Future of Diesel traction in the future and will unelectrified lines have another fuel type?

[hwl]

The National Grid state that there is not an issue whatsoever, some local small cables may need replacing as part of planned renewals and that batteries & smart grid / charging will reduce the total generation capacity needed, removing peaks and using otherwise wasted energy at night, you better improve your research on your phd or l'd fail you!

What is this insane need to charge / fill at xx Mw/hr? I top up the charge of my car at night, in car parks or off the solar here & there, when doing something better with my time and not having to waste my life at stinky dirty fuel pumps! Trains will do the same, at night, in layovers etc and will use much less power due to regen raking / power storage.

National Grid actually manage very little cable overall and won't be where the EV charging capacity issues are. Those issuses will all be with the local distribution networks where the vast majority of the cabling actually is and will be very expensive to sort. Most of the local substation transformers designs assumes limited use over night to cool down.

 

[Bletchleyite]

National Grid actually manage very little cable overall and won't be where the EV charging capacity issues are. Those issuses will all be with the local distribution networks where the vast majority of the cabling actually is and will be very expensive to sort. Most of the local substation transformers designs assumes limited use over night to cool down.

Wouldn't that to some extent be compensated for by reduced use at other times, e.g. that the entire lighting load of my house is about 160W (LED), whereas 10 years ago it was 1600W? Not to mention the lower loading from modern appliances?

 

[HSTEd]

Wouldn't that to some extent be compensated for by reduced use at other times, e.g. that the entire lighting load of my house is about 160W (LED), whereas 10 years ago it was 1600W? Not to mention the lower loading from modern appliances?

People have celebrated the lower energy use of their appliances by using more appliances.

Hot water connected washing machines are a rarity these days, we have very high power electric showers, enormous televisions with unprecedented brightness, high power computers and numerous other mod cons.

Why? The main cost of taxi operation is the driver, not fuel, and an electric taxi wastes just as much road space as manually driving an old, large-engined, particulate-belching diesel Range Rover.

Road space is not really charged premiums is it though?
Electric cars cut something like 15p per mile off the cost of operating a car, including brake wear, fuel and such.

That will cause substantial increases in the profitability of taxi and rideshare companies.

Taxis might require more staff, but they pay their staff rather less than rail staff get paid.

 

[DPWH]

A cold fusion locomotive anyone?

 

[hwl]

It's not really National Grid's business is it?
The grid infrastructure that will need modifying is not going to be transmission assets.


Local small cables are where the grid infrastructure costs are.
Transmission costs essentially nothing, the distribution system is the problem, and planned renewals is not going to cut it.

A rapid transition to electric cars could easily add 30GW of grid demand in a decade or less, this is not demand growth we have seen since before the oil crisis.
This is combined with the necessity of withdrawing domestic gas use for heating and cooking.

(And this is before we consider Jevons paradox causing car use to explode as a result of the really low cost per mile of an electric car)

We could be looking at a doubling of electricity consumption in under 20 years, this will require enormous expenditure, just as it did before the 70s.


Outside of niche applications batteries are not going to make a significant impact on the energy supply, since the primary energy demand swing in the UK in a decarbonised system will be seasonal in nature.
And using a battery for one charge a year is going to get astronomically expensive, even before we consider self discharge concerns.

And we can't practically use electric cars for grid support without enormous cost and enormous losses from passing power through the LV system multiple times - which we really want to prevent.


I as referring to the statements regarding the number of charging points exceeding the number of petrol stations as if this means EVs are rapidly taking over the world.
They are not.
You have to compare apples to apples.
Saying I have more charging points than petrol stations is meaningless when petrol stations have aggregate charging power orders of magnitude higher.


If everyone charges their cars at night, peak time will shift to the night and the price of nighttime charging will go way up.
This is not a simple solution.

Agreed - FYI DECC (as was) and DfT have been aware of the scale of intervention required for circa 10 years.

 

[Bletchleyite]

People have celebrated the lower energy use of their appliances by using more appliances.

Have they?

Hot water connected washing machines are a rarity these days

That is true, though it's been true for years - since well before lighting mostly switched to LED.

we have very high power electric showers

Electric showers are rubbish. Quite a lot of people will have switched from those to having a combi boiler which is a giant gas shower which provides a far better shower.

enormous televisions with unprecedented brightness

With LED backlights, as almost all of them have, or OLED screens, the power consumption is a fraction of a classic CRT, even a small-screen one.

high power computers

Computers are very low-power-consumption, again particularly now all displays are LED-backlit LCDs or OLEDs.

Road space is not really charged premiums is it though?
Electric cars cut something like 15p per mile off the cost of operating a car, including brake wear, fuel and such.

15p/mile isn't going to make much difference in terms of whether a taxi makes financial sense compared with a train ticket. Most taxi journeys cost well over £1 per mile. This also assumes that we keep the situation of electric cars being basically untaxed, which is very unlikely to continue long term, as a lot of tax income comes from road traffic.

That will cause substantial increases in the profitability of taxi and rideshare companies.

That's a lot more likely than a reduction in fares.

Taxis might require more staff, but they pay their staff rather less than rail staff get paid.

They do, but as a train (the obvious basket case lines excepted) tends to carry far more passengers than a taxi this is more than offset.

 

[hwl]

Wouldn't that to some extent be compensated for by reduced use at other times, e.g. that the entire lighting load of my house is about 160W (LED), whereas 10 years ago it was 1600W? Not to mention the lower loading from modern appliances?

Average domestic use per capita has indeed shrunk but not by much. The population growth (and population densification in some area) in London area means that total domestic electricity usage is growing quiet a bit. Outside the wider London area total domestic usage is falling slightly but far less than any additional growth required for decarbonisation (e.g. electric heating / cooking).

 

[najaB]

Hot water connected washing machines are a rarity these days, we have very high power electric showers, enormous televisions with unprecedented brightness, high power computers and numerous other mod cons.

The total electric use of an immersion heater vs a cold water connected washing machine means less power is required overall. Same with electric power showers. My old 27" Sony CRT TV used 140W, a new 42" LED Sony uses 51W. My old desktop PC had a 500W power supply, my laptop uses a 74W power supply. And so on, and so on...

 

[bastien]

The total electric use of an immersion heater vs a cold water connected washing machine means less power is required overall. Same with electric power showers. My old 27" Sony CRT TV used 140W, a new 42" LED Sony uses 51W. My old desktop PC had a 500W power supply, my laptop uses a 74W power supply. And so on, and so on...

Indeed, the washing machines today use so little water the hot tap doesn't have a chance to run hot. The dishwasher uses less water than filling the sink. I've got a lovely, very bright light fitting with 20 bulbs. All LED, total power 40w. Less than the one bulb it replaced.

 

[Charlie Smythe]

high power computers

Computers are very low-power-consumption, again particularly now all displays are LED-backlit LCDs or OLEDs.

This is me. When i am gaming at 4k my rig pulls just over 1000 watts from the wall.

 

[AndrewE]

Indeed, the washing machines today use so little water the hot tap doesn't have a chance to run hot. The dishwasher uses less water than filling the sink. I've got a lovely, very bright light fitting with 20 bulbs. All LED, total power 40w. Less than the one bulb it replaced.

Our washing machine uses so little water that it is shredding lots of my clothes long before they should be wearing out! You can select extra water in the rinses (which gets more of the "soap" out and doesn't show up so much when you first use a flannel after washing it) but I can't find any way of winding up the volume of water the clothes are actually washed in.
There's no point saving water if it ruins garments, which probably takes more water growing new cotton in hot countries (where it is in shorter supply to boot) than it saves here.

 

[najaB]

There's no point saving water if it ruins garments, which probably takes more water growing new cotton in hot countries (where it is in shorter supply to boot) than it saves here.

Cotton doesn't need much water to grow. Certainly not a lot compared to other crops, it's a pretty tough plant.

 

[reddragon]

It's not really National Grid's business is it?
The grid infrastructure that will need modifying is not going to be transmission assets.

It is the National Grid who provide / manage the generated input to the grid and they say that they do not need any additional power stations let alone 10 Hinckley points

 

[reddragon]

Local small cables are where the grid infrastructure costs are.
Transmission costs essentially nothing, the distribution system is the problem, and planned renewals is not going to cut it.

A rapid transition to electric cars could easily add 30GW of grid demand in a decade or less, this is not demand growth we have seen since before the oil crisis.
This is combined with the necessity of withdrawing domestic gas use for heating and cooking.

(And this is before we consider Jevons paradox causing car use to explode as a result of the really low cost per mile of an electric car)

We could be looking at a doubling of electricity consumption in under 20 years, this will require enormous expenditure, just as it did before the 70s.

Yes some local cables will need upgrading but according to DNOs they are older sub-standard cables due for replacement in a similar time period. Reductions in energy use, LEDs, private Solar PV, better appliances have addressed much of that issue already. None of this affects railway operations anyway!

Ah, the daft 30GW joke again. That is the theoretical charge rate if every single electric vehicle in the UK charged up at the same time. Now do 31 million cars go to the petrol station at 5pm every Friday night? No they don't!

On average daily mileages, at tops 10kW/day is required that is 30GW per day, not per hour! A bigger issue is the banning of gas boilers from 2025!

All new chargers from June onward required smart charging as standard to address this and domestic V2G is ready for roll out too. Commercial is widely used.

Tell South Australia that batteries do not work! They closed a power station from the savings made by installing a battery!!

 

[reddragon]

Outside of niche applications batteries are not going to make a significant impact on the energy supply, since the primary energy demand swing in the UK in a decarbonised system will be seasonal in nature.
And using a battery for one charge a year is going to get astronomically expensive, even before we consider self discharge concerns.

And we can't practically use electric cars for grid support without enormous cost and enormous losses from passing power through the LV system multiple times - which we reallly want to prevent.


I as referring to the statements regarding the number of charging points exceeding the number of petrol stations as if this means EVs are rapidly taking over the world.
They are not.
You have to compare apples to apples.
Saying I have more charging points than petrol stations is meaningless when petrol stations have aggregate charging power orders of magnitude higher.


If everyone charges their cars at night, peak time will shift to the night and the price of nighttime charging will go way up.
This is not a simple solution.

And if electric cars really do take off, non heavily travelled train routes will simply be crushed by Uber lookalikes.

OK batteries. These are now considered the basis of a stable grid and are expected to dominate grid balancing within 10 years. Cars alone will provide at least 1TW of usable storage and grid level storage much more. Niche? No!! They will balance the grid and allow 100% renewable in the summer and eventually all year round. There are more than just batteries! Heat / pressure / counterweight storage are all used today as well. Local LV losses are irrelevant. My car will power my house in peak demand / high cost periods and charge when there is low cost / available power. Simple.

Apples. Who wants to stand out in the rain, handling toxic gas / liquids? 95% of charging is at home when you are in bed or at work, most of the rest is when parked out shopping / at supermarkets. So 25 million homes capable of charging 2 cars each with 75% having off street parking = 37.5 million home chargers, maybe 10-20 million work / business chargers (the humble 3 pin socket counts). I only charge when out to take advantage of free charging / parking. This week will maybe my first need to charge when out this year, but even that will not be needed with my next car!

Driverless taxis will destroy local / rural bus services and create huge public transport growth outside of cities. Trains will most likely be fine.

Steam trains have gone to museum. Fossil fuels will join them soon!

 

[Charlie Smythe]

Now do 31 million cars go to the petrol station at 5pm every Friday night

No, they don't but that's because they can go 500 plus miles on a charge. EV's basically require daily charging so yes people will all plug in at 5pm.

 

[Charlie Smythe]

I know its really sad. You can't beat a steam loco on a steep bank or a thrashing class 37 on a heavy train.

 

[HSTEd]

It is the National Grid who provide / manage the generated input to the grid and they say that they do not need any additional power stations let alone 10 Hinckley points

Leaving aside that significant generating plant is connected directly to the distribution system these days, where will this extra electricity be generated?
We are going to have to consume a lot more electricity to replace all the natural gas burned in domestic settings, and all the petroleum fuels used in transport and other applications.

I have piles of models that demonstrate this.

Yes some local cables will need upgrading but according to DNOs they are older sub-standard cables due for replacement in a similar time period.

DNOs are also not planning for any significant decarbonisation of the energy system.
It is not going to happen under current plans!

Reductions in energy use, LEDs

LEDs' savings have already happened.
Virtually everyone is on fluorescents or LEDs already - the number of filament bulbs I see has dropped drastically in the last few years.
The mass giveaways of CFLs in the last decade saw to that.

private Solar PV, better appliances have addressed much of that issue already. None of this affects railway operations anyway!

Solar PV is of almost no value to the power system.
Barring a mass rollout of air conditioning systems, solar power is off peak power.

Peak electricity demand tends to occur in February, at about 6pm.
Which is after dark.

The fact is that, barring mass use of air conditioning, electricity produced at midday in June and July is nearly worthless.

Ah, the daft 30GW joke again. That is the theoretical charge rate if every single electric vehicle in the UK charged up at the same time. Now do 31 million cars go to the petrol station at 5pm every Friday night? No they don't!

Does fueling a petrol car take several hours?
Is there a petrol station in every single house, as you are advocating?

On average daily mileages, at tops 10kW/day is required that is 30GW per day, not per hour!

You are confusing power with energy.
The average car drives about 7900 miles per year, which is about 20 miles per day, this ofcourse does not count driving less at weekends which will load the grid more heavily on weekdays.
Typical electric cars use about 0.34kWh/mile.

This comes to about 7kWh/day
So thirty million cars consuming 7kWh/day is about 210 million kWh/day, which is 210GWh.

If it was spread over the entire day that would be a charging power of 8.75GW

Since cars will likely be mostly charged at night as that is one of the only times the owner will have the car at a charging point they control and such, we are looking at charging over about 7 hours of the day, which is about 30GWe.

Adding lorries and the like makes it even worse.

All new chargers from June onward required smart charging as standard to address this and domestic V2G is ready for roll out too. Commercial is widely used.

Domestic V2G is technically ready.
It's just hilariously uneconomic, and likely to be unpopular when a person gets up in the morning to discover his car's battery is flat because it got pulled into a V2G scheme.

Tell South Australia that batteries do not work! They closed a power station from the savings made by installing a battery!!

That was instantaneous grid support in a rural and relatively week grid environment.
This is not the use case we are talking about here.

 

[HSTEd]

OK batteries. These are now considered the basis of a stable grid and are expected to dominate grid balancing within 10 years.

They literally aren't.
Not significant grid battery system installations are expected in the UK.
They cost astronomical amounts of money and have terrible amounts of energy storage.

Cars alone will provide at least 1TW of usable storage and grid level storage much more. Niche? No!! They will balance the grid and allow 100% renewable in the summer and eventually all year round.

100% renewable in the summer might be doable, at astronomical cost, but you will still end up with virtually all the power used in the system being passed through batteries, which will throw a substantial fraction of it away in efficiency losses and wear on battery packs.
In winter, you've got no chance, we have multiple week wind lulls in the UK, and unless you suggest having enough batteries to carry the entire grid for a fortnight or more, you will get grid collapse long before the lull ends.
Solar is of little use in the winter, in February in Manchester solar capacity factor is about 2%.

Local LV losses are irrelevant. My car will power my house in peak demand / high cost periods and charge when there is low cost / available power. Simple.

This is a terrible strategy for the system as a whole.
This means your house will start randomly and unpredictably drawing power from the grid, whilst not drawing it at other times.
This will increase the difficulties placed upon the grid operator as demand will randomly and unexpectedly shift around, especially when you unplug your car to take it somewhere.

LV losses are definitely increased in this strategy because you are now drawing the same amount of energy in random bursts, and since losses scale by the square of power transmitted.....

 

[HSTEd]

The total electric use of an immersion heater vs a cold water connected washing machine means less power is required overall.

Well it depends on how you value various energy sources.
Energy in the form of instantaneous electricity is much more valuable than heat in the form of gas, or hot water that was produced by a solar heating panel or a heat pump.

Same with electric power showers. My old 27" Sony CRT TV used 140W, a new 42" LED Sony uses 51W. My old desktop PC had a 500W power supply, my laptop uses a 74W power supply. And so on, and so on...

Those savings have already occurred however.
They are not going to keep happening. So we can't expect them to rescue us from the requirement for drastically increased power demand in a zero carbon energy system.

And power showers represent power that used to be drawn from the gas grid being replaced with instantaneous electricity use.
Even an economy 7 immersion is much better for the grid than an instantaneous power shower.

 

[najaB]

Energy in the form of instantaneous electricity is much more valuable than heat in the form of gas, or hot water that was produced by a solar heating panel or a heat pump.

That's true. And you're likely to see more use of both forms of extracting heat from the environment - I fully expect that in the near future power showers will just be used to top-up when the heat pump/solar panel is having an off day.

 

[AndrewE]

Cotton doesn't need much water to grow. Certainly not a lot compared to other crops, it's a pretty tough plant.

It does. Wikipedia says

Successful cultivation of cotton requires a long frost-free period, plenty of sunshine, and a moderate rainfall, usually from 60 to 120 cm (24 to 47 in)[citation needed]. Soils usually need to be fairly heavy, although the level of nutrients does not need to be exceptional. In general, these conditions are met within the seasonally dry tropics and subtropics in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, but a large proportion of the cotton grown today is cultivated in areas with less rainfall that obtain the water from irrigation.

and I believe cotton production is the main reason why the Aral sea has almost disappeared

The shrinking of the Aral Sea has been called "one of the planet's worst environmental disasters".[10][11] The region's once-prosperous fishing industry has been decimated, bringing unemployment and economic hardship. The water from the diverted Syr Darya river is used to irrigate about two million hectares (5,000,000 acres) of farmland in the Ferghana Valley.[12]["Mass cotton cultivation, introduced by the Soviets, remains central to the economy"] The Aral Sea region is also heavily polluted, with consequential serious public health problems.

 

[Bald Rick]

Road space is not really charged premiums is it though?

Not yet. But it’s coming.

Duty and VAT on road fuels raises around £40bn for the Governement. With electrification of road transport, that will be a big hole in government income. Full VAT on all electricity for all purposes would raise an extra c£6bn a year (my very rough calcs). Something else will have to plug the gap (pun intended).

For decades transport economists and planners have struggled to find a way to justify and implement usage based road user charging as a method of rationing capacity and balancing demand. The technology is here now. The justification is fast approaching (to back fill the loss of fuel duty). The politics isn’t there yet, but it won’t be far away. 10 years I reckon.

 

[InTheEastMids]

Well, haven't we all got massively side-tracked into a big discussion about the electricity system and domestic consumption and electric vehicles?
A lot of it is pretty irrelevant to this thread, unless the trains we're discussing are made by Hornby, so trying to bring us back on-topic...

The system impact of rail electrification is negligible, it's about 1% of demand now (~3 TWh out of 300 TWh GB demand), and even if all rail travel is electric, that percentage probably wouldn't grow above 2%, because of increasing electricity demand from electric vehicles and heating. It's fun (I use the term advisedly) to speculate on future generation mix and domestic demand, but that's for a different thread*

The options for low-carbon trains are basically biodiesel or 3 concepts of discontinuous electrification (ie)

1. with batteries and dedicated charging stations (e.g. the Vivarail concept) connected to the distribution network
2. with batteries and recharging from rail 25 kV schemes (e.g. the 379 IPMU)
3. using hydrogen as energy storage with electric drive, which in may be made by electrolysis at depot/lineside facilities (There may also be some hydrogen from waste streams like midstream petrochem, or from natural gas (with CO2 captured), but I'm ignoring that for now)

The first and last of these could require quite significant reinforcement of local distribution networks around depots or wherever you want to recharge them - as HSTed pointed out. However, given NR's track record, it may still look pretty cheap compared to rail electrification schemes - but then what doesn't?

I think the big change compared to the "bionic duckweed" days of 2007-ish is that technology has brought forward 3 reasonably credible concepts (albeit none are sufficiently mature - we're still putting too much faith in immature technology (think Railtrack and moving block signalling!). These now need to battle for market share in competition with conventional electrification. I'm really interested to understand the issues which tip different railway lines down different technology paths.

*If people do want to debate future energy- I'd suggest looking at publications from the Energy Systems Catapult, Committee on Climate Change, UKERC and the National Grid Future Energy Scenarios to help inform your own opinions. A lot of modelling goes into this, but one thing that people repeatedly get wrong is thinking models are predictions of the future. They're not, they're snapshots of *a* future, and should be used to develop your thinking, e.g. "What has to happen for this future to come true?" and "Why might it not happen?". Example: In 2013 nearly all models still predicted large amounts of new nuclear, and some people assured me this *would* happen, yet it hasn't because the work didn't model the lack of investor appetite for very risky "bet the company" nuclear projects, even though this was already obvious as EDF and DECC inched towards the Hinkley Point C deal.

 

[Bletchleyite]

And power showers represent power that used to be drawn from the gas grid being replaced with instantaneous electricity use.
Even an economy 7 immersion is much better for the grid than an instantaneous power shower.

Even better for absolutely everything shower-wise is a combi boiler. Mains pressure at a good temperature, what's not to like?

 

[najaB]

It does. Wikipedia says

It doesn't. I used to pick the stuff.

and I believe cotton production is the main reason why the Aral sea has almost disappeared

Of course, growing anything in a desert will take a lot of water in comparison.

 

[AndrewE]

It doesn't. I used to pick the stuff.
Of course, growing anything in a desert will take a lot of water in comparison.

Most crops other than salads are better harvested when they are dry, of course.
Are you saying that the publicity over the last decade or two about how growing cotton demands much more water than linen and other natural fibres is just environmental propoganda?

 

[najaB]

Most crops other than salads are better harvested when they are dry, of course.
Are you saying that the publicity over the last decade or two about how growing cotton demands much more water than linen and other natural fibres is just environmental propoganda?

'More' isn't necessarily 'a lot'. We grow cotton at home and we have less available water per-captia than many middle-Eastern countries.

 

[squizzler]

From a theoretical point of view, yes it would as gas turbines are something like twice as efficient at turning fuel into electricity. However, diesel engines are much more ubiquitous (meaning that it's easier to get spare parts, etc.) so they're likely to continue to dominate.

I think you will find mobile turbines are of roughly equal efficiency to that of diesel, but only if they can be run at their best output, hence speculation over their use in tri-mode where the batteries act as demand buffers. There are plenty of smaller gas turbines available such as in helicopters and the auxiliary power generators in the tails of aircraft.

More broadly I think that the railways should aspire towards such advanced aircraft technology rather than the cruder products more appropriate to the motor trade such as your diesel power packs. Nothing wrong with technology drawn from the streets of course, it works very well in its intended application, but upcycling to rail use is not always successful as we have seen in the pacer.

 

[Bletchleyite]

More broadly I think that the railways should aspire towards such advanced aircraft technology rather than the cruder products more appropriate to the motor trade such as your diesel power packs. Nothing wrong with technology drawn from the streets of course, it works very well in its intended application, but upcycling to rail use is not always successful as we have seen in the pacer.

The jet engine is actually quite crude, and far more polluting than a modern internal combustion engine. It's used in aircraft because it's simple, light for the power it offers and incredibly reliable. Just because it has wings and contains some highly precision engineering doesn't make it advanced.