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posted by takyon on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the all-aboard dept.

A Californian company proposes using weighted electrically-driven rail vehicles on inclines to store energy. At times when the capacity of electricity supply exceeds demand the vehicles would be driven up inclined tracks, and when demand exceeds generation they are allowed to run down, generating electricity as they fall.

This link includes a video that shows a prototype vehicle (which appears to be built on a conventional locomotive chassis), an interview with a promoter, and an animation of a "farm" of these devices. There is a shortage of hard data, such as how much energy could be stored, for how long, and how steep the tracks are, etc., but a quick calculation shows that some thousands of these vehicles would be required for them to be useful. The control panel for this prototype has a power dial that appears to go up to only 20 kW. The promoter in the interview focuses instead on how the construction material can be recycled at end of life.

Motherboard story from 2016 when Advanced Rail Energy Storage (ARES) got approval to build a 50 MW facility in Nevada.


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:19PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:19PM (#701982)

    Anyone have an idea what happened to the first one in Nevada? They have a nice page about it on their site https://www.aresnorthamerica.com/about-ares-north-america, [aresnorthamerica.com] and say construction should take 9 months starting a year ago. But it's not in google's satellite imagery at all: https://goo.gl/maps/eg3U3eiKSC12 [goo.gl]

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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:09PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:09PM (#702029) Journal

    Nine months expected construction time? It's clear what that means …

    Probably she just had migraine.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.