tools and approaches that are proven to solve them.
It's all a grift for people who can't do basic math. I'm seeing heavy, low-speed electric passenger rail needs 15-30 kWh per mile. There's no way they can build out enough solar to meet that demand in the RoW for the tracks. Never mind that now you've cluttered the space that workers need to use when performing maintenance and created a safety hazard for emergency access.
At best they can use some particularly suitable embankments.
Putting solar actually near the tracks is presumably not on the cards: not only because the regulations for bolting techy shit to a railway are there for a reason, but also the vibration, the overshadowed nature of much railway, thick black grime, and difficulty in getting access for maintenance, and impediment and vulnerability to normal railway maintenance. It sounds a nightmare in both operational and capital terms.
And since the trains mostly run at 25kV (the 750V third rail systems are basically a dead end in the UK) it would probably be quite a headache to step a few dozen panels here and there up to that, even if there was a way to feed it in near the panel. So exporting to the national grid is probably more cost effective in many cases.
Then again, it's understandable that if Network Rail has to have the land anyway that it wants to get something out of it rather than it just being a net cost.
Like solar cells laid on highways. Thank you. I hadn't seen these bat shit ideas from that perspective. Another great mystery of humanity solved.
The article does a very bad job of explaining the 'why' part, but I think they're saying that the benefit is in feeding the solar panel output to the trains without going through the (national) grid. It's presumably cheaper because the grid operator isn't taking a cut. Whether it is significantly cheaper when all the other costs are considered is another question.
FTA: “A key barrier to electrification is often the limitations of the local electricity grid – it's hard to get access to a big connection for powering your trains. "That problem has only become much, much worse," says Mr Murray.”
⇒ This moves production close to where power is consumed, removing/decreasing the need for new grid infra.
The article claims this, but the huge amount of electrified rail that already exists, and has for 50 years, suggests the problem isn't as difficult as they make it out.
You can't sell a train to VCs, so you have to invent reinvent worse trains.
Kind of a dumb article. Most UK lines were electrified fifty or so years ago. This seems to be about sticking some solar cells up to help provide some of the power.
One problem with electric cars and distributed generation is that it puts strain in the grid. I wonder if we can somehow make train tracks act as makeshift powerlines, to help cope with demand for transmission.
>>A key benefit of the technology, says Mr Paczek, is that it allows operators to bring freight wagons to a stop very quickly – and, as a consequence, that means they could, in principle, safely put lots of independently moving wagons relatively close together on one stretch of rail, increasing the density of freight transportation in a particular area.
THAT'S CALLED A FUCKING TRAIN.
Not defending this mess of an article, but they meant a train of trains.
that's also just a train.
Uncharitable interpretation of TFA. “independently moving wagons” are different from a series of linked wagons that all have to leave the terminus at the same time, travel together, and arrive together. This idea would allow independently moving wagons to be dispatched as required from multiple destinations, share the line with others in very close proximity, and break away seamlessly to their different destinations.
"Independently moving" is the distinguishing part there
Yeah, which is to say not a train of trains but just individual cars, packed as closely as possible together, on a track... you know what the closest you can pack two cars on the same track is? touching each other.
It's a fucking train.
They're not independently moving if they're coupled together. You can fairly argue that the idea is bad, and I know it's not as fun a dunk as "you invented a train", but multiple wagons that can move independently (and can therefore be switched to different destinations) are fundamentally a different thing than a single train.
No. The aim is to “increase the density of freight transportation in a particular area.” That would be maximum tonnage carried through an area over a period, eg a year. It’s possible more tonnes of independently moving wagons could move through an area over a year by being individually dispatched 24/7 in close proximity versus larger traditional freight trains that only run a few times a day.
Which would need completely different signaling systems, where sensors for sections are every few meters instead of like now having sections hundreds of meters or even kilometers long. That's investment of hundred of billions + maintenance.
In Europe we are integrating ETCS since 1996 and it is still not done.
It seems like it's impossible for anyone to develop any new technology for trains without online commenters screeching "THAT'S CALLED A FUCKING TRAIN".
It seems to generally be clustered with a sort of leftish, anti-AI, maybe anti-tech worldview. Like they feel they have ownership of railways as a concept as sort of a charity case, and if "tech bros" are working on improving them, it's sort of like taking their cause away from them.
It's more that people have started realizing that governments and big tech have been playing this game for a long time, where instead of doing the work of using the huge resources they have to build useful infrastructure with the technolgies that we already have, they prefer to invest in useless new tech, coincidentally being sold by their own cronies. And they often have the nerve to do this while claiming that problems that are solved everywhere else in the world, and have been for 50-100 years, are somehow almost insurmountable.
Electrification of a rail is a thing since 1879 and 1881 in regular service. Techbros just figured out how to grasp technology of 19th century. A wire above a rail...
They could build the solar, then use it for data centers while waiting for the wires to be strung over the rail lines.
Techbros stopped reinventing trains and now will invest in trains directly. Until next funding round when they will be trying to invent a some kind of pod transportation again.
Everybody wants to ~rule the world~ have their Steve Jobs "one more thing" moment on stage.
Sometimes it feels like that all the tech "innovations" lately have all been due to a certain group of people's desire to experience what Steve Jobs had. A generation of impressionable young people who grew up into a world where tech is going to save the world, and watching Jobs on stage are now trying their hardest to make their dreams a reality.
The real trick to being a Steve Jobs is to have your own MS/RIM/Nokia/Motorola rivals that wait politely for you to innovate everything before they even try to come up with concept material.
It helps when one of those rivals bails you out too.