Power Plants On Rails for California

SoCalChris writes "According to this article on Wired.com, the Sierra Railroad is planning to use diesel train locomotives to produce power for California. Each of the 48 engines are expected to produce 2.1 megawatts of power for a thousand hours each year. Another key advantage to this plan is that since the "PowerTrains" are mobile, they can be taken to the areas that need power the most, so it doesn't have to be routed across the state through our power grid."

Comments

Really nothing new...

[Pig Hogger]

Back in the days where steam power was ***THE*** thing, steam locomotives were often used to replace or assist some plant's steam boiler while it was out of service... As many plants had sidings to bring-in railroad cars, it wasn't very hard to bring the hog near the plant building.

But this was done recently for electric power; in 1998, a disastrous ice storm destroyed a fair portion of the electric distribution system in Québec; in a suburb of Montréal, diesel locomotives were lent to the city to provide emergency power; they even ran the engines on the frozen street without any track at all!!! (other links here and here).

Another reason..

[mindstrm]

Diesel engines (and gas engines) have an optimum RPM, where they are the most efficient.

In something that is fuel/electric hybrid, you can use the fuel section at an optimal way to produce power, and then regulate the electric how you want.

Same thing goes on I think in like an M1 tank.. a gas turbine (jet) engine runs at constant speed producing power.

Merely a Drop in an Ocean

[Pooua]

Each of 48 trains would produce 2.1 MW of electricity, for a total of 100.8 Megawatts, for 1000 hours a year, amounts to 100.8 Gigawatt-hours a year.

The State of California in 2001 produced 265059 Gigawatt-hours, or almost 3000 times more electric power than these trains are supposed to produce. Even solar energy contributes more to California; 638 GW-hours!

California Gross System Electricity Production for 2001

The problems of really big drivetrains

[Animats]

The real reason for diesel-electric locomotives is that a mechanical drive would require "a clutch the size of Cleveland", plus a shiftable transmission of awesome size. And you still wouldn't get all-wheel drive.

Hydraulic transmissions, which are variable-displacement pumps driving hydraulic motors, are sometimes used for low-speed switch engines, but there's a vibration problem with hydraulic transmissions that's kept them as slow-speed devices. (I once worked in a hydraulic R&D facility, which built, among other things, prototype locomotive transmissions.)

But electric motors can produce full torque at zero speed. So they're just what you need to start up a freight train. A variable-speed electrical drive in locomotive size was a problem for a long time. Until about 1950, all you could do is switch windings into various combinations of parallel and series. Later, ignitrons (the big mercury-vapor member of the gas-discharge triode tube family) were tried. It took a while for semiconductors to work up to handling megawatts. BART was the first railroad with semiconductor motor drives, and they burned out giant triacs regularly for years.

The latest generation of locomotives finally does it right - the motors are synchronous AC three-phase motors driven by variable-frequency inverters in a closed-loop system. This synchronizes all the motors on all the axles (the motors are down in the trucks, near the wheels), which provides synchronized all-wheel drive. Synching all the wheels nearly doubled drawbar pull (the locomotive spec that matters), and the limits of couplers have now been reached.

Despite this, using spare diesel engines to generate power is a basically dumb idea except in emergencies. The efficiency isn't that good and diesels pollute more than any of the other popular forms of power generation.

Where the hell do YOU live?

[EvilStein]

First of all, it's "Sacramento." If you're going to talk about it, spell it right. Second off, I don't know where you're getting the idea that electricity is cheap in Sacramento. My SMUD bill (yes, I live here. I'm 2 blocks from the Capitol building.) is most certainly not cheap. Have you noticed all of the idiot protesters outside that vote DOWN power plants? How about the Sierra Club? The "NIMBY" folks? Deregulation has ceased to exist. It's over.

Also, there have been quite a few power plants built. In fact, SMUD has one on McClellan Air Force Base that just opened up about a year ago. Where the hell did you get the idea that not a single new power plant has been built?

Insulated from the state problems.. hardly. I walk downtown every single day and see our state problems right in front of me. The politicians walk around and see the same exact problems. Whether they do anything about it is another story.

Re:This has to be inefficient

[zeno_2]

Moreover, the company is going to fuel them with 100-percent biodiesel, a cleaner-burning vegetable oil equivalent of the familiar petroleum product.

Second sentence from the article.. And who is muddying the conversation?