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Just a few minor nits, you are off by a bit in your calculation of the cost of the train cars. A 5800CF open-topped hopper car will hold a little more than 200
by evgen 10y ago
Just a few minor nits, you are off by a bit in your calculation of the cost of the train cars. A 5800CF open-topped hopper car will hold a little more than 200 metric tons of gravel and will cost less than 50K for the car and the gravel to fill it. Now you need 600000 cars at a cost of 50K each so the cost has dropped to around 33 billion. If you were buying rail cars at this sort of quantity you can probably also get a much better deal :)
I also seriously doubt there are going to be cost factors that add one or two orders of magnitude to the price here, but it is possible. The rail itself is very cheap and land to site the project is similarly easy to find since the rail line does not actually need to go anywhere and you can run lines in parallel instead of needing a long distance.
Definitely not cheap, but pumped hydro storage is in no way "free" and there are really no places you can do pumped hydro in any large scale that are not already used for existing dams and rivers. The lack of significant environmental impact is also a win for something like ARES.
- jsymolon 10y agoWhat's the maintenance cost of the lines and equipment vs the hydro ?
- evgen 10y agoProbably much much cheaper for rail lines. Rail doesn't leak. The entire infra is open to direct maintenance, and you can easily take segments of the system out of production for repair without having any significant impact on the productivity of the whole. You can extend or lay parallel track while your main system is still operational without too much bother so expansion is also easier.
- jartelt 10y agoI wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the maintenance cost for a ARES-type rail system. For pumped hydro, your ongoing maintenance is largely going to be maintaining a pumping system (to send water up) and a generator system. Hopefully you build your reservoir properly so that it lasts for 30 years. For rail, you have to have to maintain a large number of moving parts. It won't be cheap to insure all the parts are greased and good to go. I think it's a lot easier to maintain a set of pumps and generators than it is to maintain what is essentially a rail fleet filled with gravel on a mountain.
- evgen 10y agoSo for pumped hydro you have a massive up front cost and potentially smaller maintenance. Maintaining a large number of moving parts for rail might seem daunting, but these rail cars are made to operate for very long periods of time in unpleasant conditions with minimal maintenance; topping up lubrication systems and visual inspection is basically covering monthly maintenance for the system. I am not sure what the ongoing maintenance cost for most hydro installations is (pipe inspections, anti-silting and other water maintenance, inspections of the system, etc.), but I had to guess I would say that it is probably quite similar to rail.
- gozur88 10y agoStandard rail cars are sturdier than they'd need to be for this application - if you were going to buy that many you could pull out a lot of the cost by making them fit for purpose.