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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."
They need something mobile to counter the rolling blackouts.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Why does it sound like California's energy plan is some crazed mixture of Sim City and an RTS?
:)
"Quick Bob, move those two engines to San Jose quick."
"No, wait, power outage in Anahiem. Undo, undo!"
"I can't move it fast enough!"
"Lasso all the Amtracks and use your hotkeys!!!!"
Look at all of the valuable life skills computer games teach us!
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
I live in Montreal, and during the 1999 Ice Storm that knocked out power to almost 300,000 people many communities that had access to the railway used diesel train locomotives to produce electricity for there area.
Despite the doom and gloom prophecies of the anti-nuke crowd, nuclear power generation has proved itself the least environmentally impacting electricity generating method time and again. Canada and France (while certainly not governmental systems to model) have come up with a system of genericized nuclear breeder facilities that provide clean, cheap power to their respective countries.
It's sad that Germany has made the decision to kill more birds and disrupt weather patterns with their latest misguided policies. And it's sad that the radical left in California has blocked nuclear power plant construction in their state.
A diesel train to generate electricity? Why not just legalize tobacco again and ruin everyone's lungs?
I have been pwned because my
Yes, they were designed to produce electricity. Modern diesel locomotives do not couple the diesel engines directly to the drive wheels, but rather use them to turn generators. The electricity produced is then used to run electric motors that power the drive wheels.
It may seem inefficient, but you've got to remember how powerful a locomotive is. Starting a train moving from a dead stop is just not practical using a conventional clutch and transmission. The motor and generator combination provides the same ability to start from a dead stop smoothly and transform torque/speed ratios with fewer moving parts, and much less wear on parts.
And in fact, the motor and generator are not much worse efficiency-wise than the friction losses in the transmission would be. These things are designed for efficiency.
Of course, they don't natively produce power compatable with the power grid, but as the article says, that's easy (and also pretty efficient) to convert with interters.
These trains were built to produce electricity. In fact, all modern locomotives are. the engines are designed to do one thing and one thing only: generate electricity. there are electric motors that do the pushing.
My father was an engineer for Burlington Northern before Santa Fe merged with them, and i remember as a child, going to the engine plant, and actually being INSIDE an engine cylinder - they're massive!
When i asked my dad why they were so big, he said "they need to be, they run all the time and it takes a lot of electricity to pull a train." being a smart lad of 8, i asked "don't the engines push the wheels?" through a lengthy discussion that i repeated with him over the years to get more detail, i learned that the engines produce electricity and the wheels are driven by electric motors.
It turns out that this is more efficient, in money, fuel effeciency, and repair time (imagine replacing the drive train if it were not electrically driven). all you do is replace a motor, instead of a drive shaft and/or transmission. (simplified explanation, of course)
It makes perfect sense for them to do this. Resourcefullness demonstrated brilliantly!
Naikrovek
Some people bash California as being a bunch of ignorant liberal fucks. This is only partially true. There's a magical land in this very state where the water runs pure and the electricity comes cheap and the migrant workers, well, they are neither heard nor seen. This magical land is called Sacremento. From this shining beacon of cockjockery shines the shiny light of dumbfuckery. See up in Sac Town where all the tough choices are made they're insulated from the rest of the state's problems.
Using diesel electric locomotive engines to boost a local power station has cool geek factor to it but it is a stupid and short term fix for a very serious long term problem. The descision to deregulate power is a failed experiment yet our plucky leadership in Sac Town don't see it that way, they're rather spend billions dollars bailing out these failed and failing utility companies and their shit management. It is sad watching this all happen. It doesn't matter how you vote locally either, the State Assembly doesn't do anything to curb the jackassery coming from the Governor's office.
What the state needs is regulated and less externally dependant electrical power. The state has been growing temendously in the past 20 years but hasn't seen the construction of a single new power plant, nuclear or otherwise. The population in the bay area has boomed as well as the populations of San Diego and Orange counties. A lot of people are moving into Riverside and San Bernadino counties out towards the deserts where they run their air conditioner 24/7 and water their lawns in the middle of the day because they don't know how to live in a desert. These sort of people are a huge strain on the power grid in Southern California and makes the boards of SoCal Edision cream their pants. Running a couple trains down there during the summer to give some extra go juice to people does not solve the problem. Nevada has its own burgeoning population in and around Las Vegas they've got to provide power and water for, they aren't going to able to export power to California for too much longer.
The state needs more eletrical plants. There are plenty of clean-ish power plant designs in common use around the world that the state could use for a basis for new plants. It is getting ridiculous that these retarded stopgap measures are being suggested and implimented when the real solution is so clear cut. There's plenty of plants that can be upgraded to use cleaner technology while at the same time increasing their output. It'd be a much better use than billion dollar bonds being spent to cover the cost of crooked deregulated utility companies.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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).
They are extremly inefficient, and burn DIESEL!
When tuned properly, a diesel engine is just as clean as gasoline. Plus diesel is more efficient, so you get more power per gallon. (Diesel powered small cars get much better mileage than their gas counterparts)
Is your need for air conditioning SO great that you have to have 48 diesel engines running YEAR ROUND and polluting the earth to ONLY produce 2.1 megawatts each?
It will only produce as much pollution as a few semi trucks put together.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
In my state (not in the USA) the stop-gap measure was old jet engines burning kerosine (or some similarly expensive fuel). Like California there was no excuse for it to happen, just incredibly stupid and short sighted actions on the part of those in control.
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.
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
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
Because everyone has complained about the current, stationary natural gas powerplants polluting the air, they will take them and put them on flatbed cars and drive them up and down the train tracks. This will have the double benefit of bailing out Amtrak and allowing the deisel generators to continue to belch out known harmful chemicals all day and all night, further allowing the government to completely ignore solar power.
I just don't get why the state that has most of the Mojave Desert can't set up a decent solar energy system, at least for the bottom half of the state.
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
I have never heard an environmentalist opposed to solar or wind power. Come to think of it, I have never heard anyone strongly opposed to solar and wind power, except people whose livelihood depends on the continued consumption of non-renewable resources.
Reality has a liberal bias
You would think that after the rolling black/brownouts they've experienced in the last year or so that Californians would be more conscientious of the need to conserve energy wherever possible.
/. readers from California reading this who care to offer a first hand perspective? Are you using just as much energy as before the current crisis? Have you taken any measures to cut down on your consumption? What's your local government doing to promote energy efficiency?
But, from what my friends in SF and LA tell me, the average Joe is still getting through as much power as before, if not more, despite the rise in the price of electricity.
Any
Some detailed on the ground information would be appreciated.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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.
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.
Am I the only one who might think that a field of well, windmills, more or less, might actually not be the worst thing in the world to look at? Heck, if anyone wants to put one of those, or a nice radio telescope array right next to me, go right ahead.
I have never heard an environmentalist opposed to solar or wind power. Come to think of it, I have never heard anyone strongly opposed to solar and wind power, except people whose livelihood depends on the continued consumption of non-renewable resources.
Of course they're not opposed to the idea of solar or wind power. Now go try to build a solar or wind power plant.
"You can't put it there! There's trees there! Oh, not there! You'll confuse the antelopes..."
-JDF
Second sentence from the article.. And who is muddying the conversation?