Nevada Startup Stores Energy With Trains (fortune.com) 324
An anonymous reader writes: Nevada's Bureau of Land Management has granted a land lease to a $55 million project by Advanced Rail Energy Storage, which "proposes to use excess off-peak energy to push a heavily-loaded train up a grade," according to Fortune. "Then, when the grid needs that energy back, the cars will be rolled back down the slope...that return trip will generate energy and put it back on the grid."
The company claims its solution is about 50% cheaper than other storage technologies, according to Fortune, and boasts an 80% efficency in energy reclamation, "similar to or slightly above typical hydro-storage efficiency." Citing Tesla's factory, the magazine callsthe project "further evidence for Nevadaâ(TM)s emergence as a leading region for innovative transportation and energy projects."
The company claims its solution is about 50% cheaper than other storage technologies, according to Fortune, and boasts an 80% efficency in energy reclamation, "similar to or slightly above typical hydro-storage efficiency." Citing Tesla's factory, the magazine callsthe project "further evidence for Nevadaâ(TM)s emergence as a leading region for innovative transportation and energy projects."
When I was a kid... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: When I was a kid... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not necessarily a bad idea. How about this? A lot of your excess wind power during the summer comes at night when it's cool, provided your turbines are tall enough. In many places the winds are stronger during the winter. That's definitely true in the central United States. What if you used that energy to compress air and store it? Then let it reach temperature equilibrium with its surroundings? Then uncompress the air and circulate it when it's hot. The ideal gas law dictates that it will cool as it's depr
Re:When I was a kid... (Score:5, Interesting)
More recently, there are plenty of sizeable buildings that use ice storage as part of their HVAC system. During the night, when ambient temperatures are colder, building loads are minimized, and electricity is cheap, power is used to create tons of ice. The ice is then used to cool the building the following day.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
We actually store truckloads of snow every winter in Finland, cover it with sawdust and wood chippings and then use it for early cross-country skiing in the fall. About half of the snow has melted during the summer.
Re:When I was a kid... (Score:4, Funny)
You're talking about Finland, then you're talking about Summer. What now, make up your mind, either you're in Finland or you have a Summer!
Re:When I was a kid... (Score:5, Funny)
Finland has two major seasons, six months of skiing and six months of mosquitoes.
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How did Linus phrase that? During Winter in Finland, you can either drink or code.
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Kimi Raikkonen on leisure activities in Finland: "Well, in summer there's fishing and screwing. And in winter... the fishing is bad "
Re:When I was a kid... (Score:5, Interesting)
When I go to grocery store to pick up soda, I am always amazed by the fact that the soda is room temperature. More than half of the year the soda could be cold just by drawing in some of the cold air that exist all the time for 6 months here in Michigan. I am amazed by the mountains of snow that are created in every parking lot. The snow will be there until the sun melts them. Yet there are a huge amount of freezers using electricity to keep food cool. The same goes for the refrigerator in my home. I have forced air gas furnace. It has a fan to distribute the air. All it would need is a way to draw in outside air in the cool summer nights here in Michigan to cool down my house. It would have to be smart enough to know when the outside air is cool enough to cool down the house. Take today for instance the sun will heat up my attic to about 85 degrees and the house to around 75 degrees. My bedroom will remain in the 70's well after the time I wish to sleep making it difficult to get to sleep. A few hours ago it was in the upper 40's or lower 50's but none of the cold air was used to cool down anything that I could use during the day.
Re:When I was a kid... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm amazed that western vending machines usually only serve hot OR cold drinks, not bother. Most Japanese machines have both, because if you are going to generate heat cooling one lot you might as well use it to heat another lot. The coffee-in-a-can is surprisingly good, and the warm green tea is passable.
Re:When I was a kid... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is sort of like storing energy in a vacuum vs a pressurized vessel. The energy stored in a vacuum is very limited (you can only go to zero pressure), while you can make a pressure vessel that can store a lot more energy in the same volume because the pressure is unlimited up to the point of condensing the gas.
There's a practical limit to how cold you can make things, and therefore the energy you can store that way, but you can get a lot of things super hot (liquid sodium, for example) and store much more energy in the same volume.
Maximizing energy/volume is what it's all about economically, because cost is directly proportional to volume.
Re:When I was a kid... (Score:5, Interesting)
Its not completely idiotic, in fact I think they do something similar in Japan. Some buildings have concrete storage boxes burred underground where during winter snow is dumped. When summer rolls around the snow is used to cool the building for a few months out of the summer until the snow melts. It doesn't completely cover the cooling requirements but it does take a big bite out of it and it also gives them a place to shove some of their snow that's out of the way.
Re:When I was a kid... (Score:5, Interesting)
There are air conditioning systems that make ice during off peak electricity hours and then use that ice to cool air during the peak hours. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Personally I wish more places would use ground source heat pumps (GSHP) though I understand that they don't because the systems are expensive. That's why I don't have one. When it came to replace my furnace and A/C last year I looked into a GSHP and it was about 5 times the price of a pretty good natural gas furnace (98%+ efficient) and a SEER 16 A/C. Instead of storing the cold you are storing the heat. In the summer a normal central A/C just dumps the heat into the air and gets less efficient the hotter it is. A GSHP will transfer the heat into the ground where it is kept and it doesn't matter how warm it is outside. Then in the winter the GSHP will take the heat that was saved in the summer, plus some of the heat that was already there, and transfer it back into the building to warm it up.
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No, that's a completely valid idea - in fact, it's what people actually did before refrigeration existed to store frozen fish:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Innovation in Nevada (Score:5, Insightful)
Citing Tesla's factory, the magazine callsthe project "further evidence for Nevadaâ(TM)s emergence as a leading region for innovative transportation and energy projects."
And the existence of Las Vegas is evidence for Nevada as a leading region for innovations in ways to needlessly waste energy and resources.
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Need != Want (Score:2)
"Need" is a matter of opinion.
Incorrect. "Want" is a matter of opinion. "Need" is not optional by definition. Sometimes people confuse the needs with wants but they are not the same thing.
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And the existence of Las Vegas is evidence for Nevada as a leading region for innovations in ways to needlessly waste energy and resources.
It does a marvelously efficient job of extracting billions of dollars from Los Angeles...
Necessity vs invention (Score:5, Interesting)
To be fair... it does make some sense that these two things would chase each other around in circles.
I think you are correct. Necessity is the mother of invention and apparently invention can be the mother of necessity too. The amount of wasted human effort involved in making a major metropolis in the middle of a desert in a location with zero natural resources to justify its existence is astonishing. Same thing applies to Phoenix. Great examples of doing something because we can without stopping to wonder if we should.
Re:Necessity vs invention (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the original natural resources of Phoenix was pollen free air - invaluable for people with allergies. Ironically, the successful development of Phoenix, largely based on this resource, has destroyed the resource just as surely as a coal mining town mines out a seam - get enough people in a city and they're sure to plant grass and flowers in their yards.
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I used to develop mobile computing data collection systems for field workers, and one time I did an installation and training session in Palm Springs, where for four months out of the year the average daily high exceeds 100F, and fairly commonly goes north of 110F.
I asked people about this, and they said that it used to be bearable because it was bone-dry heat. Then developers started putting more and more golf courses in -- it's a great place to golf in the winter -- and the amount of water they need to k
Las Vegas shouldn't be larger than a small town (Score:3)
You speak of the Las Vegas of today, when the city was established it was known for it's numerous natural springs
The Las Vegas of today is the only one we have. Whatever local water supplies it naturally has ceased to be adequate a looong time ago in order to feed utterly pointless displays like the fountains at the Bellagio. Vast amounts of water resources have been diverted to supply a city that never should have gotten larger than a small town. I've ever heard people from Nevada talk about ideas like diverting the Mississippi or the Great Lakes to supply water to the idiocy that is Las Vegas.
Re:Innovation in Nevada (Score:5, Funny)
Better part is maybe NIMBYS will stayl put, and not ruin places, like Colorado.
So you don't want NIMBYs in your backyard?
Mechanical storage (Score:2)
I read about this system and it seems interesting and it makes me wonder if there are any other forays into mechanical storage of energy, such as some kind of larger scale clockwork system of raised weights.
A lot of the locations able to generate power surpluses are in remote regions with poor access to the geography and water for pumped hydro, but generally have a lot of square footage that could be used to house some kind of mechanical storage system.
Re:Mechanical storage (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I recall reading about a huge cutting/shredding blade that weighed (a wild guess) between 80-200 metric tons and took over 8 hours to stop when it was shut down for maintenance. I imagine flywheels could indeed be a space-conserving and *extremely simple* solution for storing energy when there's abundant energy laying around the grids.
The output of a flywheel generator could be also easily evened out using gears and/or variable frequency drives. When the flywheel gradually starts losing speed, the gears and
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Hearing the "8 to 12 hours to stop" reminds me of MRIs and their superconducting (lossless) magnets that take a really long time to start. There should be some kind of low loss energy storage potential in superconducting electromagnets. Lots of problems there, but moving parts (in the major energy pathways) isn't one of them.
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Yeh, I'm not convinced there's energy storage potential when you have to use massive amounts of energy to keep the superconductor cool.
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I remember reading hopeful words about that in the Sixties...perhaps it's finally getting off the dime.
Re:Mechanical storage (Score:5, Informative)
The company went bankrupt a couple of years ago after building their first 20 MW storage plant. They're now owned by a private equity firm and making another go of it, so there's hope yet.
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A power station I worked at had a backup generator that size run by an engine out of a British fighter jet from the 1950s. Not big but it could run conveyors and coal crushers to get a coal fired unit up and running from a cold start. A pump storage plant I spent a day working at had two 250MW turbines that could run until the storage dam was dry. Not big for hydro or pump storage.
Twenty megawatts is tiny.
The Bo
Re:Mechanical storage (Score:4, Informative)
There are some very interesting things going on with solar power as well, but apparently humans simply love shoving, swinging, or spinning insanely heavy shit around as an alternative.
We're currently talking about power Storage, which makes solar more viable. We're not talking about power generation. #notevenwrong
Re:Mechanical storage (Score:4, Informative)
There are some very interesting things going on with solar power as well, but apparently humans simply love shoving, swinging, or spinning insanely heavy shit around as an alternative.
...or perhaps they simply comprehend the distinction between generation and storage.
The only way to win is not to play (Score:2)
If it's an ore train in no hurry moving only at night when plenty of power is available t
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The big advantage of hydro is that the useful mass cost almost nothing.
I live in a region that have many hydroelectric infrastructures, including the Grande Dixence Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] that store 400'000'000m3 of fresh water so essentially the same number for his mass in ton. Now try to replace this mass with some cheap metal like iron that is about 50 USD/ton and you have to pay about 20'000'000'000 USD to get the same mass alone.
This is a very big investment, not counting the global iron
Cliches (Score:5, Funny)
I can see this project going off the rails.
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As long as they don't develop the control software in Ruby, we should be safe.
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I can see this project going off the rails.
It would definitely go downhill fast if there are any accidents.
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And I think this project will go downhill.
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Whoosh.
train name submission (Score:5, Funny)
Re:train name submission (Score:5, Funny)
Trainy McTrainyface
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Virtual +1 Funny to you, my good sir.
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Very, very good.
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Very, very good.
So good, you could almost believe he'd RTFA.
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Sissy McSisyphus
Sisyphus (Score:4, Funny)
They should call it project Sisyphus [wikipedia.org].
Electric Mountain, Wales (Score:4, Informative)
Rube Goldberg (Score:3)
Rube Goldberg...call for Mr. Rube Goldberg...
Re: (Score:2)
+1 These kind of ideas work best on an overhead projector.
Direct link with animation (Score:3)
Grid Scale Energy Storage [aresnorthamerica.com] (complete with requisite animation)
It looks interesting, especially for places in the West of the US where water access is slowly becoming problematic. On the East coast (where there is a lot more available water) there is the Bath County Pumped Storage Station [wikipedia.org] which has 3GW generating capacity.
Not new. (Score:2)
Bill Nye had a similar idea that involved digging a large hole and raising a large weight with solar energy, then reclaiming it by letting gravity do the work. It's basically the same principle as weight driven clocks.
There's really no innovation here - they've just made the entire thing larger. we've been storing energy like this even before batteries were a thing.
Re: (Score:2)
They're both fairly pointless ideas now that we have the technology to build magnetically levitated flywheels in vacuum vessels. They have very low loss, they take up very little power, they cost very little to build, they store fairly enormous quantities of energy, and they are very efficient.
Flywheel viability (Score:2)
They're both fairly pointless ideas now that we have the technology to build magnetically levitated flywheels in vacuum vessels. They have very low loss, they take up very little power, they cost very little to build, they store fairly enormous quantities of energy, and they are very efficient.
And yet nobody has found an economically viable way to make this miraculous device and deploy it at industrial scale. Perhaps they aren't quite everything you are making them out to be just yet?
Seriously the idea of large flywheels to store energy has logic to it and has been proven at smaller scales. We're just not quite there yet for industrial scale use. Maybe soon hopefully.
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And yet nobody has found an economically viable way to make this miraculous device and deploy it at industrial scale.
False [slashdot.org].
Bill Nye proposes pistons lifting big weights (Score:2)
Bill Nye proposes a similar scheme, using giant pistons lifting weight instead of driving a train uphill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] starting at 7:40.
How long can it recover energy? (Score:2)
To me it seems a bit of a time limited system. If energy is reclaimed by rolling the train down hill there are two options: Either the train has to go really slow or the ramp has to be really long if you want to reclaim that energy in a reasonable long time. I can't imagine that let's say 15 minutes is enough time to catch up with top demand, a train rolling for 15 minutes at some speed needs a long track and thus a lot of space. If the speed were 15 km/h you would need a ramp of almost 4 km, an hour would
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As a poster before me already mentioned, flywheels could do the same trick, take less space and are likely more efficiënt.
On the other hand this system stores potential energy whereas a flywheel stores kinetic energy - each type of system has it's benefits and drawbacks.
For example it is possible to fill this train system up with potential energy and then shut it completely down for maintenance. You can't do that with a flywheel system.
Re: (Score:3)
It's not a train like you normally see on the tracks while going for a drive such as an Amtrack or a freight train. There are a large number of independently controlled flatbed cars on a series of parallel tracks. Yes the tracks are still long. When you have excess energy one or more cars are moved towards the top in order to take up the electricity. When electricity is required one or more cars can be send down the tracks using regenerative braking to create electricity. If a car reaches the bottom and e
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b) have you been to Nevada? It's full of empty space, mostly arranged on long gentle slopes
No, I am from the Netherlands, where it is pretty flat and where space is costly, so I replied from that perspective. If space is no problem and long enough slopes are available, the train solution might work.
Where I live (Score:2)
Where I live we pump water up a mountain into a lake to store energy. Seems to me a simpler solution than using trains.
I wouldn't be surprised if water would be slightly less efficient due to pumps and turbines having higher loss factor and due to water evaporating. But how many trains, tracks and difference in height would you need to have something equivalent to a small lake high up a mountain?
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The problem with pumped water storage is that you need to have a good supply of water, a reservoir above, a reservoir below, and a proper height differential between the two reservoirs. These severely limit the number of places in which you can place such a system. (The reservoir below may not always be a reservoir if there is a source of water large enough, such as a river, always available when the system is running.)
With this system all you really need is some relatively smooth ground running at a grade
talk about limited applications. (Score:2)
Not going to work well anyplace without mountains.
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It just needs a decent hill, not a mountain. It can go into a lot more places than something like pumped water storage.
Pretty neat (Score:2)
I'd be curious how much space such an installation might require and how easy it is to add capacity. I imagine adding more cars or putting more weight per car is probably pretty cheap in comparison to other options.
I wonder what argument NIMBYs will to try to shitcan it some places.
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I'd be curious how much space such an installation might require and how easy it is to add capacity. I imagine adding more cars or putting more weight per car is probably pretty cheap in comparison to other options.
Probably not. The cars would have to be designed at a maximum weight and running them below that specified weight would be a waste of capacity BECAUSE it would be so easy to load those cars with, say, rocks. To load the same volume with more mass, you'd probably need to use cast metal bars, which would cost much more than rocks and would probably eat the profit from the amount of stored energy.
And putting more weight on the cars than originally designed for would result in a completly new fleet of cars that
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The NIMBYs will say it will ruin the view. It's a big argument some people in Europe have against windmills. The big thing in North America against windmills is the so-called health problems which don't exist.
I'd just tell then it's either this or a nuclear plant. Your choice.
Numbers (Score:2)
A thousand tonne train of railcars pulled up a slope 100 metres in height, assuming no losses (spherical cow assumptions here but bear with me) will require Mass x Gravity x Height = 1 billion joules = 270 kWhr which at commercial rates for electricity is worth maybe $20 or $30 US. That's not a lot of energy storage given the capital cost of track and equipment and recurring maintenance costs etc.
Like is done all over the world already? (Score:2)
Essentially what is already done already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
--Q
Difficulties (Score:2)
Re: Or get a generator that works 24x7 (Score:2, Informative)
That's not the issue. The problem is that demand is highest during the day, and you end up with unused power at night. That's especially true during the summer. You still generate the energy at night but you waste some of it when it's not needed. In the case of wind, in some places the winds tend to be stronger at night. If your turbines are high enough in the central US, that's absolutely true. That's probably somewhat true out west, too. The goal is to store the energy generated at night so it can be used
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Re:The question is whether the solution is scalabl (Score:4, Interesting)
ARES quotes an energy efficiency of 80% which would outperform pumped water storage (70%), so that's pretty good.
Converting CO2 into carbon is being worked on [google.nl], but no large-scale efficient process has been found yet.
Re: (Score:2)
But at what capacity?
How many trains would you need to store the energy of an average tank / water tower (built at the same elevation as the upper station of the train system) and what area would be needed as storage capacity for trains instead?
Gtall already mentioned the rounding losses as the least amount of energy you can store is the amount that is needed to bring one train all the way up to the upper plateau.
Granted, it doesn't need water which may be an advantage in dessert areas, but there you could
Re:The question is whether the solution is scalabl (Score:5, Informative)
Their brochure [aresnorthamerica.com] has more info on their proposed solution. 2 rail yards, 8 miles apart, 70 4-car trains weighing 1000 tons each, capacity 2 MWh per train. Each train is about 60 m long and ~3 m wide. Peak capacity 333 MW.
Rail cars weigh 240 tons, mostly concrete. A block of concrete 15*2.5*3 m weighs that much.
The least amount of energy you can store is achieved by parking one train somewhere up the slope. Want to store 200 kWh? Drive 0.8 miles.
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Re:The question is whether the solution is scalabl (Score:4, Insightful)
There's an invention that can help with that. You may have heard of it, it's called "brakes".
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GP's post brought to you by: the people that sit on a hill at a light with a manual transmission and keep slipping the clutch and gunning it to hold their position.
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Their would be wayy more than one train, hopefully dozens, if not hundreds. I imagine a triple track leading up a steep grade with a large flat switch yard at either end. Enough for doxens/hundreds of trians at either end..
At any one time they could have ten or more mile long trains on two of the tracks generating electricity. One only needs enouigh specialised three phase motor/generator 20-50MW locomotoves for the trains on graded tracks.(third track woud be used to return locomotives to the top/bottom
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Converting carbon dioxide back into carbon is a lot harder than moving mass to a higher elevation, solid or liquid, and a hell of a lot less efficient.
=Smidge=
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Energy losses with surplus power (Score:3)
IMHO, concerns about storage energy losses when the source power system (solar for sure, wind mostly) is capable of generating power but for which there is no useful work for it seem to throw away useful ideas.
If a solar farm can produce 10 megawatts of power and the grid demand is 5, does it really matter much if the storage system is only able to reproduce 1 megawatt of the surplus 5? Sure, you've lost 4 megawatts, but not doing anything at all is a loss of 5 megawatts.
Obviously there are some economics
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You don't need to store a lot of them. Assuming that you can somehow build a single strong boxcar out of lead (more likely it would be many cars, but we'll use that for the sake of argument), you would end up pushing 3.4Gg up the hill. Nevada has 10,000ft mountains at its western edge. If you could push that weight to near the top of those mountains you would be storing about 9GJ, or about 7.5GW/h (assuming 12 hours of high usage and 12 hours of low during a day). That's a similar level of production to
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It doesn't have to scale. It just has to store and provide energy with enough efficiency to be commercially viable. This particular technology may not "solve all our problems", but I foresee a future in which we don't turn to just one thing to "solve all our problems". This is why we ought to upgrade our electrical grid; to allow more diverse energy sources to deliver over greater distances.
As for "mother nature's solution", it has a name: biomass. Environmentalists like biomass in principle because it
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Because pumped water storage isn't 80% efficient.
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Simple - some "obvious" things aren't obvious at all.
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Why not optimize it further so you drive freight trains uphill when the electricity is cheap and then downhill when it's expensive and feed back the braking energy to the grid?
The downside is that it would require a lot of tracks to be electrified, but that can be seen as an investment. You will also need some large holding areas at the top and bottom.
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Train routes through mountain passes are already pretty saturated, very expensive place to lay track, hence not overbuilt. There is no place to park trains at the top.
Re: why (Score:5, Interesting)
Sisyphean Railways
800giga joules per train = 1 las vegas minute. (Score:5, Informative)
Let's see now.
suppose they have oversized axles so we'll estimate 200 metric tonnes per car, then a 2000 meter mountain difference, and 100 cars long. we'll round g off to 10.
E= mgh = 200*200E3*2000*10 = 800E9
If they could release that in 1 hour then they could have 200 megawattHr
I found an old estimate that by 2015 Las vegas would need 10,000 megawatts of power on a summer day. Thus 50 trains could power it for an hour.
Or roughtly speaking 1 train would power las vegas for 1 minute
Steep mountain grade (Score:3)
OK, something here doesn't "compute."
The cost and challenge of pumped-storage hydro is finding an available mountain or hilltop where you can store enough mass in the form of water. Here you are storing mass on top of the hill in the form of train cars and electric locomotives. If you had enough room on a spare hilltop to park the train, wouldn't you have enough room to put in a bunch of water tanks, or better yet, and open-air pond or maybe an underground water-storage cavern.
And if you are going to
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OK, water is less dense than gravel, but water can be pumped as opposed to loading and unloading gravel from those train cars and the attendant friction loss?
There's no reason to load or unload the train cars at all. Their loads are static, and could in fact be poured concrete, so you can extract as much energy as possible when they roll back down hill, and store as much as possible while you're pushing them up hill.
Presumably water is considerably less useful in Nevada because it's a desert. The water isn't available, and if it were, it would tend to evaporate. Possibly brackish water could be used, though it's harder on equipment, but I don't know if suffic
Re:why (Score:5, Interesting)
why didn't I think of this????
Because it’s been done before. The Virginian railroad used to haul coal down the hills of Virginia; it was electrified, and the engines used regenerative braking. When they slowed down, the electric motors turned into generators and sent back power through the wire. When one fully-loaded train was going downhill, it provided enough power to get two unloaded trains up the hill; the net energy consumption was pretty negligible
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Please have someone who knows basic physics do the numbers before investing in this.
And what makes you think that they haven't?
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See, if you'd ever tried to get funding for a business, you'd have been asked for something called a business case that includes something called analysis...
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But they take it to Vegas every weekend.
Financing details (Score:2)
Is it? The write-up does not mention financing and TFA is at Fortune... Did they get any money from the DOE, like that failure we discussed yesterday [slashdot.org], or are they financed the old-fashioned way — by people voluntarily giving them money hoping for nice payback?