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220-mph Solar-Powered Train Proposed In Arizona
Mike writes "An ambitious Arizona company has recently revealed plans for a solar powered bullet train that will streak across the desert at 220 mph, traveling from Tuscon to Phoenix in 30 minutes flat. Proposed by Solar Bullet LLC, the system comprises a series of tracks that would serve stations including Chandler, Casa Grande, Red Rock, and Marana, and may one day be extended to Flagstaff and Nogales. The train would require 110 megawatts of electricity, which would be generated by solar panels mounted above the tracks." Local coverage of the plan takes a harder look, noting that Solar Bullet LLC is two guys who are now asking local governments in the towns at which such a train would potentially stop for $35K for a legal and feasibility study. Total cost is estimated at $27B.
Whether or not this would fly will all come down to cost. I've made the drive from Tucson to Phoenix when it is bumper to bumper the entire way and going the speed limit is physically impossible. A half hour train ride sounds very nice in light of that. But the reality is the ride and the electric car rental on the other end have to be cheaper than driving down there in one's own car. Arizona cities are textbook cases of sprawl. It is almost impossible to get around in them without a vehicle, especially in the summer. It's unlikely too many people would want to just ride the train and not need a car on the other end.
Then there is that time thing. It's not making the trip in 30 minutes if it stops 5 times between the two cities. Maybe they are thinking of express trips interspersed with trips that stop? The article doesn't say. Of course the way things are going, eventually this would run right up the middle of one big metro area.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
This is what the green economy is all about. Get rich on the government handouts or by imposing government requirements of consumers' energy consumption.
traveling from Tuscon to Phoenix in 30 minutes flat
It is estimated that the journey at night could take up to 12 hours.
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I can see the fnords!
Solar powered train is more of a Shelbyville idea...
Solar Bullet LLC has already built trains in Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook, and by golly it put them on the map!
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
Arizona is not fit for human habitation. Best plan for Arizona is for all the people of Arizona to move to places like Pittsburgh, where there is plenty of water and nice homes for dirt cheap prices. That will be lot more green, enviro friendly etc etc than this nonsense about 220 mph train that connects two points in the desert.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
As opposed to the standard non-green economy, which is all about externalizing environmental costs, so that others can pay for it, while you rub your hands in anticipation of quarterly profits?
Lack of environmental regulation and incentives is a handout to companies that pollute; the cost is born by the general public (or, even worse, by a small segment of the public who are negatively impacted in a massive way (flooding, disease, loss of livelihood, etc).
Yes, people will take advantage of incentives -- this is true of any incentive. On the other hand, I consider people who bitch about environmental incentives and regulations to be selfish bastards who choose not to, or cannot, comprehend that there are true costs to environmental damages, and that these externalized costs must either be internalized by the parties responsible, or matched by incentives to be environmentally responsible.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Assume that the cost of the thing is financed like a 30 year mortgage. Just as a rule of thumb, with interest we're talking about a total of 54 billion. Just to satisfy construction costs, a need to make a payment of 150 million a month, every month. To make that payment, we need to have 5 million dollars a day, ever day. To get that, assuming a $10 a day per person spend, you'll have to have 500,000 riders a day, every day, traveling across Arizona. Is that economical? Are there THAT many people riding back and forth? I think this project is a stretch.
This is my sig.
110 MW per train sounds like too much. The typical power output for a locomotive seems to be roughly 5000 HP (http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/2008/05/23/ges-4500-hp-locomotive/). Even if we double that number, since it a high speed train, 10 000 HP = 7 456 998 watts. It is only 7.5 MW. You could power more than 10 of these suckers with 110MW
Yes it would be faster than by car.
It would? From where to where?
Last time I looked, trains could only travel on tracks.
Trains run to schedules, which means you have to wait for them.
Trains only stop at stations which means you have to travel to and from the station.
Trains are only faster than a car under the conditions that
1: you live near a station and
2: want to travel near to another station,
3: without having to change between lines or other modes of transport.
There's a very good reason people have embraced the car with open arms.
Deleted
They claim the cost will be 27 billion dollars. If they make 100 dollars per rider it will take how many riders?
If they build it using bond money you will have to pay the interest as well. It would take 270,000,000 riders and that is without interest. So if you had a million riders a year it would only take 270 years to pay it off.
So I would say that it is insane. Yes you could charge more for the ticket but I was using $100 as the profit on the ticket. You will still have to pay for up keep and other operating expenses.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I work for a train company, and not only are most of your concerns accurate there are quite a few *more* even.
f) Infrastructure. To get to those speeds you need to replace the entire rail system. Concrete railroad ties, carefully planned/banked track, etc.
g) HVAC on the trains themselves. Cooling is massive.
h-z) If I wanted to go on.
Maintenence costs would be prohibitive. Guaranteed. But if they can manage federal funding (they won't) they will soak up a never-ending stream of cash for upkeep.
This is one of the dumber ideas I have seen make this much press this quickly. People are so blindly interested in anything billed as "eco" or "green or "solar" that common sense goes right out the window. Trains are about as efficient a means of transportation as possible *right now*, how about going after the real areas of waste and inefficiency?
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Seriously, this is a rather larger undertaking. Generating 110 megawatts (per train, I imagine?) is no small feat. Especially for solar paneling. That's usually the type of thing you need your own power plant for. It's a nice idea, but you'll forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical of:
a) Solar Power only above the rails being effective
b) The practicality of any design that relied only on the rail footprint
Hmm, well let's do a little napkin engineering here and guestimate the footprint needed. Let's start with standard 1000 W/m^2 solar irradiance, and assume 2m wide cells over the rails. With that you'd need solar panels over 55km of track. Easy-peasy. Now assume inexpensive thin film cells at about 10% efficiency -- then you need 550km of over-rail cells. Which is longer than the rail from Phoenix to Tuscon would be.
If they could afford 30% efficient cells, then it'd be 183km, which is about the distance from Tuscon to Phoenix. For one car. If they have a pair of tracks, then they could have one going in both directions at all times. Is one train every 30 mins, for a 30 min trip, reasonable? Doesn't seem any worse than normal trains today. So I'm going to call this one barely feasible, physically. Economically? That's a whole 'nother ball of wax.
The enemies of Democracy are
People keep talking about urban sprawl like it's an insurmountable issue. As I've said recently, Japanese cities have massive sprawl and they manage just fine.
As cool as high speed rail lines are the big problem is that they're a huge waste of money if there isn't some sort of infrastructure for getting people around each city without cars. What American cities and suburbs need are extensive rail systems which service outlying areas in addition to the city core.
And this doesn't just mean a spoke and hub layout, this means that those outlying areas should be directly connected as well. Take a look at this map of the rail lines owned by a single company around Tokyo.
Want to be really impressed? Check out this PDF. In that map, Shibukawa, tucked away in the upper left corner of that map is 120km from Tokyo. That should give you a sense of how extensive their rail system is.
If you want people to take rail seriously this is the sort of extensive service you need to provide. I'd take the train to work if it provided me this level of accessibility. Hell, I wouldn't even need a car.
This is the embarrassment that passes for a rail system in the New York area. Just imagine trying to get from somewhere like Poughkeepsie to New Haven.
Of course, there's another issue. The rail system in Japan runs like clockwork. With far fewer lines Metronorth is incapable of ever being punctual. Every year they send out press releases stating, with pride, that their trains are on average only 5 or 10 minutes late. I rode the New Haven line for years and I can't recall it ever being on time. Hell, it was even late departing the very first station.
Every so often the train manages to pull down power lines or at least damage them sufficiently to cause significant delays as has been happening the past week or so. The bathrooms are a cesspool and unfortunately a lot of riders are slobs who leave their crap on the train when they get off. And then there's the vandalism.
Despite increased ridership the MTA, which runs the rail system around New York, can barely stay afloat without drastically raising fees or getting bailouts from the government. Years ago they began ordering new trains. I've yet to see one. But the bigger joke is that some of these new cars are being pulled by diesel locomotives. On an electric line! It's crap from the bottom up.
These are all important issues that need to be taken seriously if anyone expects a rail line to be successful. But an extensive rail system does make far more sense than any high speed rail line.
Unfortunately, in the US there are far too many obstacles for any such system to ever see fruition. First, are all the environmentalists who piss and moan about everything even if it were to provide real long-term advantages. Just as bad are all the residents who have this irrational fear of any perceived threat to their idyllic communities. They're all wrapped up in their selfish desire to preserve their little communities even if these projects would ultimately benefit everyone. In the Northeast there are a number of extremely helpful projects which have been blocked by just these sort of people.
I'm quite pessimistic about the whole thing. American's have lost that can-do attitude a long time ago and I think have grown quite self-centered. I mean self-centered from the standpoint of wanting to be sheltered by the government from all the little challenges of life. Although, I don't doubt that the government will spend untold billions on some boondoggle.
The TGV (french electric high speed train) runs 199mph in passenger service on many routes as of 2009 (some older routes are limited to only 186mph, like in the dark ages, sheesh!).
The trains used there pull somewhere around 9MW to do 200mph, and because to go faster the force required increases as a square of the speed, I'd imagine that the last 20mph being proposed could bump the required figure up to about 12MW per trainset. 100MW would allow for a couple of trains in the station, and a couple en route, so the number looks about right to me when transmission losses are taken into account.
C
I AM CONTACTING WITH YOU ON BEHALF OF THE RAILS CONSTRUCTION PLANING CORPORATION SOLAR BULLET LLC. I HOPE THIS DAY FINDS YOU WELL. MY ASSOCIATES AND I ARE PREPARED TO START THE MOVING FORWARD ON CONSTRUCTIONS OF A 220MPH SOLAR-POWERED BULLET TRAIN TO MAJOR CITIES IN ARIZONA AND ALSO TO BE PASSING THROUGH THE SMALLER CITIES SUCH AS YOURS. THIS WILL BE A TWENTY-SEVEN BILLION US DOLLARS PROJECT ( $27 000 000 000 US ) WHICH WE ARE PREPARED TO MAKE LARGE INVESTMENTS IN AT NO COST TO YOUR TOWNSHIP. IN ORDER TO RELEASE FUNDS WE WILL BE REQUIRED TO DO A VERY SMALL ENVIRONMENTAL STUDY AT THE COST OF THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND US DOLLARS ( $35 000 US ) TO SECURE THE TWENTY-SEVEN BILLION. THIS STUDY COSTS WILL BE SPLIT BETWEEN THE CITIES OF ARIZONA ON THE PATHS OF THE SOLAR-POWERED BULLET TRAIN AT THE COST OF FIVE-THOUSAND US DOLLARS ( $5 000 US ) PER CITY. PLEASE SEND IN HASTE THE FIVE-THOUSAND US DOLLARS TO OUR ASSOCIATES SO WE CAN BE MADE ABLE TO SECURE THE TWENTY-SEVEN BILLION US DOLLARS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! WARMEST REGARDS, BILL GAITHER, CO-PRESIDENT, SOLAR BULLET LLC RAYMOND WRIGHT, CO-PRESIDENT, SOLAR BULLET LLC
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