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TRANSPORT ELECTRIFICATION

Battery-powered freight trains

Nature Energy volume 6, pages 1003–1004 (2021)Cite this article

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Curbing carbon emissions will require electrification of transport, but until now most of the innovations have been deployed in the car industry. In a recent article researchers focus on the electrification of another crucial sector, freight trains, but not with the traditional approach of overhead lines — rather with batteries.

Traditionally, electrification in the rail sector has meant the installation of overhead line equipment — cables carrying electric energy along the entire line, connected by a pantograph to a moving locomotive housing an electric motor. This requires a capital-intensive, long-term investment proportional to the length of the track, and makes electric locomotives unable to operate on the remaining non-electrified part of the network. Writing in Nature Energy, Natalie Popovich and colleagues from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California explore another avenue for freight train electrification — batteries — and examine their economic feasibility given current technology and cost trends1.

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References

  1. Popovich, N. D., Rajagopal, D., Tasar, E. & Phadke, A. Nat. Energy https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-021-00915-5 (2021).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Energy and Process Engineering, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway

    Federico Zenith

  2. SINTEF Mathematics and Cybernetics, Trondheim, Norway

    Federico Zenith

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  1. Federico Zenith
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Correspondence to Federico Zenith.

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Zenith, F. Battery-powered freight trains. Nat Energy 6, 1003–1004 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-021-00914-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-021-00914-6

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