Could you please point me to sources where these shortcomings are aired?
Thanks in anticipation.
Dave
Modern Railways - April 2015 p42-43
Ian Walmsley (who most of you will know was formerly Engineering Development Manager with Porterbrook Leasing) has done the economics on it, with no help from the actual Class 379 team, who are doing a great PR act and some lousy engineering.
Walmsley did the calculations based on serving Sudbury and the battery size calculations came to 660kWh, rather than the 452kWh on the trail unit, which gives a cost for a single battery pack somewhere around £570,000. The life expectancy of the battery is around 2,000 cycles which equates to 5 years. I'm sure those of you who know the details of the 27.5 year MTU contract for the Hitachi Super Express program are shaking your heads at this stage (1 x 12V1600R80L engine comes to 800,000 with 27.5 years of maintenance support from the manufacturer)
Walmsley correctly but perhaps, in my view, over optimistically discounts the cost of the battery for bulk order and continual manufacturing cost reductions, giving a total cost on average of £300,000 for each battery pack. He doesn't explicitly commit but I'd suggest he's also working on manufacturing cost reductions offsetting inflation on the price of the battery packs and they'll remain around the £300k mark for much of their life, which gives a total cost of £2m for batteries alone over the 35 year life expectancy of a new build EMU.
£2m is just slightly more than the total cost for 1 vehicle of an EMU, and it's not a cost that can be written off/depreciated against, the battery pack costs money, 5 years later the next battery pack costs money and so on, there's going to be no discernible decrease in the leasing costs, which work out at something in the region of £17,000 per battery pack per month, going on Ian's figures.
If we go around sticking battery packs under even a fraction of the Class 387s they'll be receiving will be astronomically expensive. If they need to do it for all 37, you can see how expensive that gets each year - an additional leasing cost of £8m per year. £8m that someone will need to pay each year for the 5 years of the batteries life - either franchise or DfT. That's £40m to lease the batteries for just 5 years, though thankfully at the end of 5 years, they can be safely disposed of (we would assume the leasing fees will cover disposal costs). It is possible, I guess, that DfT might buy the battery packs, retain ownership and do something with the cost so it doesn't come out of the franchise, but it's still money being burned by someone, somewhere.
There's the thorny issue of track access charges too, I've never been able to find out how much the extra 8 tonnes of weight on the Class 379 unit would cost in a proper commercial setting, or how 12 tonnes of weight needed for a more sensible IPEMU implementation would impact on track access charges, but I'd expect the battery vehicle to be getting on for double the cost per mile for track access charges, so up from around 6.5p per mile to 12p or 13p, due to the way track access costs increase almost exponentially with increasing weight.
I'd be unsurprised if, when the entire cost of 5 years of IPEMU operation on the Great Western route is fully worked out, the costs come in at £50m and £50m buys a number of Kirow piling machines, it buys a number of road rail electrification vehicles and it pays a lot of salaries over a couple of years, if that sort of money is going to be made available, use it to speed up electrification, not to mitigate against late delivery.
