Interview: Hitachi’s Nick Hughes On Driving Innovation In Rail Propulsion
The title of this post is the same as that of this article on The Engineer.
As with the article I discuss in Hydrogen On The Line, it is another well-written and informative article from The Engineer, where those at the sharp end of innovative rail technologies give their views.
This is the introductory paragraph.
As part of a series of articles exploring the propulsion technologies that will shape the future of key transport sectors The Engineer spoke to Hitachi Rail’s Nick Hughes about the innovations that will propel the rail sector into a low carbon future.
The Engineer asked these questions.
- What propulsion innovations will help power the rail sector towards net zero?
- Can you outline some of your organisation’s own key activities in this area?
- What are the key obstacles and challenges to developments in this area?
- What is your vision for the long-term future of propulsion in your sector?
I find the answer to the last question most interesting.
Rail is going to become increasingly digitised and integrated into other sectors involved in smart cities, mobility-as-a-service and flexible green grid. Therefore, Hitachi Rail won’t be able to stay at the forefront of innovation by its self. This is why we are focused on building partnerships with other like-minded, innovative, clean tech companies like Hyperdrive Innovation, Perpetuum and Hitachi group companies such as Hitachi ABB.
Hyperdrive Innovation is going to apply its knowledge and expertise from the automotive sector, to develop a market leading battery for Hitachi trains. Perpetuum predictive analytics improve reliability and availability of existing trains. Meanwhile, Hitachi ABB’s experience of the power sector allows our battery train solution to incorporate charging, storage and grid management. These partnerships creates an entry point into the rail market for our partners, potentially leading to future growth and jobs.
However, it is important to recognise that the established technologies of today – battery trains, discontinuous electrification and high-speed trains – are the technologies will help achieve the 2050 net zero emission target.
I would very much agree with all that is said.
Drax, Velocys Help Launch Coalition For Negative Emissions
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on Biomass Magazine.
This is the introductory paragraph.
U.K.-based companies Drax Group and Velocys are among 11 organizations that have launched the Coalition for Negative Emissions, which aims to achieve a sustainable and resilient recovery from COVID-19 by developing pioneering projects that can remove carbon dioxide and other pollutants from the atmosphere.
This paragraph details the companies and organisations involved.
In addition to Drax and Velocys, members of the coalition include Carbon Engineering, Carbon Removal Centre, CBI, Carbon Capture and Storage Association, Climeworks, Energy U.K., Heathrow, International Airlines Group, and the U.K. National Farmers Union.
They have sent a letter to the Government, which can be downloaded from the Drax website.
Conclusion
I have an open mind about biomass and products such as aviation biofuel and techniques such as carbon capture.
Keeping the wheels of commerce turning, needs a sustainable way to fly and ideas such as producing aviation biofuel from household and industrial waste, could enable sustainable transport in the short term.
Carbon capture is very difficult in a lot of processes, but I feel that in some, such as a modern gas-turbine powered station, if they are designed in an innovative manner, they an be made to deliver a pure stream of the gas. A pure gas must be easier to handle, than one contaminated with all sorts of unknowns, as you might get from burning some sources of coal.
I am pleased that the National Farmers Union is involved as using pure carbon dioxide, as a growth promoter for greenhouse crops is a proven use for carbon dioxide.
Overall, I am optimistic about the formation of the Coalition for Negative Emissions.
SEA Electric And Toyota Team Up For Electric Trucks
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on AuManufacturing.
These are the introductory paragraphs.
Toyota’s Hino truck division has announced a major foray into electric and hydrogen powered trucks, with Melbourne’s SEA Electric set to partner in the development of a new medium sized truck.
SEA Electric manufactures electric vehicle drive trains in Melbourne and has been converting Hino truck models to electric here and in the United States.
Now the company will partner with Hino in its global Project Z which will expand its range of largely diesel trucks.
It appears that electric and hydrogen powered vehicles are being developed.
This paragraph describes the powertrain.
Running the SEA Drive 120 a powertrain, it is mounted on on a cab/chassis platform. The 1470Nm electric motor and 136kWh battery pack delivers range of up to 350km (220 miles), and a typical breakeven period of less than 4 years.
They also claim to have eliminated the need for a battery cooling system.
Conclusion
I am drawn to these conclusions.
It seems that there are scores of small companies all over the world developing battery and hydrogen power systems for trucks, buses and trains.
As with SEA Electric and Hino, big manufacturers are often happy to tie up with smaller technology companies to create new products.
Carnot – Is This The Next Generation Of Hydrogen Technology?
I first heard about Carnot on the crowdfunding site I use.
On this page on their web site, they talk about disruptive technology and say this.
The off-grid energy and long-haul transport sectors, unregulated until the last decade, must be net zero by 2050. Battery technology is unsuitable due to cost and weight. Hydrogen technology is considered to be the only viable solution to decarbonising these sectors. Carnot power units will have greater efficiency, lower total cost of ownership and greater range, reliability and durability than fuel cells. They are the key to unlocking a hydrogen future while minimising the impact to supply chains.
I have put a bet of a grand on this company, just in case it does turn out to be the next generation of hydrogen technology.
Waste-to-Hydrogen Project Set For California
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on Power Magazine.
This is the introductory paragraph.
A California company that produces renewable hydrogen has joined with a Louisiana construction group on a project to build a modular waste-to-hydrogen production facility.
These are some further points.
- The Californian company; Ways2H, also has a project in Japan.
- They aim to setup a pipeline of projects in 2021.
- The California Energy Commission has said the state is short of green hydrogen.
- The process can use paper and plastic waste or municipal solid waste.
- They can also handle medicinal waste.
- The systems appear to be transportable.
This paragraph is from the article.
Kindler said his company could produce “white hydrogen,” because the company’s process, which uses very high temperatures to turn waste plastics, wood, rubber and other biomass into gas and a carbon solid, can be used to sequester carbon dioxide and store it underground.
It looks to me, that if they make this system work, they will have found an alternative way to make hydrogen, by a zero-carbon method.
Conclusion
Could we see one of these plants in every local authority in the world to process all their waste into hydrogen?
I suspect in Ways2H’s plan for world domination, this is one of their objectives.
Siemens and Macquarie Form Calibrant Energy To Tackle Distributed Energy Market
The title of this post is the same as that of this article on Greentech Media.
This is the introductory paragraphs.
Macquarie Capital and Siemens have formed a joint venture to finance and build distributed energy projects, joining an increasingly competitive landscape in the growing corporate renewables market, the two announced this week.
The partnership, called Calibrant Energy, will initially focus its energy-as-a-service model in the United States, where corporate and industrial customers have become heavyweight renewables buyers as they seek to reach decarbonization goals.
It looks a good idea for a business venture.
I also like it, that two big corporate beats have got together tp finance and install renewable energy systems like solar.
Are Floating Wind Farms The Future?
Boris Johnson obviously thinks so, as he said this about floating wind farms at the on-line Tory conference today.
We will invest £160m in ports and factories across the country, to manufacture the next generation of turbines.
And we will not only build fixed arrays in the sea; we will build windmills that float on the sea – enough to deliver one gigawatt of energy by 2030, 15 times floating windmills, fifteen times as much as the rest of the world put together.
Far out in the deepest waters we will harvest the gusts, and by upgrading infrastructure in such places as Teesside and Humber and Scotland and Wales we will increase an offshore wind capacity that is already the biggest in the world.
Just because Boris said it, there is a large amount of comment on the Internet, describing everything he said and floating wind turbines as utter crap.
Wikipedia
The Wikipedia entry for floating wind turbines is particularly informative and gives details on their history, economics and deployment.
This is a paragraph from the Wikipedia entry.
Hywind Scotland has 5 floating turbines with a total capacity of 30 MW, and operated since 2017. Japan has 4 floating turbines with a combined 16 MW capacity.
Wikipedia also has an entry for Hywind Scotland, which starts with this sentence.
Hywind Scotland is the world’s first commercial wind farm using floating wind turbines, situated 29 kilometres (18 mi) off Peterhead, Scotland. The farm has five 6 MW Hywind floating turbines with a total capacity of 30 MW. It is operated by Hywind (Scotland) Limited, a joint venture of Equinor (75%) and Masdar (25%)
Wikipedia, also says this about the performance of Hywind Scotland.
In its first two years of operation the facility has averaged a capacity factor in excess of 50%.
That is good performance for a wind farm.
Hywind
There is more about Hywind on this page of the Equinor web site, which is entitled How Hywind Works.
This is the opening paragraph.
Hywind is a floating wind turbine design based on a single floating cylindrical spar buoy moored by cables or chains to the sea bed. Its substructure is ballasted so that the entire construction floats upright. Hywind combines familiar technologies from the offshore and wind power industries into a new design.
I’ve also found this promotional video on the Equinor web site.
Note that Statoil; the Norwegian government’s state-owned oil company, was renamed Equinor in 2018.
Balaena Structures
In the early 1970s, I did a lot of work for a company called Time Sharing Ltd.
At one point, I ended up doing work for a company in Cambridge started by a couple of engineering professors at the University, which was called Balaena Structures.
They had designed a reusable oil platform, that was built horizontally and then floated out and turned vertically. They couldn’t work out how to do this and I built a mathematical model, which showed how it could be done.
This is said about how the Hywind turbines are fabricated.
Onshore assembly reduces time and risk of offshore operations. The substructures for Hywind Scotland were transported in a horizontal position to the onshore assembly site at Stord on the west coast of Norway. There, the giant spar-structures were filled with close to 8000 tonnes of seawater to make them stay upright. Finally, they were filled with around 5500 tonnes of solid ballast while pumping out approximately 5000 tonnes of seawater to maintain draft.
It sounds like Statoil and Equinor have followed the line of thinking, that I pursued with the Cambridge team.
My simulations of oil platforms, involved much larger structures and they had some other unique features, which I’m not going to put here, as someone might give me a nice sum for the information.
Sadly, in the end Balaena Structures failed.
I actually proposed using a Balaena as a wind power platform in Could a Balaena-Like Structure Be Used As a Wind Power Platform?, which I wrote in 2011.
I believe that their designs could have transformed the offshore oil industry and could have been used to control the Deepwater Horizon accident. I talked about this in The Balaena Lives, which again is from 2011.
Conclusion
It is my view, that floating wind farms are the future.
But then I’ve done the mathematics of these structures!
Did Boris’s advisors, as I doubt he knows the mathematics of oblique cylinders and how to solve simultaneous differential equations, do the mathematics or just read the brochures?
I will predict, that today’s structures will look primitive to some of those developed before 2030.
New Transmission Technology Is Helping UK Offshore Wind Farms Go Bigger, Farther
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on Reve.
It is rather technical, but it describes how the electricity is brought onshore from the 1.4 GW Sofia wind-farm, which is being built 220 kilometres out in the North Sea on the Dogger Bank. where upwards of 5 GW of capacity is proposed.
New lighter equipment is being used to convert the electricity to and from DC to bring it ashore at Lazenby, on Teesside. Note that sub-sea electricity links usually use high-voltage direct current or HVDC, The equipment has been designed and built by GE in Stafford.
It looks like the North East of England will have enough power.
The North Sea Wind Power Hub
The North Sea Wind Power Hub, will lie to the East of the UK capacity on the Dogger Bank in European territorial waters. This is the introductory paragraph from Wikipedia.
North Sea Wind Power Hub is a proposed energy island complex to be built in the middle of the North Sea as part of a European system for sustainable electricity. One or more “Power Link” artificial islands will be created at the northeast end of the Dogger Bank, a relatively shallow area in the North Sea, just outside the continental shelf of the United Kingdom and near the point where the borders between the territorial waters of Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark come together. Dutch, German, and Danish electrical grid operators are cooperating in this project to help develop a cluster of offshore wind parks with a capacity of several gigawatts, with interconnections to the North Sea countries. Undersea cables will make international trade in electricity possible.
So will the connection to Lazenby, also be used to bring electricity from the North Sea Wind Power Hub to the UK, when we need it? And will electricity from our part of the Dogger Bank be exported to Europe, when they need it?
The North Sea Intranet of electricity is emerging and it could be one of the biggest factors in the decarbonisation of Western Europe.
The technology developed at Stafford, will be needed to support all this zero-carbon electricity.
What Size Of Hydrogen Tank Will Be Needed On A ZEROe Turbofan?
I believe that Airbus’s proposed ZEROe Turbofan is designed for the same market segment as a A 320 neo.
- This aircraft has a fuel capacity of 26,730 litres of kerosene.
- This will have a mass of 21.38 tonnes.
- Each kilogram of kerosene can produce 46 Mega Joules of energy
- This means that full fuel tanks contain 983, 480 Mega Joules of energy.
- Each litre of liquid hydrogen can produce 10.273 Mega Joules of energy
This means that to carry the same amount of energy will need a 95,734.5 litres or 95.7 cubic metres of liquid hydrogen.
- This could be contained in a cylindrical tank with a diameter of 4 metres and a length of 7.6 metres.
- It would also weigh 6.93 tonnes.
As the range of the A 320 neo is given as 6,300 kilometres and that of the ZEROe Turbofan, as just 3,700 kilometres. the tank could probably be shorter.
Note that I used this Energy And Fuel Data Sheet from Birmingham University.
Conclusion
Carrying as much energy as an A 320 neo will be difficult.
- Range will be reduced.
- A new more efficient airframe will be necessary.
- As volume is probably more of a problem than weight, the fuselage might be lengthened by a few metres.
Designing the hydrogen system will be challenging, but I would be surprised if it were an insurmountable problem.
The Anonymous Widower 