There's a lot of folks with a vested interest in pushing a hydrogen future (market participants who will see financial loss as fossil fuel use declines, natural gas infra, automakers who are trying to cling to non battery platforms), so it takes orders of magnitude of additional effort to bring folks back to boring, reliable tech (overhead wires or charging points) and batteries versus the "innovator hand wave" of various colors of hydrogen marketing (green, blue).
Building new catenary systems can be expensive (anywhere between $1M-$5M/mile in the US), but can possibly be avoided with batteries and charging at stations (or energy provided via rails).
The problem is political dysfunction at higher levels. California tried hiring SNCF to build their high speed rail, but that fell apart because what California wanted was impossible and didn't make sense. (SNCF built a line in Morocco instead)
It certainly seems to be at its worst when it comes to anything that involves building. So technologies that can run on existing lines without modification might find it easier to run the regulatory gauntlet even if objectively inferior. (See e.g. Los Angeles' sunshade-on-a-pole because it's illegal to build a bus shelter)
> California tried hiring SNCF to build their high speed rail, but that fell apart because what California wanted was impossible and didn't make sense
The third-party claims about the SNCF proposal mutated a lot in response to evidence that seemed to contradict them, the most recent form of it acknowledging that SNCF publicly supported the CV alignment that the story says they later opposed, and also paints the opposition coming after federal funding waa committed under ARRA tied specifically to specific projects in the Central Valley alignment that SNCF America was said to have then opposed.
When the UK electrified the East Coast Mainline in the 80s, that cost an inflation-adjusted GBP 600M, for 397 route miles. At that time 1 GBP was approx 1.5 USD.
Using 1.5, that's $2.26M/mile.
PS: Even in Japan, almost all freight travels by diesel to this day... they run on separate tracks to the passenger trains, although freight in general in Japan is less important since they don't have much bulk cargo, being a major exporter of neither food nor minerals.
The only scam here is the battery train. You can simply electrify the rail lines fully and eliminate all battery needs. That is the obvious solution. At least hydrogen makes sense for rail lines with no electrification.
Like what's the cost per mile to install overhead wires? Comments in an online magazine says $1M/mile[1]. You can buy 5-10,000 kwh worth of batteries for a million bucks.
Every train needs their own battery, all trains can use the same overhead lines. Plus, in Europe, most rolling stock is electrified anyway, and diesel units are only kept around for a handful of peripheral lines. Germans are famous for not being willing to spend anything on infra, but I'm not so sure battery trains make sense for them. On the other hand, it may make for another nice subsidy vehicle for local industry like hydrogen trains were.
Sorry, but never heard of that here, neither for the local trams, nor the >50% electrified on rail.. it is more likely some unhappy guys cut the signaling wires. Where is that?
Sure, they do just not very often (at least not here). Out here I'd imagine worn out pantograph shoes (since most trains here don't have auto lowering pantos). Otherwise the wrong tension on the wires or pantograph at the wrong height can cause some pretty spectacular failures.
If it's happening all the time you're doing something wrong.
Overhead wires have been around since the 1950s (actually the 1800s), they are old technology, everyone wants to support new technology. Nobody cares that the new is worse than the old (this is both in practice and in theory).
Overhead wires take quite a while to plan and build and for non-frequent service (1tph) and/or short trains installation costs and maintenance are quite high compared to buying e.g. BEMUs. Many of these services are shuttle runs with electrification at one or both ends and route lengths of less than 100km, so e.g. a Mireo Plus B with ~120 seats only a 580kWh battery (or less than 6 Tesla Model X batteries ) is used (https://www.vde.com/resource/blob/1979350/a41e9c3559af76fee9... page 24)
HEMUs for these types of services I don't understand. It's laudable that transit providers want to get away from fossil fuels (and putting up overhead wire is a long and arduous process, fraught with delays), but getting hydrogen today almost certainly isn't "green". Maybe "Technologieoffenheit" virtue signalling.
But looking at the plans of various german transit agencies for future service on non-electrified lines, it's pretty obvious that hydrogen has already lost for rail-based transit, with almost every tender that doesn't prescribe a technology going to BEMUs and studies showing that BEMUs and partial electrification or full electrification almost always makes more sense than HEMUs
Optimizing ecological impact of non-frequent services leads to diminishing gains. In this case, a diesel train you already have may be the best option.
BEMUs make zero sense. Just electrify the full route. You eliminate all battery related costs by doing this, nearly guaranteeing it will be cheaper in the long-run. I get the feeling that Germany is overran with "consultants" who are playing games with finances or are trying to harvest subsidies. The whole story feels like propaganda intended to defend against some kind of scam.
If by Europe you mean Germany, or by rebuilt mean maintenance, then, yes.
The level of rail maintenance in America (barely any) is illegal in the rest of the western world. Tenders for maintenance specify certain speed and safety limits that basically require rebuilding every few decades.
Only on private rail could a hedge fund approach work, where the capital of the infrastructure is extracted by way of not maintaining it, but instead slowing trains down and increasing their length to compensate for bandwidth loss.
One of the bigger issues is that it requires much more vertical clearance.
Rebuilding tunnels and bridges is expensive - tunnels especially are practically never built much larger than required. Stations, depots, carriage washers, and other related infrastructure will need to be rebuilt or heavily modified to account for the extra height of the panto, wires, and poles.
If you're building NEW track, sure, OHLE is the way to go. But there is well over 1 million route kilometers of rail in the world, and less than a third of it is electrified. Of the countries having at least 20,000km of track, only India and Japan are above 70% electrified. Cost of electrifying is estimated at at a miniumum of $1 million per track kilometer. (10 route km of a quad-track mainline would be 40 track km).
A large freight yard might be 40 tracks wide by 2 or 3km long... that's over $100m right there, and that's assuming the yard tracks are spaced widely enough, which they aren't always.
You do not need to electrify every meter of track. Trains have enough momentum that you can coast for fairly significant distances. The idea that you need an entire fleet of battery trains just for those short sections beggars belief.
An obstacle appears appears, and the train goes into emergency braking. You’re now stopped between electrified sections. It’s going to take hours to get moved, and the delays will ripple through the system.
A diesel will have to be dispatched… except it’s entirely possible it won’t be able to get you because there are trains stuck between you, and it’s not like they can pull onto the shoulder.
Hydrogen is a better solution for ocean shipping, long-range airplanes, and industrial processes that need very high heat. Even Elon Musk admits the last one will be necessary. Fuel cells are not a good idea because they require expensive catalyst metals. Hydrogen, in the form of ammonia running in combustion engines, is just about the only decarbonized solution that work for the big container ships. Large scale ammonia engines have been successfully tested and may go into production in the next few years for these applications[1]. For trains, it's not a good idea because you can more easily supply power with overhead wire and you don't even need to deal with batteries.
That depends on your ability to get access to electric. While you can imagine wires across the ocean (or at 35000 feet), it doesn't seem practical or cost effective to install them. However if you are in more populated areas odds are you already have electric close and so it is more cost effective to connect to the grid.
For transit use, a rule of thumb is if you have a bus every 10 minutes or less then it would be more cost effective in the long run to have wires to the bus (better than diesel or battery buses). However even when you have a bus every 10 minutes odds are you have enough other routes that don't have that frequency and so overall it isn't worth it even though in some places it would be.
Lots of lines are not electrified, because of the infrastructure cost of raising bridges for the overhead line. In some places it might be simpler to switch diesel electric train engines to hydrogen engines.
> For trains, it's not a good idea because you can more easily supply power with overhead wire and you don't even need to deal with batteries.
Rail networks with large stretches of non-electrified lines are extremely costly to upgrade, so battery-electric and hydrogen are the likely solutions unless there is massive investment in electrification. The US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Australia are prime examples of this.
Currently CPKC is working on a number of HFC locomotives that are showing very promising results.
Also seasonal storage. Batteries are good for storing excess energy on Tuesday to use Wednesday, not so good at storing energy produced in July to use in December.
Solid Oxide fuel cells do not require expensive catalysts and they can also directly convert hydrocarbon fuels as well as ammonia…not just pure hydrogen. And they have about 30-50% improvement in efficiency over combustion processes.
Hydrogen is needed for routes with no electrification infrastructure. Think long journeys across the empty parts of the US. There really isn't any alternative to that.
The main benefit of hydrogen that it is cheaper to store energy for long periods. When electricity comes mostly from renewables, which is expected to lead to very low, zero or even negative electricity during periods with lots of sun and/or wind, hydrogen could be produced for the cost of capital of electrolyzers + storage, which might tip the scales in favor of hydrogen.
Right now this is the case, but if roof-top solar is used more widely, it can happen even without subsidies. For owners of roof-top solar it should never be beneficial to turn run from the grid if not necessary, so coal and nuclear power plants that take a while to spin down might still produce oversupply, leading to negative prices
You're assuming that rooftop solar receives a fixed power price or is able to do net metering. Both of these are subsidies.
Without subsidies, somebody feeding solar from their rooftop into the grid will need to sell the power on the stock exchange, usually through a power broker company that adds them to their portfolio. (In Germany this is called "Direktvermarktung")
This power broker will remotely curtail (turn off) the solar infeed when the spot prices turn negative.
No, I'm assuming rooftop solar users just use their solar themselves, thus significantly reducing the demand the grid sees. Since there is (and will be) no way to penalize using rooftop power yourself, demand might still be below the generation left even with renewables feeding into the grid turned off. This, of course, assumes widespread rooftop solar usage and a lot of "conventional" slow power generation online (the latter will likely remain the case in France for the next few decades, since they're in no hurry to reduce their nuclear power plant stock).
I'm also don't understand why a fixed feed-in price has to be a subsidy? Is a fixed electricity price or a fixed gas price a subsidy? It could be that home owners are more comfortable selling their electricity for a fixed price and power brokers have determined that accurately measuring feed-in over time and adding remote-curtailment functionality is not worth the cost for small installations. I doubt we will see feed-in prices without any subsidies in the near future, but it could certainly happen.
Okay, if you assume non-renewable generation that cannot be curtailed, then you are right of course.
And your second point is also valid, a small flat rate infeed may be easier to bill for the broker than per-minute pricing with curtailment. But this will only be the case if prices aren't negative for too long.
Austrália has the largest rooftop solar installation in the world and our fixed feed in prices are 100% a subsidy. We have the ability to price energy in half hour intervals for almost every installation in some parts of the country and are on the way to 5 minute intervals.
If it weren’t for the subsidised price and general resistance of consumers to spot pricing we would have someone offering a service offering supply management by rooftop solar installations to increase the spot price, fewer green energy certs being sold, and way fewer installs. We would also see increased battery storage.
In the very long term we would expect electricity generation to become slightly more expensive than free.
People with solar talk a big game but the vast majority of them are thinking about their pocket and just hate our energy industry.
The fact is that if anyone other than a highly niche purely spot pricing business offered a truly fair price for solar the market regulators would be overruled by the government because of the political optics.
And it’s a subsidy that is paid by those who do not have solar.
I just don’t think your comment applies at all here. Perhaps there are other markets and societies but it’s not us. And we have the most rooftop solar per capita on earth.
The issue with this line of thinking is that electrolyzers are very expensive. I've read papers that estimated that using free electricity would only be cheaper than running 100% on the time for normal electricity prices of 8-9 ct/kWh (in germany) if free electricity was available at least 25% of the time. With energy storage for the daily variations already shaving some of the peaks off, I expect this to be surprisingly little energy (not even covering applications where hydrogen usage is pretty certain based on the lack of great alternatives).
This is a very outdated argument. Electrolyzers cost reduce as production capacity expands. All signs suggest that this quickly become a minor source of cost, in the same way PV panels went the same process.
I thought hydrogen storage was somewhat troublesome because of the cost and lifetime of storage containers.
Compare alternative fuel vehicles and you'll see that hydrogen vehicles are really quite impractical.
Hydrogen vehicles require tanks at extremely high pressure, and they might become fragile from the hydrogen.
Actually, natural gas vehicles (CNG) were more practical and still didn't go that far without subsidies. Note that although natural gas is found natively - in the ground - a significant amount of energy is required to pressurize it to ~3600 psi for transportation.
Now I would agree with you if your statement said diesel instead of hydrogen.
It depends on wether volume matters or not. The comment you are replying to speaks about seasonal storage. You can use caverns for that, like with natural gas. You only need around 3 times the volume to store the same energy as with natural gas.
For vehicles like trains it can still be advantageous compared to batteries if you have very long ranges you have to drive without the possibility to recharge. Batteries simply get too heavy, bulky and expensive then.
CNG vehicles are very common. There are millions of them. It's just the case that in the US, gasoline has been cheap enough to kill off any demand for them. But the US is not the world.
It is. For airplanes it's probably better to lose 30% of the energy and synthesize carbon based fuels.
Hydrogen is still useful as a store of energy to smooth out seasonal variations in solar and wind production though. On a large scale it's more difficult to store than natural gas due to embrittlement but not impractical.
I thought storing hydrogen was extremely difficult? It diffuses through most metals on relatively short time frames (days to weeks), and that's not even getting into embrittlement.
While hydrogen EMUs were first used in germany in planned service (with battery EMUs coming into service later this year), it seems that BEMUs might be more mature right now. The only HEMU being used right now is the iLint, and it has been in development for many years while the first "real" deployment is plagued with issues (to be fair, not all of them stemming from the iLint itself). Meanwhile it seems that BEMUs are being offered by nearly every company, with trains from three different manufacturers starting service in the next 12 months.
Hydrogen will probably see some use in railways, but more for freight and long-distance applications, mostly outside of Germany. I wouldn't be surprised if a large part of freight and long distance service in the US ran with hydrogen, with commuter trains mostly using batteries and conventional overhead electrification.
I just don't see it. It's just such a pain in the ass to store and handle. Locomotives are actually a better case for batteries than most, because you could keep the batteries in a secondary car, much like a steam locomotive tender, that can easily be swapped out on a siding when needed in about 10 minutes... or just chain as many together as you need for the trip.
Trains, especially freight trains, aren't that weight sensitive, since they tend to mostly roll along at the same speed.
Such trains could be fitted with a pantograph and operate directly off OHLE when possible. Actually, don't recall the class but I'm fairly sure the UK has a variant of one it's commuter EMU with a small built in batter. The route it travels has a few miles without wires where is impractical to add wires so it uses batterys to cover that gap.
Not being weight sensitive is the very important key point. It means trains of the future could use some non-lithium battery chemistry.
Likely sodium-ion, which is projected to be significantly cheaper due to abundant materials, safer due to its chemistry, more tolerant to hot/cold weather, and it's main drawback of lower energy density isn't a big deal to trains.
I think the power requirements for the train might be the limiting factor tho. It's not quite the rocket equation but you can't just drain the whole battery pack on a 3% incline and get 15-30% back on the decline.
a 4000 HP train is ~ 2,000 kWatts. The average diesel-electric locomotive uses 3.5-4 kwh / mile of electricity (according to chatgpt). So to go 500 miles we're looking at 53,000lbs / 26.7 tons of _just_ battery (doubled up weight to account for non lithium). The locomotive itself can weigh 120-220 tons. A freight railcar can weigh about 100tons.
For a yard locomotive where they are just moving things around this could be super useful. For hauling freight around it's a potential? You're basically losing a freight car of cargo per 500 miles.
And I would really want this thing to be NOT made of lithium ion cuz if the train derailed it would be fairly destructive.[
25 tons in a 5,000ton ore train is a rounding error.
A typical locomotive carries approximately 5,000 gallons of diesel fuel, which at 7lbs a gallon is already 17 tons, not counting the weight of the tanks.
The diesel engines will be even heavier (and they're Diesel Electric, so they already have electric traction motors, and the related electrical equipment).
Train's don't haul just one car, they haul dozens or even hundreds.
You need something like 500 tons of batteries, even with superior efficiency numbers taken into account, to match the energy of 5,000 gallons of fuel. It is actually significant if people did the math correctly.
That certainly changes things somewhat, but I still think railroads would jump on it if it meant, say, 1/3rd less maintenance and half the fuel costs. The move to tier 4 emissions is/was a big deal. They’re starting to have to use DPFs and SCR.
The problem is that the cost of batteries pretty quickly undermine the cost savings of not fully electrifying the rail. If it is just a few miles, it makes no sense to have a fleet of battery trains for those short trips.
There is no justification for BEMUs in this case because you can simply use direct electrification. The rails are already electrified except for short sections. It's actually a pretty rare scenario to ever need battery powered trains.
In reality, this is one of the silliest stories of the year. I'm guessing this is probably some kind of subsidy harvesting scam.
More than 40% of the german railway network isn't electrified, which supports around around 10% of of traffic. Simply looking at https://openrailwaymap.org/ shows you just how many small branch lines and less significant lines don't have overhead power for dozens of kilometers.
This means that for large parts of the network there is some traffic, but far from enough to justify electrification which costs around 1M€/km (and, with some tunnels, might even mean expanding the tunnel diameter). There is a reason DMUs are widely used for these lines, and expectations are that BEMUs might be even cheaper to run.
More lines should be electrified, but expecting it to cover everything is not realistic nor economically justifiable. See https://vm.baden-wuerttemberg.de/fileadmin/redaktion/m-mvi/i... for a study on how to run non-electrified lines in Baden-Württemberg which comes to result that BEMUs are cheaper for around half of the lines that full electrification.
I'm not aware of BEMUs getting some special subsidy (meanwhile electrification is heavily subsidised, IMHO for good reasons), looking from the perspective of the ones financing and specifying the operations.
For those totally unelectrified sections, you need something like hydrogen trains. This allows you to go hundreds of miles without power. But battery trains require catenaries at both ends for charging anyways. And the limited range of battery trains implies that the unpowered sections must be very short, and could easily be electrified instead.
Which is why this decision is nonsensical and seems like some kind of subsidy related scam. Whatever the motivation, it cannot be based in rational thought.
76 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadBuilding new catenary systems can be expensive (anywhere between $1M-$5M/mile in the US), but can possibly be avoided with batteries and charging at stations (or energy provided via rails).
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/clean-energy-green-hy...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
Can you just hire Japan Rail to build it for you, then?
The third-party claims about the SNCF proposal mutated a lot in response to evidence that seemed to contradict them, the most recent form of it acknowledging that SNCF publicly supported the CV alignment that the story says they later opposed, and also paints the opposition coming after federal funding waa committed under ARRA tied specifically to specific projects in the Central Valley alignment that SNCF America was said to have then opposed.
When the UK electrified the East Coast Mainline in the 80s, that cost an inflation-adjusted GBP 600M, for 397 route miles. At that time 1 GBP was approx 1.5 USD.
Using 1.5, that's $2.26M/mile.
PS: Even in Japan, almost all freight travels by diesel to this day... they run on separate tracks to the passenger trains, although freight in general in Japan is less important since they don't have much bulk cargo, being a major exporter of neither food nor minerals.
Like what's the cost per mile to install overhead wires? Comments in an online magazine says $1M/mile[1]. You can buy 5-10,000 kwh worth of batteries for a million bucks.
[1] https://cs.trains.com/trn/f/111/t/189389.aspx
EU wide it's 56%, brought up a good chunk by Scandinavia and Switzerland. Italy and Spain are the only two countries in Southern Europe over 50%.
There are a LOT of infrequently used industrial lines that see no passenger traffic, and maybe only see a freight train once or twice a day, if that.
Sorry, but never heard of that here, neither for the local trams, nor the >50% electrified on rail.. it is more likely some unhappy guys cut the signaling wires. Where is that?
If it's happening all the time you're doing something wrong.
https://youtu.be/Ou73R_wIwiA?t=113
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YqLB-TMvhg
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/one-injured-after-overhead-m...
https://sf.streetsblog.org/2020/09/02/bad-splices-point-to-f...
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/muni-wires-fall-on...
HEMUs for these types of services I don't understand. It's laudable that transit providers want to get away from fossil fuels (and putting up overhead wire is a long and arduous process, fraught with delays), but getting hydrogen today almost certainly isn't "green". Maybe "Technologieoffenheit" virtue signalling.
But looking at the plans of various german transit agencies for future service on non-electrified lines, it's pretty obvious that hydrogen has already lost for rail-based transit, with almost every tender that doesn't prescribe a technology going to BEMUs and studies showing that BEMUs and partial electrification or full electrification almost always makes more sense than HEMUs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...
If the line is electrified then freight travelling on it will be travelling on electric trains.
The level of rail maintenance in America (barely any) is illegal in the rest of the western world. Tenders for maintenance specify certain speed and safety limits that basically require rebuilding every few decades.
Only on private rail could a hedge fund approach work, where the capital of the infrastructure is extracted by way of not maintaining it, but instead slowing trains down and increasing their length to compensate for bandwidth loss.
Rebuilding tunnels and bridges is expensive - tunnels especially are practically never built much larger than required. Stations, depots, carriage washers, and other related infrastructure will need to be rebuilt or heavily modified to account for the extra height of the panto, wires, and poles.
If you're building NEW track, sure, OHLE is the way to go. But there is well over 1 million route kilometers of rail in the world, and less than a third of it is electrified. Of the countries having at least 20,000km of track, only India and Japan are above 70% electrified. Cost of electrifying is estimated at at a miniumum of $1 million per track kilometer. (10 route km of a quad-track mainline would be 40 track km).
A large freight yard might be 40 tracks wide by 2 or 3km long... that's over $100m right there, and that's assuming the yard tracks are spaced widely enough, which they aren't always.
A diesel will have to be dispatched… except it’s entirely possible it won’t be able to get you because there are trains stuck between you, and it’s not like they can pull onto the shoulder.
These sections are sometimes miles long.
[1]https://www.power-technology.com/news/man-ammonnia-engine-te...
Why would that be, except maybe in rare cornercases? You can electrify almost anything, and it'll be more efficient and less polluting.
For transit use, a rule of thumb is if you have a bus every 10 minutes or less then it would be more cost effective in the long run to have wires to the bus (better than diesel or battery buses). However even when you have a bus every 10 minutes odds are you have enough other routes that don't have that frequency and so overall it isn't worth it even though in some places it would be.
Rail networks with large stretches of non-electrified lines are extremely costly to upgrade, so battery-electric and hydrogen are the likely solutions unless there is massive investment in electrification. The US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Australia are prime examples of this.
Currently CPKC is working on a number of HFC locomotives that are showing very promising results.
It's very easy and fast to turn off a solar power plant. Without subsidies, nobody will pay to feed power into the grid.
And that's okay, ~0 is a good enough as a price.
Without subsidies, somebody feeding solar from their rooftop into the grid will need to sell the power on the stock exchange, usually through a power broker company that adds them to their portfolio. (In Germany this is called "Direktvermarktung")
This power broker will remotely curtail (turn off) the solar infeed when the spot prices turn negative.
I'm also don't understand why a fixed feed-in price has to be a subsidy? Is a fixed electricity price or a fixed gas price a subsidy? It could be that home owners are more comfortable selling their electricity for a fixed price and power brokers have determined that accurately measuring feed-in over time and adding remote-curtailment functionality is not worth the cost for small installations. I doubt we will see feed-in prices without any subsidies in the near future, but it could certainly happen.
And your second point is also valid, a small flat rate infeed may be easier to bill for the broker than per-minute pricing with curtailment. But this will only be the case if prices aren't negative for too long.
If it weren’t for the subsidised price and general resistance of consumers to spot pricing we would have someone offering a service offering supply management by rooftop solar installations to increase the spot price, fewer green energy certs being sold, and way fewer installs. We would also see increased battery storage.
In the very long term we would expect electricity generation to become slightly more expensive than free.
People with solar talk a big game but the vast majority of them are thinking about their pocket and just hate our energy industry.
The fact is that if anyone other than a highly niche purely spot pricing business offered a truly fair price for solar the market regulators would be overruled by the government because of the political optics.
And it’s a subsidy that is paid by those who do not have solar.
I just don’t think your comment applies at all here. Perhaps there are other markets and societies but it’s not us. And we have the most rooftop solar per capita on earth.
I unfortunately haven't been able to find great timelines for electrolyzer costs apart from https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Cost-of-electrolyser-tec.... This suggests that costs fell around 50% between 2000 and 2015. Solar panel prices fell around 90% in the same timeframe: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices?time=2000... (and even faster between 2006 and 2021 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices?time=2006...).
Solar cost decreases have been amazing, but for example wind was less impressive and solar thermal didn't scale well.
https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/22002-historical-cost-r...
Compare alternative fuel vehicles and you'll see that hydrogen vehicles are really quite impractical.
Hydrogen vehicles require tanks at extremely high pressure, and they might become fragile from the hydrogen.
Actually, natural gas vehicles (CNG) were more practical and still didn't go that far without subsidies. Note that although natural gas is found natively - in the ground - a significant amount of energy is required to pressurize it to ~3600 psi for transportation.
Now I would agree with you if your statement said diesel instead of hydrogen.
For vehicles like trains it can still be advantageous compared to batteries if you have very long ranges you have to drive without the possibility to recharge. Batteries simply get too heavy, bulky and expensive then.
Hydrogen is still useful as a store of energy to smooth out seasonal variations in solar and wind production though. On a large scale it's more difficult to store than natural gas due to embrittlement but not impractical.
Hydrogen will probably see some use in railways, but more for freight and long-distance applications, mostly outside of Germany. I wouldn't be surprised if a large part of freight and long distance service in the US ran with hydrogen, with commuter trains mostly using batteries and conventional overhead electrification.
Trains, especially freight trains, aren't that weight sensitive, since they tend to mostly roll along at the same speed.
Such trains could be fitted with a pantograph and operate directly off OHLE when possible. Actually, don't recall the class but I'm fairly sure the UK has a variant of one it's commuter EMU with a small built in batter. The route it travels has a few miles without wires where is impractical to add wires so it uses batterys to cover that gap.
Likely sodium-ion, which is projected to be significantly cheaper due to abundant materials, safer due to its chemistry, more tolerant to hot/cold weather, and it's main drawback of lower energy density isn't a big deal to trains.
a 4000 HP train is ~ 2,000 kWatts. The average diesel-electric locomotive uses 3.5-4 kwh / mile of electricity (according to chatgpt). So to go 500 miles we're looking at 53,000lbs / 26.7 tons of _just_ battery (doubled up weight to account for non lithium). The locomotive itself can weigh 120-220 tons. A freight railcar can weigh about 100tons.
For a yard locomotive where they are just moving things around this could be super useful. For hauling freight around it's a potential? You're basically losing a freight car of cargo per 500 miles.
And I would really want this thing to be NOT made of lithium ion cuz if the train derailed it would be fairly destructive.[
A typical locomotive carries approximately 5,000 gallons of diesel fuel, which at 7lbs a gallon is already 17 tons, not counting the weight of the tanks.
The diesel engines will be even heavier (and they're Diesel Electric, so they already have electric traction motors, and the related electrical equipment).
Train's don't haul just one car, they haul dozens or even hundreds.
25t of batteries and you save all of the hassle and maintenance of combustion.
http://reasonrail.blogspot.com/2015/09/a-cost-to-benefit-ana...
It looks like 22-66 kWh/mile, depending on size of train.
In reality, this is one of the silliest stories of the year. I'm guessing this is probably some kind of subsidy harvesting scam.
This means that for large parts of the network there is some traffic, but far from enough to justify electrification which costs around 1M€/km (and, with some tunnels, might even mean expanding the tunnel diameter). There is a reason DMUs are widely used for these lines, and expectations are that BEMUs might be even cheaper to run.
More lines should be electrified, but expecting it to cover everything is not realistic nor economically justifiable. See https://vm.baden-wuerttemberg.de/fileadmin/redaktion/m-mvi/i... for a study on how to run non-electrified lines in Baden-Württemberg which comes to result that BEMUs are cheaper for around half of the lines that full electrification.
I'm not aware of BEMUs getting some special subsidy (meanwhile electrification is heavily subsidised, IMHO for good reasons), looking from the perspective of the ones financing and specifying the operations.
Which is why this decision is nonsensical and seems like some kind of subsidy related scam. Whatever the motivation, it cannot be based in rational thought.