the Solar Powered railway

[tankist]

nahhh, i just think our OP had bit different thought process and final goal on this one.
normally one would go:
"I want to run model railroad. i need to power it somehow. solution - i'll use battery/outlet/whatever power."
here however i feel that thought process went somewhere along:
" i want to use the green Solar power. what i'm going to power with it? ohhh, a model railroad (psychedelic colored). and i have rats..."

OP, take no offence plz, J/K

at a times however we all (or at least some of us) tend to think backwards. i'm for example concerned where i'm going to stick my doubleslip switch into layout. i do realize planning a layout around a feature is perhaps bad idea but i cant help it, i like those thingies a lot (just won another one, yey!!) and i need to have one in it. naturally i will have to sacrifice something for it (prototypicality perhaps) but i'm ok with this price.
however i feel that shade "control" is just to much of a inconvenience here

 

[smiley]

nahhh, i just think our OP had bit different thought process and final goal on this one.
normally one would go:
"I want to run model railroad. i need to power it somehow. solution - i'll use battery/outlet/whatever power."
here however i feel that thought process went somewhere along:
" i want to use the green Solar power. what i'm going to power with it? ohhh, a model railroad (psychedelic colored). and i have rats..."

OP, take no offence plz, J/K

haha you more or less nailed it right there. model railroad became the vehicle of choice since it's got that old timey feeling. I'm personally rather fond of anything from the pre-automobile era.

by the way that cable photo is quite something... too bad its cut off right above the cable junction.

The latest nutty idea came out of a visit to the science museum yesterday, where they had an exhibition on magnetism. I suppose you folks can guess where that is headed...

 

[smiley]

The San Francisco, Berkeley, Fremont, and Elsewhere is proud to announce inauguration of passenger service today with the first run of the Sunrise Limited.

"While our art crews have yet to start on their work, we're all excited to see that things have been merrily rolling along," said a SFBF&E spokeswoman. To meet the rapid demand for restoration of rail service along the line in the midst of a fuel shortage, technicians had labored overtime to attach solar modules to the roof using, uh, very large rubber bands. "It wasn't easy, but you get a good dozen strong folks up there and it stays on pretty good."

The passenger cars are old Kasiner aluminum coaches (we believe in Recycling around these parts), one of which is slipped over an engine chassis on the lead car. (Still need to bend the car body a little more to get it to fit all the way)

Despite the heavy metal coaches the train still makes good speed on the straight track, though the full-length carriages don't quite handle curves too well. Here the locomotive is pulling two solar panel cars plus a fourth dummy car up a slight grade on the Garden Route.

Current technical issues in progress:
- The "layout" as it is so far is a one-way run, as there's no room to close the loop easily. I suppose I'll have to rig a switch that can get the train to run backwards after it reaches the end of the line.

- While the current locomotive performs admirably, it'd be nice to have one with a slower running speed and maybe even a lower starting voltage. Any advice in this department?

 

[UP2CSX]

Umm....I don't quite know what to say. As kind of an experemental joke, it's interesting, but worrying about the running speed of a train with solar panels strapped on the roof with rubber bands seems kind of like worrying about the top speed of a Yugo. It probably has one but who really cares, since it's still a Yugo.

 

[JazzDad]

What EVERYONE is missing here is: This is the future of prototype rail transportation! All we need is someplace like Goodyear to start work on the giant rubber bands.

 

[smiley]

strange as it may seem, there have been experiments with putting panels on real trains! As far back as 2003, Italian railroads have been experimenting with PV panels to provide power for air conditioning and other non-propulsion systems. The A/C idea is actually quite brilliant as the panels generate the most power when its most needed.

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/10/italian_trains_.html

 

[UP2CSX]

Have you sat down and calculated the amount of amps and current it would take to run a real locomotive. I just have a dinky RV and it takes a 75 watt solar panel charging a four six volt golf cart battery bank just to run things like the TV, lights, and furnace fan. It still doesn't put out enough amps to run the A/C or microwave from a 5000 amp inverter.

A real train would have to run off solar cell charging a huge battery bank. You also need auxilary power to charge the batteries on cloudy days. You's also have to plug it in somewhere at night to get the batteries back up to full charge.

Any idea how much hazardous material is in a big battery? How about the carbon footprint building large solar cells? The auxilary engine still needs diesel fuel to run on cloudy days. I don't think the electric power you'll need to top off the batteries will come from windmills either.

You still can't make something from nothing. The propane/LNG genset engines, which use existing technology, have probably 10% of the environmental footprint of a solar train. I used to live in northern California and living in Berkely can make your brain go wonky.

 

[tankist]

Jim, he said powering sertain functions , not for traction.

smiley, first impression of solar panel is of course "green! weee, i'm going to hug some trees". however it takes vast amounts of energy to produce a panel. only now we reaching a point that panel will return the power (watt hours) invested in its construction in a year or two of operation. then there is environmental cost, those panels are made of not so nasty materials but sure not environment friendly nor biodegradable.

solar power from photovoltaic panels is still not practical enough just yet.at the moment all the decisions to cover roofs and such are purely PR, "lets make it look like we care about environment", "or lets pull some subsidies from government".

so if you want to go green, skip the panels and hire some squirrels

 

[jtudor]

Smiley,
If your passenger cars are not liking your curves, then they are too sharp. Try using wider curves and the cars will stop complaining, and also look more natural as well.

 

[UP2CSX]

Anton, no, he was using the PV panels on the Italian Railroads passenger cars as an example of running auxiliary equipment. He's been ruminating on solar power to run the whole train. I addition, the PV system on those cars is producing 1.1 kilowatts per hour. That's about 1100 watts per hour, or 53 amps. 53 amps would barely run the lights and maybe 25% of the air conditioning or heat pump. I guarantee you that those PV panels are still going to a battery bank and the head end power of the locomotive is still providing most of the power. As you said, PV panels are still not powerful enough to drive any large equipment without a battery bank. It looks good but the mathematics, cost, and carbon footprint just don't pencil out. Once we can get PV cells that can produce power in the half-megawatt range, then we might have something.

 

[RCH]

This thread reminds me of what Thomas Edison once said:

"We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Natures inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. ... I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that."

 

[UP2CSX]

Good quote, Ryan, but Edison, like so many of his time, believed we were on the verge of running out of oil and coal. Propane and LNG wasn't even dreamed of yet. It is now about 100 years later and we still have oil and coal in abundance and an almost inexhaustible supply of natural gas, most of which we produce ourselves or import from a friendly country, Canada. I'd hate to see the countryside littered with windmills and solar farms, neither of which are too scenic or safe. Just check out the number of birds killed annually by the small number windmills we already have and imagine that number being 10 or 100 times higher. I'd like to see us take the energy we already have in abundance and make it as clean as possible rather than spending trillions (that we don't have) on unproven technology that will have many unintended consequences.

 

[RCH]

Jim,

I think the technologies of capturing energy from the sun, wind and tides should be pursued, even if the current technology isn't as productive as those technologies currently in use for capturing energy from coal, gas and oil. If these alternatives are not explored and perfected, we will be up the creek without a paddle when the day comes that we finally have burned all the oil, coal and gas on the planet, regardless of how distant that day may be.

The current solar farm technology using PV panels is not effective, but other methods have been developed (see Solar Tower). Windmills are less than ideal when placed in the path of migratory birds, but there are plenty of places with wind where there are few birds. Besides that, the quality of air we all breathe, including birds, is becoming worse with each ton of waste exhausted into the air from combustion technologies.

 

[UP2CSX]

Ryan, I don't want to turn this into an environmental debate but solar towers are a complete no-go when it come to cost vs. benefit ratios. The experimental plant in Spain cost $170 billion dollars, had a 125 meter stack, and only produced 50 megawatts. A conventional natural gas power plant that expensive could produce somewhere between 330 and 400 megawatts. The one proposed in Australia is even more wacky. All the details are still vague but it would require about 300 acres of land and would have a 1000 meter high stack. That's about 3,300 feet, taller than any man-made structure on earth except a few TV antennas. Just the land clearing and material carbon footprint would be about three year payback before were even. No one has addressed the total cost but $700 billion per plant to produce about 5000 megawatts of power seems to be the agreed upon guess. We would need about 600 of these plants to supply all of America's power. That doesn't count the infrastructure like switching stations, substations, and thousands of miles of transmission lines. Even for the present administration, this type of mega-trillion project is going to be hard to sell, especially if you have nice view of the 3,300 foot tower from you backyard.

The problem with windmills in not just migratory birds, it's all birds. The blades tend to attract insects and other prey and the birds follow, not knowing they are about to be cut to pieces. I did consulting work for a large utility on the west coast and one of my jobs was to make sure we had all the dead birds cleaned up before took tour groups up to the wind farm. We had crews that were dedicated to this job and we're not talking about a few birds, we're talking 6 yards dump trucks filled with dead birds.

I agree we should keep working on alternate power and utilities are working night and day to come up with a cost effective method to achieve this goal. It will be done when the cost of alternative power matches or comes close to present fuels. We can survive breathing the relatively small amounts of pollution produced by power plants longer than we can starvation as government tax rates rise to near 100% to pay for presently unworkable solutions or freeze to death because no one but Bill Gates can afford to pay his utility bill.

I forgot to add that that cheapest way to acheive energy savings right now is to require all new homes to have all lighting and every appliance possible run on 12 volts. The estimate is, over 10 years, we'd save about 10% of our present electical use. If Obama would stop painting natural gas as a terrible pollutant, we could run refrigerators and freezers on LPG and save another 6%. There are a lot of things we can do now rather than spending huge amounts of money on things that may not even work.

 

[tankist]

Ryan, of course we should pursue solar energy. but pursuing does not mean sticking half baked technology everywhere.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/08/doityourself_du.php
here is a typical israeli rooftop view

each unit belongs to individual apartment within the building. if the system is tuned well even in colder but sunny winter day there is hot water. beginning early spring i don't remember turning supplemental electric heating unit altogether even in overcast days. i'd say 99.5% of households have this installed. its really simple to build, hence relatively inexpensive. and the cost of the contraption pays off in less then one summer. can you imagine electric/gas bill savings nationwide?
i'm at loss why this is not done here, plenty of hot and sunny places that could benefit. i can only think about
intimidated natural gas companies lobbying for city construction codes.

solar energy should be tapped. and it can be tapped really well if one can think outside expensive, environmentally unhealthy, inefficient (yet) photovoltaic panels. as i said for now (think google's roof top PV farm) its all PR.

 

[hamltnblue]

Should it be tapped.... maybe, but it shouldn't be required for people to do so.
Why is it that everytime the liberals/socialists identify a "problem" the solution involves their hands in our back pockets grabbing our wallets?
The entire climate change issue is bs, and mother nature is chiming in this year with record low temps. Anyone notice it's Mid August and there have been NO huricanes in the US? Al Gore's movie must have been a bit off.
We could change the story and call it global cooling like we did in the 70's.

The solar train idea is cute and a great science project. I think it was done well by the poster. The only thing I have a problem with is when politicians try to invent science. Next thing they'll be saying the days are getting shorter because of man made night time lighting and the wacko liberals will rally around that too.

Rant over, I think I'll go run the trains for a while and contribute to some more global warming.
Here's an interesting link showing over and over the how the world will end if we don't act now:
http://www.oilempire.us/climate-time.html