In an Anthropocene
article, Shipping Solar Power at the Speed of a Freight Train, Peter Fairley writes, “By charging up battery
cars where renewable energy is cheap and delivering the power to where it’s
needed, [a San Francisco start-up called The Sun Train hopes to show] railroads
could break the clean energy transmission logjam.” They
see freight cars packed with solar batteries transporting electricity obtained
at a solar array near Pueblo, Colorado as the perfect way to by-pass the
increasingly congested transmission grid in the Denver area.
The concept seems somewhat awkward, but if you consider other advantages like potential capacity
increases and decreasing vulnerability of diversified transmission systems,
they may have a practical solution.
Anyway, in looking for
a way to illustrate this article so I could use it in a blog post, I
came up with Pikes Peak, which is situated near Colorado Springs 70 km. north of Pueblo, about one third
of the distance to Denver.
