Netherlands trains now running on 100 percent wind power

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.aweablog.org/netherlandss-trains-now-running-100-percent-wind-power/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Netherlands trains now running on 100 percent wind power[/font]

Alexander Laska
January 6, 2017

[font size=3]A country that’s used wind mills since the Middle Ages has begun harnessing the power of wind to bring its transportation system into the future.

In a world first, Dutch railway company NS now runs all of its passenger trains on 100 percent wind energy. Roughly 600,000 people ride NS trains every day, and as of January 1, wind energy powers all of those trips.

The 1.2 billion kilowatt-hours of wind energy being used to power the trains – provided by energy company Eneco and drawn from projects in the Netherlands, Belgium and other Scandinavian countries – is enough to power every household in Amsterdam. But Eneco made a point of building new wind farms for the trains, sourcing from both domestic and international projects to help keep prices down for Dutch customers.

Impressively, Eneco reached the 100 percent goal an entire year ahead of schedule – proving how quickly the wind industry can rise to the occasion when given the opportunity.

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[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. First thing that came to mind was trains with sails...

[hunter]

2. Electric trains are a well established technology.

Unlike airplanes, they don't require carbon fuels.

There's no good reason to use fossil fueled airplanes for trips of less than a few hundred miles between densely populated areas.

I don't understand the opposition to high speed rail.

It's as if fossil fueled vehicles are an essential aspect of some increasingly bizarre religion.

Oil is our god.

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. "I don't understand the opposition to high speed rail."

I don’t think there is an opposition to high speed rail per se. I think there is an opposition to building it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-28/california-hits-the-brakes-on-high-speed-rail-fiasco

[font face=Serif][font size=5]California Hits the Brakes on High-Speed Rail Fiasco[/font]

June 28, 2016 10:00 AM EDT
By Virginia Postrel

[font size=3]California's high-speed rail project increasingly looks like an expensive social science experiment to test just how long interest groups can keep money flowing to a doomed endeavor before elected officials finally decide to cancel it. What combination of sweet-sounding scenarios, streamlined mockups, ever-changing and mind-numbing technical detail, and audacious spin will keep the dream alive?

Sold to the public in 2008 as a visionary plan to whisk riders along at 220 miles an hour, making the trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles in a little over two and a half hours, the project promised to attract most of the necessary billions from private investors, to operate without ongoing subsidies and to charge fares low enough to make it competitive with cheap flights. With those assurances, 53.7 percent of voters said yes to a $9.95 billion bond referendum to get the project started. But the assurances were at best wishful thinking, at worst an elaborate con.

The total construction cost estimate has now more than doubled to $68 billion from the original $33 billion, despite trims in the routes planned. The first, easiest-to-build, segment of the system -- the “train to nowhere” through a relatively empty stretch of the Central Valley -- is running at least four years behind schedule and still hasn’t acquired all the needed land. Predicted ticket prices to travel from LA to the Bay have shot from $50 to more than $80. State funding is running short. Last month’s cap-and-trade auction for greenhouse gases, expected to provide $150 million for the train, yielded a mere $2.5 million. And no investors are lining up to fill the $43 billion construction-budget gap.

Now, courtesy of Los Angeles Times reporter Ralph Vartabedian, comes yet another damning revelation: When the Spanish construction company Ferrovial submitted its winning bid for a 22-mile segment, the proposal included a clear and inconvenient warning: “More than likely, the California high speed rail will require large government subsidies for years to come.” Ferrovial reviewed 111 similar systems around the world and found only three that cover their operating costs.

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[NNadir]

3. Really? The wind blows continuously in the Netherlands? Why don't they put sails on their trains?

The lies of the so called "renewable energy" industry are Trumpian in scale.

The truth is right here, where anyone can see it, unless they are really, really, really invested in lying to themselves and making the reality, um, worse: Well, above 400 ppm, and we ain't going back.

In twenty years, when the overwhelming bulk of the wind turbines now operating in Europe have become rotting rusting junk, we'll be well over 430 ppm, and Europe will still be what it is right now, a continent totally dependent on dangerous fossil fuels.

Except for France, and Norway, (although Norway recently built a gas powered electricity plant at Karsto, and it of course, exports gas to the rest of Europe) Europe has never eliminated its reliance on dangerous fossil fuels for its electricity, not Netherlands, not Germany, not Spain, not Italy.

The Trumpian lies by the so called "renewable energy" industry are causing the degradation of the atmosphere to accelerate.

Nobody, not the Dutch rails, not the German Bundestag, not the airheads in the European Greenpeace knows how to sort electrons to see if they are powered by wind.