
“World’s First Solar-Powered Train” Is in Reality a Battery-Powered Train - ant6n
http://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/the-worlds-first-solar-powered-train-is-in-reality-a-battery-powered-train/
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CharlesW
Except that batteries don't generate power.

The author goes on to point out that all of the power used by the train is
indeed solar-generated, provided by a combination of onboard panels and a
solar power plant at its station.

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ant6n
Author here: maybe the tone is too controversial. That wasn't really intended
as such. I'll try to tone it down.

My twitter was full of 'first solar train' posts, always with the image
showing the solar panels on top of the train. I found that the various posts
don't make it very obvious where the power for this train is really coming
from, implying it's from the panels on top of the train.

My overarching point is that roof-top solar-powered trains are not really
possible -- unless you spend most of the time standing still. And that the
real innovation in this concept is to power a train by battery, which is
something that has had few working implementations and may have a huge impact.

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matthiasl
Would be nice to fix the units in the article.

In the 'fact sheet' box, the only correctly abbreviated unit is the 'km'.
Every 'KWh' should be 'kWh', i.e. kilo and not Kelvin. Similarly, footnote 1
uses both kwh and KWh, neither of which are right. The numbers in the box are
interesting, especially since I can't find them on the train's official site
(where did they come from?).

The last row in the 'fact sheet' box says "Power of solar plant at station:
30Kwh". Should that be 30 kW? Or is there a battery at the station as well, in
which case the text should probably be different. The train's own website
(second link in the blog post) doesn't mention a battery at the station and
refers to the connection to the grid as "just like a bank", which makes me
think that the train is solar powered in a 'bookkeeping' sense.

Another nit is that San Francisco has "solar insolation" and not "insulation".

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ant6n
fixed the typos, thanks.

Various numbers in the box are links to articles where they are in the text.

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matthiasl
It's changed, but not correct.

Currently, all the units in the 'fact box' are KWh. That is "Kelvin Watt
hours", which makes no sense. You want kWh, i.e. lower case 'k', upper case
'W', lower case 'h'.

Wikipedia has a reasonable article explaining that 'K' is Kelvin and 'k' is
the prefix for 10^3:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units)

Same problem in the footnotes, though MWh is correct, so that's good.

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ant6n
Fair enough.

I hope that one day, you'll Win the war against Incorrectly capitalized
physical Units that still make sense Due to Context. :-)

