I was thinking(This could be dangerous) that instead of building a 186 million doller power plant for my hometown of Jamestown NY we could plug in a few old Metro North Diesal engines during peak summer periods and keep the price of electricty down. The cost here is the transmission not the generation of power. We only have 50,000 people and a metro area of 100,000 so we could lease the engines as we need them. I saw this done in a power outage in Canada. Heck if this works out this could be a cash cow for the railroads. Power By the Hour.
If it works, lets get all the old SD40’s and Geeps up here!!
I have read about them doing that somewhere in Montana. I can’t remember the specifics. I think they used 6 SD40-2s. It was only a temporary setup.
Well the demand is temp here. Mostly Industrial end users. Which Means that during the summer you could plug in a GP40 into the power grid next to a industrial park.
they did that in canada in toronto…that was in the big ice storm that knocked out the north easts power grid back in 97 i think it was… it was 2 -8s infront of the 911 disptach center for power…CN crained 2 units off the rails…chained the trucks so they can only go stright…and then moved the units under thier own power down the street infront of the building…then hooked up lines from the locomotives into the power system of the building… i have an issue of TRAINS mag (i think it was trains) that shows this being done…and the units with bunches of people around taking pictuers…
csx engineer
I never heard about that one. But the one I’m talking about was definatly Montana (I’ll stick my neck out and say it was Montana Rail Link) and was 2-3 years ago.
That a trip…You mean they ran the loco on the pavement/concrete? or did they lay something on the road to disperse the weight?
There is nothing new under the sun.
http://www.sierrarailroad.com/powertrain/powertrain.html
In Canada, they used Alcos. I believe there is a picture somewhere of an RS-18 actually being drivin on the road.
How about using generators powered by big wheels with hoboes running inside like hamsters? When the hoboes get tired, they could be encouraged to run faster by placing tigers in the wheels to chase the hoboes. I saw this done on the Muppet show once.
LOL
I can think of another way to “harness” the energy of the hobos…booze induced methane
ran it right over the blacktop from what i can remember in the pictures…
csx engineer
here is an artical about the storm…if you read down to the January 9th section…you will find a little write up about it…with the engin numbers…now im looking for pics…if i find any…ill post…
csx engineer
opps…my bad…
try this…lol
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:JqRoUxedlHMJ:www.trainweb.org/canadianrailways/CanadaCalling/March1998.html+CN+railroad+ICE+storms&hl=en
I remember kev telling me about that. kev where are you?
stay safe
joe
Ah, that really will not work. In fact, other than a emergency or peak shaving, diesels are the most expensive power and you do not want to use them.
We have 3 plants that have diesel generators. We operate FM’s and Norton’s in these plants. The FM’s are both inline and op engines. At two of the plants they are for emergency use only. In other words, we fire them up if the city goes dark and use them to feed the steam plants to black start them. At the third, we may use it to shave the peak, stabilize the voltage (we have problems with our tramission provider at times for this town), or cover the critical services if the twon goes in the dark.
One of our cities has 2 units that they will use to shave the peak in the summer or run critical services if they go dark.
Generaly a loco puts out less than a megawatt of available power, not really that much when it comes down to it. Plus the cost of the equipment to make the power available to the grid. It would be far cheaper to lease a gen set for a set rate. Being tire mounted you have more flexability to where it can go and be used.
Best to worst as far as cost for a fossil fueled generating:
- Nucs - once they are built they are by far the cheapest to operate. They are good for base loading as it is not that easy to ramp them up and down to meet the peak.
- Coal fired plants. They are also good for base loading, not easy to ramp up and down.
- Combined Cycle Gen sets. These consist of a gas fired turbine with boilers to scavage the waste heat from them. You basically get 2 generators, one on the turbine and then a steam turbine. While they are not good base load units, they are great for following the peak. The high price of NG has really hurt them lately. So they are only used a peaking units.
- Gas fired turbines - great peaking units, but expensive to run.
- NG fired steam boilers - Very expensive to run. Decent base load and can be used as peaking units.
yeah, but your gen sets are little ones. That is all you need. Larger ones, esp. the newer ones can be a lot more efficant than the one you have.
We will use one of our cities that uses two diesels to shave the peak in the summer. They only want to pay for 14 megawatts of transmission. But they will exceed that during the summer for a few hours each day. The way transmission works is you pay for CAPACITY, not only for what you use. You pay both a capacity fee and a amount used fee. Now if you exceed that 14 megs for even 1 minute at ANY time, you pay for the next capacity level for an ENTIRE years, whether you use it or not. That can add up in a hurry. So they fire their 2 engines up, each has a capacity of about 3 megs, for a few hours each day. Remember, we pay for offroad diesel, we don’t pay the road taxes. This is cost effective.
Another case is New York Citu. NYC has some severe capacity constraints on their transmission system, esp. to the parts on Long Island. What they have done is gather diesel gen sets in certain areas, this is called distrbuted power, to reduce the strain on certain aspects of their grid. As with above, they only have to run them maybe a few hours each day or only in case of an emergency.
I got a question mabee one of you guys could answer. When a diesel locomotive or generator is used to generate power for the grid, how is it phase locked with the existing 60Hz.
It has to be sycn’ed into the system, as do all generators when it is brought on line. It can be easily adjusted to get into sync.
With nuc’s, it’s not the operating cost that gets ya. I’ve heard it said that the dream-to-online cost of building a nuclear plant is higher than the cost of building solar or wind power. Makes no sense to build them.
So out of curiosity, how much power does it take to black-start a large generator?
For one of our 35meg gas fired units, it takes about 3 megs to get it started. There is a lot of equipment to run to start a unit - blowers, the controls, pumps, etc.
Yes, the build cost for a nuc is high, but once it is built it is cheap and easy to operate.
The only problem you have with renewables, is that to you do when the wind is below or above the operating limits of the unit? The same for solar power. It takes a lot of solar cells to make a meg of power. And solar power is expensive. Plus the NIMBY’s are starting about wind power. They want and they want, as long as someone else has to deal with it.