India is Rolling Out Trains With Solar-powered Coaches That'll Save Thousands of Litres of Diesel (qz.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: India's massive diesel-guzzling railway network is getting serious about its experiments with solar. On July 14, Indian Railways rolled out its first train with rooftop solar panels that power the lights, fans, and information display systems inside passenger coaches. Although the train will still be pulled by a diesel-powered locomotive, a set of 16 solar panels atop each coach will replace the diesel generators that typically power these appliances. The railways estimate that a train with six solar-powered coaches could save around 21,000 litres (5,547 gallons) of diesel every year, worth around $108,000. In 2014, Indian Railways consumed 2.6 billion litres of diesel, accounting for around 70% to the network's total fuel bill of $4.4 billion. The first of these trains will be pressed into service on the suburban railway network of New Delhi, one of the world's most polluted cities, before two dozen more coaches are fitted with similar rooftop solar systems. Retrofitting each coach with these system, including an inverter to optimise power generation and battery for storing surplus power, costs around $14,000.

Comments

Units

[ramsun]

Rs 28,592 crore = USD 4.5 billion, approximately

Rs 9 lakh = USD 14,000

Re:Units

[brianerst]

Rs = symbol for Rupees (the local currency)
lakh = x1,00,000 or x100,000
crore = x1,00,00,000 or x10,000,000

India separates numbers differently than most of the West - the first comma is at a power of three, all the rest are at powers of 2. Tens, hundreds, thousands, lakhs and crores are combined in various ways (with some older terms like arab, padma, neel and shankh occasionally used for very large numbers too)

one, ten, one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand, lakh, ten lakh, one crore, ten crore, one arab / one hundred crore, one thousand crore, ten thousand crore, one lakh crore, ten lakh crore, one crore crore, one padma / ten crore crore, etc.

Re:Costs around Rs9 lakh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike western societies, where we generally use every 3rd power of 10 as a reference (thousand, million, billion), India uses the 5th power of 10 - "lakh" is 10^5 (which is one hundred thousand), and "crore" is 10^10 (which it 10 billion) as its main "reference" powers.

Rs9 lakh should be parsed similar to how $1bn would be parsed in the US - 9 lakh rupees, which is 900,000 rupees. At current exchange rates, this is around $14,000 US.

Re:That's $20 +/ gallon diesel

[mspohr]

The article in Quartz states 21,000 liters of fuel costing Rs 12 lakh ($18,000) which is more realistic so the summary is the culprit here.