Thank you!
Regards, Volker
How much of that is attributable to development cost and relatively low production? To what extent are the recent cumulative price reductions in traction-battery cost involved, practically (I think only in September did Li-ion batteries become first used by Siemens for locomotive starting batteries; I’m going on what their provider said in promotional literature which might no longer be accurate)?
We should repeat here that a large part of the economics of the iLINT system involves a full provision of the hydrogen infrastructure, not just the generation of the fuel from renewable sources. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the actual scale (and scalability) of the tech used there, as I’d expect there to be quite a bit of low-marginal-cost availability for additional rail uses, both as continuous recharging or perhaps direct combustion.
I think the case is more complicated, in that emissions from a good powerplant (or grid fed by different types of powerplant) will be much lower in a number of respects than a load-following diesel engine in a vehicle. I don’t personally think that CO2 is a ‘pollutant’ in the same sense as, say, NO/NO2 or nanoparticulates, except politically or expediently, when looking at absolute levels of railcar emission, so I would like to use a different word from ‘dirty’ when assessing these matters.
While this certainly is a demonstration project, Santa Clara County contains 1.9 million people and the rather large City of San Jose California, so suggesting it’s some podunck thing is completely disengenuous. Silicon Valley is a major population center and VTA handles a lot of people.