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Could freight trains help our transition to renewable energy?

Suntrain is hoping to land a multi-million dollar federal grant that would allow them to create a demo project in Colorado.
courtesy of SunTrain
Suntrain is hoping to land a multi-million dollar federal grant that would allow them to create a demo project in Colorado.

It might seem too good to be true — batteries charged by renewable energy being transported around the country to where they're needed. That is exactly what SunTrain believes it can do on a large scale by using the existing rail system throughout the U.S.

SunTrain calls it "trainsmission" and they have the support of Gov. Jared Polis. They're hoping to land a multi-million dollar federal grant that would allow them to create a demo project in Colorado. Greta Kerkoff spoke with SunTrain CEO Jeff Anderson and SunTrain President and CTO Christopher Smith about their energy solution.

 Jeff Anderson: SunTrain is trying to solve the transmission bottleneck. There are tens of thousands of megawatts, if not gigawatts of power, renewable power, trying to get onto the transmission system that can't because there's simply not enough transmission capacity. And the reason is that it takes 10 to 20 years to build a single transmission line.

We don't have that kind of time if we're going to actually decarbonize the grid and electrify everything. SunTrain is a solution to that. We're putting batteries on trains which can be moved and into place in one to two years and rapidly solve that problem.

Christopher Smith: So, SunTrain, as Jeff said, is pretty much the discovery that we can move grid-ready electricity over the freight railroad network as a commodity.

And that commodity is presently not being transported over the freight railroad network today. So the way that it came about having this realization is actually, I was in Alaska with some friends during the early stages of COVID. We were up there because we decided that being in Alaska where there were no active cases of COVID and a really minimal density, population density, was a good place to kind of ride it out.

And while we were hiking over a particular ridge, we had this vantage point that looked over this just absolutely massive expanse of land. And one thing that we happened to catch was a freight train going by. So as we saw the train, I was just noticing the different rail cars that were on it. It looked like there was natural gas, looked like there was oil, looked like there was coal, looked like there was some biomass by way of wood and things like that.

Then when the section of the train got to containers, my brain being that from the energy world thought that the shipping containers that were on the train were actually batteries. So then when I got back to our lodging I started thinking like, were those actually batteries? I think I would have heard about that if that were the case.

I made the discovery that they, in fact, were not batteries, but they were instead just regular old shipping containers being transported on the trains. That's where I had the epiphany moment that batteries could be moved on trains. So I started doing the research trying to figure out if there was some technical reason, logistical reason, maybe economic reason, that this wasn't being done. Turned out that after all this research that none of those reasons are preventing electricity moving over the rail network.

Greta Kerkhoff: So what is the timeline that you're looking at for when this can be operating?

Anderson: We think that the pilot could be up and running within the next two years. And that if successful we would actually have the first full-scale trains in deployment by 2031.

Kerkoff: And lastly, I wanted to talk about SunTrain in the context of the climate goals that have been set around the country, but also in Colorado.

If deployed within that timeline, how could SunTrain impact those climate goals?

Anderson: I would love to put this in a more positive spotlight, but we're not going to meet our current carbon goals and our climate goals with the existing transmission system and existing transmission technologies.

And so SunTrain is an immediately deployable new technology that leverages existing infrastructure that is cost-effective, that lets us rapidly get renewable generation onto the grid to actually get close to meeting those goals.

Smith: Renewable energy generation isn't moving as forward as quickly as it used to because the developers who were building those things were looking for sites that were located around transmission line and grid interactive access.

A lot of those spots have been eaten up. There's now a huge competition in the development world to find the few remaining places that are well qualified for wind or solar, geothermal, or whatever else they are. In fact, the latest number I saw, and this number is even a little dated, is that they are now having to lay 13 miles between the grid interaction point, which is typically a substation, and where the actual generator is located.

So, we're teaching developers, and we're proving that you can now locate these generators around where the freight railroad network is because there's very little competition for location next to active rail.

Anderson: I mean, the important thing to remember is we're not talking about a few batteries here. We're talking about two gigawatts of power moving at one time. That can displace multiple fossil fuel power plants. And so it's, it really is an enabling technology to rapidly decarbonize.

Smith: The Industrial Revolution was built off of the backbone of the freight railroad network. Before the grid existed, all of the forms of energy that were used going to power plants, going to industrial centers, going to towns, was riding on rails. And this is in the 1800s.

Standard Oil, at the time, was who championed that. They realized that, ‘hey, if we have this railroad connectivity everywhere, if we start selling our oil and our other derivatives, moving over the freight railroad network for distribution, we can power all of these industries that are hungry for energy.’

Now you fast forward to the 2000s era, we completely forgot that the freight railroad network was the history and currently still a major backbone of the energy industry. We're asking them to do the same thing that they've always done. Our trains are basically a one-to-one replacement of coal trains.

We're just saying ‘keep on doing what you're doing to let us move electricity as a commodity.’ And so far they're thrilled to do that because they see themselves as most do as having a fossil fuel problem. So there's capacity for this, there's precedent for this, and the railroads have been around since the 1700s because they have constantly updated to move what humanity needs them to move. Whether it's Amazon products, energy, people, cattle, I mean, whatever it is, they've been there every step of the way.

And fundamentally the technology hasn't changed whatsoever. It’s still metal wheels on metal rails on rock beds moving from virtually every major and minor population center to others.

Anderson: And by leveraging all this existing infrastructure not only are we going to help give a lifeline to the freight railroads to replace that lost revenue from declining fossil fuel loads, we're actually going to be repurposing the power plants and giving those local communities new economic life that otherwise would disappear as those plants closed.

Copyright 2024 KGNU.

This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including KSJD.

Greta Kerkhoff