How do battery operated work? Are they short rage trains? Or do they have like a car full of batteries? And how do recharge times work? Can they recharge just in the stations? If it works for them, great. And it sounds like it is. It just seemed like there were several problems.
Battery locomotives don’t have enough range to be useful solo, but they’re a handy to add on to an existing train to give it regenerative braking and improve it’s efficiency.
You want practically zero emissions train, you build overhead catenary wires. But that’s decades old tech that just works, it’s not sexy futuristic stuff.
I was saying it seems to make sense to use hydrogen as an intermediate step before you can put in all the infrastructure for overhead wires. If Germany is just using electric engines plus diesel engines now, instead of hydrogen engines, then there’s still emitting a whole lot more than they would otherwise. Even if it is cheaper.
There’s no way Hydrogen in Germany would be more green than diesel. It’d just be greenwashing. You’d need to make electricity to make hydrogen, store it and transport it, then turn it back into electricity (that’s how a hydrogen engine works, not by burning it). In the mean time, Germany is increasing it’s production of dirty energy, so the hydrogen production would have to be done with dirty energy. There’s no way that process is more efficient than just using diesel directly.
It might be better somewhere else, but not in Germany.
