Advanced Battery Trains Featuring Tesla Megapacks Can Reduce Scope 1 Emissions and High Voltage Transmission Lines (HVTL) Risk of Wildfires, a Fast-Track Concept
RichardFlentge.com
Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 11:00 AM CDT5 min read
CAPE GIRARDEAU, MO / ACCESSWIRE / March 8, 2024 / Adapting Tesla’s Megapack to a train car will enable large-scale mobile power storage with the potential to reduce both Scope 1 emissions and (HVTL) high-voltage transmission lines. Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk has long touted the market potential of Tesla Energy Operations. Elon’s clean energy division manufacturing both solar and battery storage has revenues of just over 6 billion.
Market potential for a battery train with Tesla’s Megapacks could skyrocket that revenue to over 20 billion. Remember stringing phone lines to a modem for computer access? That’s essentially the US power grid. In his new book Verities of an Electric Mule, author and former co-host of EVTV Richard Flentge has a revolutionary concept, a battery train. The modern version of taking the hardwired power grid wireless, gamechanger. He states “Battery trains are so ESG, economical, sustainable, and good for life. Let’s cut the grid cord and go wireless with battery trains”.
Tesla Megapacks are a low-cost large battery that sits inside a box providing power back-up, often an alternative to gas Peaker plants. It’s an engineered fully functional micro utility system with batteries, inverters, and thermal controls with a grid interface, perfect for storing electricity at a fixed point. With some creative engineering and a few cowboys with welders, a prototype battery train could be built in weeks.
Every day 50 miles of train cars fill up with coal in the Powder River basin of Wyoming. They cross multiple states and wildlife areas, no problem. Coal trains got their permits long ago. These 50 miles of trains travel long distances across the US to deliver low sulfur coal, which has a more favorable emission. Railroads love handling coal trains. A coal train, once loaded, has no stops or passengers. Converting the coal train model to a battery train is simple. Instead of rail cars full of black coal, fill them with high energy capacity lithium-ion battery cells. Battery trains can deliver readymade energy right to the people. The locomotive can receive its fuel from a battery system inside the train.
A typical coal train has 135 rail cars filled with 100 tons of coal each. A typical coal plant burns 10,000 tons in one day. Tesla’s Megapack on 135 train cars could move 2 Megawatts of power to whatever locale that needs electricity. Tesla Megapack battery train markets would be taking renewable energy to anywhere that has a track and utilities, selling the energy for a profit. The train could easily go right to the coal plant and connect, shutting down the boilers therefore stopping emissions.
Renewables are located where humans are not
In December 2023, CBS’s 60 minutes ran a story about Power Company of Wyoming’s Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project. In the interview, CEO Bill Miller, was asked what obstacles he was facing to solve his colossal piece of the renewable energy puzzle, how to move Wyoming’s wind energy to California. His answer “permits”. What type of permits? Right of Way, Environmental Impact, Bureau of Land Management, US Fish and Wildlife and Aeronautical, to name a few. The Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project require permits for 800 miles of transmission lines, from southern Wyoming to Las Vegas.
SunZia, the start-up wind farm in New Mexico, is staging for the same, building 550 miles of HVTL to Arizona. Both Chokecherry and SunZia want 200-foot towers of lattice steel looped with 6-inch diameter cable weighing just under 2 pounds per foot. Then they plan to cut a highway wide pathway across arid, pristine, rugged terrain through the windiest sections of the North American continent. What could possibly go wrong? Ask Texas, February’s Smokehouse Creek Fire ignited by a downed power line burned 225 square miles, 500 structures and killed two people.
The irony of renewable energy is that change-over has costs, advocates want a solution that will eliminate coal plants and the solution creates another environmental problem. A battery train with Tesla Megapack and grid connectivity eliminates this big renewable location problem. It solves how to transport renewable energy and many existing dangers.
Battery trains stop grid power loss.
When discussing our extensive grid network, the problem of power loss through transmission lines is a prominent issue that needs to be addressed. A room of Electrical Engineers, physicists, and the graduating class from MIT couldn’t factor an accurate number as to grid energy lost. Estimates put it at 15%. Step-up transformers, the general resistance of the lines themselves, the step-down process to allow for distribution, and the last sections of the distribution to consumers all contribute to the loss of precious energy. Besides that, the inefficiency of coal burning adds up another 15% loss, resulting in an accurate estimate of above 30%. The complex power grid is losing nearly a third of the energy produced.
The battery train directly stores the energy at the point of where it’s produced. It transports electricity to the distribution point and then discharges. Eliminating the multiple steps and all the distance resistance of the transmission lines.The only way to stop Scope 1 emissions (air pollution from burning fossil fuels) is to reduce the numbers. Battery trains are a fast-track concept to do just that, reduce coal plant emissions with a quick connect to renewables. Elon Musk’s Tesla Energy can rebuild the grid, he has the technology, batteries, and grid connectivity software. The Tesla Megapack battery train could be autonomous with adaptation of the full self-driving principles. Elon Musk is someone with the guts to put it together. He has the capability to make the world’s power supply essentially wireless, better, stronger, faster.