Energy Efficiency on the Railways - is there a plan?

[ABB125]

Or to summarise that post, "how many railway people does it take to change a light bulb?"

4 to change the bulb, 17 to look out for any danger, and finally 39 to fill in all the paperwork.

 

[modernrail]

My understanding is that the requirement to replace LED lighting at stations controlled by TOCs is written into some franchise agreements now. Northern rings a bell I think?

To be fair there are lots of problems with implementing energy efficiency in other sectors. Tenanted offices for instance have what is known as the split incentive problem. The tenants often pay the bill but they do not receive any credit for delivering improvements that outlive their tenancy. Also, many businesses require a predicted rate of return in excess of 20% and a pay back of less than 2 years for any investment. Energy Efficiency requiring capital investment often fails this test even though it can deliver pretty much guaranteed savings with a return of about 10% and paybacks of 3-5 years. The sweet spot that often does work is where replacement of assets is required in any case and so you try and use that opportunity to provide a more holistic programme that maximises the opportunity and focus.

I was personally involved in a project that replaced every fitting in every large NCP car park and every office and branch of Santander Bank. I would agree these things are better done as one big coordinated programme. It needs focus and a dedicated and knowledgeable team but most importantly, leadership from management.

 

[lincolnshire]

The railways obviously use huge amounts of power. How good is NR and prioritising saving cash on this, as well as reducing emissions?

As an example I have just been through the Thameslink core. All the lights are on at the OLD Kings Cross Thameslink station and at at City Thameslink (closed today) the lights are on, the information boards powered up and perhaps most troubling, the escalators are running!

Does the right culture exist within NR on identifying and implementing potential energy savings?

The former Kings Cross Thameslink station lighting may be required to be on so that it can be used as an emergency train evacuation point as if you look there are emergency fire doors exits from the old platform into the the Underground station part of the station still in use.

It might also be the same reason that City Thameslink station is always lit up at weekends for emergency train evacuation point.

 

[takno]

This sounds quite an interesting idea. Perhaps it deserves one of the industry "innovation" grants (although no doubt it will cost about £33 million for someone to basically build a big Kindle!).

Greater use of e-paper probably does make a lot of sense, but it's never really achieved the promise that it showed 20 years ago. There are a few reasons it might be useless in stations:

• It's pretty expensive - Kindles aren't a terrible price, but they are a small consumer-grade product, that has been heavily subsidized over time by Amazon who make the money from the books
• You need volume to reduce the price - e-readers and shelf labels for shops have a world-wide market of between 100s of millions and billions. Getting a fab interested in building a part for a subset of the UK rail industry alone would be... impressive. LNER have got the e-ink displays for reservations, but only because they were able to use shelf labels which were already available, um, off the shelf.
• They are relatively delicate. I've destroyed half a dozen kindles in the 10 years or so I've been using them. A part which is thrown around the place in the supply chain, installed with industrial spanners, and then left outdoors in an area with constant vibration may need to be made of sterner stuff.
• They don't have a fantastic life in terms of numbers of refreshes. Static information notices would be fine, but not departure boards. Even on relatively quiet stations, you might find the manufacture and fitting costs for replacement boards was way beyond the cost of energy saved. That might well apply in terms of environmental costs as well as simple business ones
• Modern OLEDs and LCD units are pretty damn efficient. If you're looking at a sign in an area where it would need to be illuminated for a decent proportion of the day, an e-ink display might be less efficient. If you don't build illumination into the panel and the general lighting for the area has to be left turned up to allow people to read the sign, the additional costs of e-ink could become grotesque

As ever, new thinking is always to be encouraged, but e-ink isn't new, and progress in the field has been glacial compared to competing display technologies. It's quite likely that as a technology it has pretty much peaked.

 

[edwin_m]

As I understand it e-ink doesn't use any power except when it is changing. So maybe less good for train departure displays that change a lot (and in many cases are scrolling all the time).

 

[Class 170101]

DOO monitors are wasting energy 24hrs a day 7 days a week and other than for maintenance are never off. One advantage of going over to in cab monitors

I seem to recall that Level Crossing TV monitors in signal boxes I've visited weren't on all the time only when being used by the signaller to close the crossing so why not for DOO cameras indeed?

 

[edwin_m]

Probably because the DOO camera would need something to detect the presence of the train, which would either be an interface to the safety-critical signalling system (££££) or some other detector that would prevent the system being used if it failed. With the old CRT screens there was also some "warmup time" after switching on before they displayed a stable picture. Flat screens don't have this problem but use less power anyway.

 

[ECML125]

Not sure if it was just a faulty light, but when I was at Peterborough a couple of weeks back there was a light that turned off when I walked away and turned back on when I approached it. This was an LED light and I'm guessing it was controlled by Motion Sensors of some kind. I believe it was Platform 4.

 

[mark-h]

e-ink doesn't use any power except when it is changing. So maybe less good for train departure displays that change a lot (and in many cases are scrolling all the time)

Larger displays which can display all the relevant information without scrolling could be a solution to this, however the extra cost/environmental impact of the larger screens would probably be greater than any power saving achieved over their lifetime.

With the old CRT screens there was also some "warmup time" after switching on before they displayed a stable picture. Flat screens don't have this problem but use less power anyway.

Constant switching on and off causes thermal cycling [heating up and cooling down] of equipment which can increase the risk of failure. This will be particularly important for devices running outside.

The railway would have to look at the cost of extra power vs the costs due to equipment failure (both delay minutes etc. and replacing the failed device).