Trains are a good way to get freight around the place. Better for large volumes of low value materials of course on an island our size. But still, nice and environmental:
Escalating energy costs are holding back electrification of European rail freight, which supply chain insiders warned could force more freight back onto roads.
On Monday, UK operator DB Cargo mothballed its fleet of 24 electric locomotives, CEO Andrea Rossi informing colleagues the decision was based on the “current economic climate”.
He told them: “It simply doesn’t make sense incurring additional cost of running and maintaining the Class 90s when we have an alternative fleet of Class 66 locomotives at our disposal.”
Or as another report puts it:
But those aspirations were dealt a blow last week with the news that DB Cargo UK, one of Britain’s biggest rail freight operators, was pulling its electric trains from service and replacing them with diesel models because the high cost of energy meant they were becoming too expensive to run.
DB Cargo, owned by German state railway Deutsche Bahn, said last week that its 24 class-90 electric engines would either be sold or scrapped and its class-66 diesel locos would be used instead.
If renewables really were cheap electricity then this wouldn’t be happening of course (yes, we do know that trains run on red diesel, lightly taxed).
The actual problem here is that a single unit of power or energy (we failed physics so hard we don’t know the difference there) is indeed cheap. If it arrives at the specific place and time you want to use it that is. But for power that you insist arrives when you need to use it then it’s actually quite expensive. Because not only is there the cost of the renewables generation there also has to be the backup system for when that doesn’t work.
The actual cost of an electricity system with sufficient dispatchable power is the cost of the entire system that makes dispatchable power available. Not the generation cost of the sometimes but not always renewables.
And thus as we grow out the provision of those ever so cheap renewables we have people dropping electricity use simply because it’s too expensive. Here on the grounds that freight trains pausing outside Didcot when the wind stops blowing, no movements at night - well, the unions achieve those things for us already, why would we have a power system that gave us more?
And thus the task for those who tell us that ever more renewables will make electricity cheaper. If this is so then why are hard headed businessmen dropping electric trains for diesel on the grounds of the mounting expense of electricity? After all, a theory must be able to explain the observable facts. Trains are going diesel - why?