Post by Tony PolsonDon't forget that one of the reasons given by the protagonists for rail
electrification is a reduction in CO2 emissions, so tapping into the
National Grid when CO2 production per kWh will be at its peak makes no
sense whatsoever. It makes sense to wait.
In fact it is only the monetary value attached to the CO2 reduction
which would seem to be giving OHLE anything like a sensible cost benefit
ratio over diesels. That reduction is very sensitive to generating mix
as the RSSB admit in their study, they used:
"Gas 40%, Nuclear 19%, Coal 33%, Hydro 1%, Oil 1%, Imports 2.5% and
Others 3.5%"
With Nuclear falling as you point out, North Sea gas being of finite
supply and the Russian's swiftness to shut the valves I can see the use
of Coal growing at least in the short term, and with it the CO2 benefit
drops.
The report makes interesting reading, I'll include a few highlights that
are very pertinent to the discussions here:
"The costs estimated for the IEP study assume the same cost of a train
when comparing electric and diesel trains with the same number of cars.
Therefore the default value assumes that there is no differential
between the capital cost of diesel and electric trains."
"A maintenance cost of 38 pence per vehicle mile for electric trains and
43 pence per vehicle mile for diesel trains was assumed. These rates
were used for Inter-city, Regional Commuting and Local Commuting."
Now Virgin XC in 2005/6 did 18707820 miles according to
http://www.virgintrains.co.uk/gogreener/tandc.aspx giving a maintenance
saving of £935 391 across the whole Voyager fleet in a year, that isn't
even going to pay for a thunderbird fleet to tidy up when the wires go
down. Of course OHLE needs to be maintained, and the RSSB tell us that
"Electrification equipment maintenance 5068 £/km/year" (renewal costs
ignored), so our rolling stock saving lets us maintain 115 miles of
OHLE, which of course is far short of the 1550 route miles the XC
network extends over.
Then we have the energy savings, again the RSSB give some useful figure:
"For electric domestic intercity trains current good practice is not
more than 0.035 kWh/seat-km"
"Future good practice on diesel-powered passenger railways is that a
train should not have a fuel consumption greater than 0.8 litres/100
seat-km. This would represent a shift towards a more energy efficient
approach than recent practice. Many post privatisation diesel trains
exceed this figure by around 20% and a review of the design objectives
for diesel passenger trains is therefore needed."
It difficult to find what the railway pay for electricity (generation
and grid distribution costs), so I'll guesstimate at £0.06 per kWh
(large rapidly fluctuating single phase loads at peak times):
0.035 kWh/seat-km * £0.06 per kWh = 0.0021 £/seat-km
and diesel at £0.37 per litre (of which £0.0769 per litre is duty so the
treasury get that back) which is what is in the RSSB report:
0.8 litres/100 seat-km * £0.37 per litre = 0.00296 £/seat-km
Again from http://www.virgintrains.co.uk/gogreener/tandc.aspx the
Voyager fleet on XC and WC in 2005/6 used 99,000,000 litres of gas oil:
So the saving of using electric trains on XC would be around: 99,000,000
litres * £0.37 per litre - 0.0021/0.00296 * 99,000,000 litres * £0.37
per litre = £10.6 million.
The OHLE has to erected in the first place, and the RSSB give the
figure: "capital costs of electrifying an existing route range from
£550k to £650k per single track kilometre." Disruption compensation
payments need to be added to this. They have done a sensitivity
analysis on this, and come up with the most sensitive items being:
OLE average span length (distance between support structures)
Foundation, mast, single track cantilever (multiple)
Foundations (2 off), 4 track portal, 4 off single track cantilevers
(multiple)
Remove along track equipment including catenary, contact, droppers,
return conductor
Supply & Install along track equipment including catenary, contact,
droppers, return
conductor
Auto transformers
ESI grid connection @ Feeder stations for AT system including civil site
works
Contractor's Preliminaries
Over bridges
On-costs – both Client and Contractors
Lets take 600k per single track kilometre, and assume 1000 route miles
of double track out of the 1550 miles on XC need new OHLE, then that is
capital costs of 1.93BN, they charge me 3.8% interest on my student
loan, so I'll put interest on the capital at that, giving a first year
interest payment of 73.3million, dwarfing our 10.6million energy cost
saving.
This leads to the question of how does one get the cost-benefit ratios
trumpeted by Modern Railways? The answer all lies in how the "social
benefits" are quantified and monetised in the economic model. For XC
for example the environmental costs of the carbon emission are believed
to be worth £21,329,002, so I hope we are absolutely spot on with the
whole global warming issue. Interestingly for Nuclear, they don't
include decommissioning costs or the environmental impact of radioactive
waste, they just subtract the CO2 saving, which I believe is a
significant flaw in the analysis.
Apparently an electric XC would have an improvement in journey ambiance
worth £12,373,841, but then Passenger Focus tell us the Voyagers have
been a great success.
On the noise front they conclude "A typical modern electric train (a
Pendolino) is 3.1 dB quieter than a typical modern diesel train (a
Voyager), and in addition a Pendolino has a far greater capacity, so
requires fewer train movements to carry the same number of passengers.
However, noise modelling carried out for this study suggests that there
is not a significant difference in the noise impacts of diesel or
electric traction, in large part because relatively few residential
properties are sufficiently near to railway lines where trains are
accelerating from slow speeds to experience noise above a threshold level."
Also on XC they have put all the "Consumers user benefits: travel time
saving" as £0, which would seem to me to be an admission of electric
trains not having a performance advantage (which is unsurprising with a
390 and 220 having similar powers per vehicle), but in the GW analysis
they have put it down as £50,375,891.
So the arguments seems to be all in the social benefits, and quite
frankly I think many parts of their analysis are contradictory and
flawed as the few examples above detail.