Did you ever read about the olden days, when they made all the electricity by burning coal? Perhaps you recall how they took the fuel to coal power stations on seemingly endless goods trains. Those days are thankfully ending, although not for the transportation of gasoline fuel yet. But even that could eventually be replaced by trains full of renewable energy for electric vehicles.
The Current Method For Delivering Electricity
The concept is actually dead simple once we understand the logic. We are making more and more of our electricity with renewable energy from the wind and the sun. We can consume that green power right away, or we can store it in batteries for later.
This is a huge improvement over coal power stations, where they have to use all the energy instantly, or consign the rest to a heap of cooling coal ash. Everything else worked fine in those carbon-polluting days, if we forget about global warming.
But there’s still a catch to the green energy in this apparently perfect world of the future. We still have to get that energy to our homes and businesses from the source. We can achieve that via an apparently endless chain of electricity cables, spreading out across the countryside on huge pylons.
So Why Do We Need Trains Full Of Renewable Energy?
This electricity distribution system comes at a cost that can be hard to justify for small groups of consumers. And to compound the matter further, fierce storms and raging wild fires can bring those cables down. A cheeky new start-up believes it can solve both these issues with trains full of renewable energy.
The company is developing novel rail cars, each with batteries able to power 12,000 homes for one hour. Train loads of batteries will collect electricity at the point of generation, and deliver it to end users. This sounds like a great idea but will it scale up, we wonder?
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Batteries and Hydrogen for Grid Stability
