San Francisco-based SunTrain joins Xcel Energy, NREL to apply for $10M grant for first-of-its-kind effort.
SunTrain, a SanFrancisco-based company, wants to build a pilot project in Colorado to show that high-capacity batteries hauled by freight trains can help get around bottlenecks on the transmission system so that more power from renewable energy sources can be added to the electric grid. The company, in partnership with Xcel Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, has applied for a federal grant to develop what it says would be a first-in-the-nation pilot program.
Anderson and Smith, SunTrain’s president and chief technology officer, said a lack of transmission capacity on the grid is hampering the deployment of power from renewable sources and efforts to transition from fossil fuels. Several studies forecast a need to significantly expand the nation’s transmission system, includingby the U.S. Department of Energy in partnership with NREL and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory that said the system will need to at least double in size by 2050.
The U.S. freight train system covers roughly 140,000 miles and much of that is in sweeping, remote swaths of land where wind farms and large solar arrays are typically located, Smith said. According to SunTrain, railway companies are open to the idea of becoming conveyors of power from renewable energy sources. Smith said hauling fossil fuels has long been a big source of their revenue, but is making up an increasingly smaller portion of their loads.Wind and solar would replace most of Xcel’s troubled Comanche 3 coal plant power — but not all
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