By charging up battery cars where renewable energy is cheap and delivering the power to where it’s needed, this startup thinks railroads could break the clean energy transmission logjam.
Electricity moves down a wire at close to the speed of light. In March, a tiny tech firm in San Francisco drew a crowd to witness power moving 100 million times slower, at the very modest pace of a freight train bumping around a rail yard. And I mean literally at freight speed, because the aptly-named startup, SunTrain, convened us to watch a diesel locomotive hauling solar energy.
The star of this demonstration at the Port of San Francisco’s Pier 96 rail yard was a freight container that SunTrain had crammed full of lithium ion batteries and mounted on a standard 27-meter railcar. We watched as techs for SunTrain disconnected their battery-packed rail car from a trackside solar array. We watched a diesel engine push and pull the 50-ton battery car towards a parking lot 400 meters away.