Alex Kirby at Climate News Network writes—European trains go down renewable route:
In the Netherlands, every electric train running on the Dutch railway network has relied entirely on wind energy since 1 January. The network, NS Dutch Railways, is using an energy company’s turbines to generate the energy needed to power its entire electric fleet.
NS uses 1.2 billion kilowatt-hours of wind-generated electricity a year, roughly equivalent to the total annual domestic consumption of every household in the Dutch city of Amsterdam. The wind-powered trains carry 600,000 passengers a day.
NS says three strokes of one of the turbines that supply it generate enough power to drive a train for 1 kilometer. Put another way, a single turbine running for an hour can power a train for 120 miles. Since 2005, NS says, its consumption of electricity per passenger kilometre has been cut by about 30%, and it hopes to reduce it by a further 35% by 2020.
The contract it signed with the company supplying its wind energy, Eneco, forbids the sourcing of electricity from the existing energy market, so only new-build wind farms can be used. The energy NS is using comes from wind farms in Belgium and Scandinavia as well in the Netherlands, and also from some offshore sites.
Critics of wind power say it is an unreliable source because it blows intermittently and so cannot guarantee round-the-clock availability. But Eneco is confident it has enough wind farms to ensure the power supply to NS will be able to keep the trains running.
In the UK, a university and a climate change charity have joined forces to exploit renewables for railways in a novel and entirely renewable way—straight to the tracks on which the trains run.
Imperial College London is working with the 10:10 group in the Renewable Traction Power project, in which university researchers will look at connecting solar panels directly to the lines that provide power to trains. This would bypass the electricity grid in order to manage power demand from the trains more efficiently.
A rail tunnel in Belgium has already been fitted with solar panels that provide current to passing trains. But the university says the UK researchers will be the first in the world to test the “completely unique” idea of trackside generation, which would have a “wide impact with commercial applications on electrified rail networks all over the world”.
Renewable energy is helping to power increasing numbers of the world’s road vehicles. Now several European countries are exploring the potential for using renewables to fuel their trains. [...]
QUOTATION OF THE DAY
“There were, nevertheless, numberless ways in which Negro schools could be and were decreased in efficiency; in the first place, the public school funds were distributed with open and unashamed discrimination. Anywhere from twice to ten times as much was spent on the white child as on the Negro child, and even then the poor white child did not receive an adequate education. In the Black Belt, particularly, large amounts of funds were drawn by the county officers because of the black population and distributed among the whites to the extent of sending some to college. The Negro schools were given few buildings and little equipment. No effort was made to compel Negro children to go to school. On the contrary, in the county they were deliberately kept out of school by the requirements of contract labor which embraced the labor of wife and children as well as the laborer himself. The course of study was limited. The school term was made and kept short and in many cases there was the deliberate effort, as expressed by one leading Southerner, Hoke Smith, when two Negro teachers applied for a school, to “take the less competent.”
—W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, published 1935, page 697.
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2006—If men were angels...
Like many of you, it's hard for me to understand how a core percentage of the American people are so quick to sacrifice their constitutional rights in the name of fighting terrorism. Reflecting on the question of why it is so, it's clear it's due in large part to Bush's framing of the war on terror as a fight between good vs. evil. Such a characterization has served to cast both sides in absolute terms. The terrorists are pure evil, soulless creatures with no affect who seek only to wreak death and havoc upon this earth. On the flip side, those who wage war against the terrorists are not only "good," but so righteous and pure in their crusade that they can do no wrong. That is the brilliance of Bush's strategy from the beginning—casting himself as the bearer of all things good in this fight, he has convinced his followers that there is not a shred of evil in his actions. Every act, no matter how repulsive it may to our innate sense of decency, becomes "good" because it is performed by those who fight evil. How else to explain how our society has actually accepted the fact that torture is a debatable topic? How else to explain that Scooter Libby was cast as a martyr instead of the criminal that he allegedly is?
The reality, of course, is that Bush is no saint, no matter how evil our enemies are and no matter how just he believes his means of destroying them are. His is an administration tainted from its birth. The stolen election in 2000 was the first of a multitude of sins to be committed by this cabal. Following that has been a series of offenses against Americans, from plundering their wealth to sending our soldiers unprepared into the hell of war, like sheep to the slaughter. Knowing this and armed with the truth, liberals have never bought into the myth of St. George. But his followers, from those who relish his "sunny nobility" in the media to those who live in blissful (and deliberate) ignorance of the facts, have never failed to provide a knee-jerk defense of their President.
HIGH IMPACT STORIES • TOP COMMENTS
On
today’s Kagro in the Morning show,
Greg Dworkin helps wrap up another weekend. Trump himself remains a disaster. Is there any hope of salvaging some of his wavering supporters? Checking in on the Senate nominations game. Puzder in trouble again. See Trump’s Taxes ‘18!
YouTube | iTunes | LibSyn | Support the show via Patreon