01.11.12
The power of the wind
Source: Rail Technology Magazine October/November 2012
David Hytch, information systems director at Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM), speaks to RTM about a station powered by its own wind turbine.
A new wind turbine has been installed at Horwich station, to provide 50% of its electricity needs, reduce the amount of power taken from the national grid and offer cost and carbon benefits.
It is the largest turbine at any station in England, and the initial investment will be paid off over a number of years, protecting TfGM from rising power costs off the grid, offering a return “well within the lifetime” of the turbine.
TfGM information systems director David Hytch told RTM: “It’s the only station which Transport for Greater Manchester actually owns, so we’re always looking for ways to save money and make places more efficient.”
A wind turbine was chosen as the most appropriate form of a renewable resource, as Hytch pointed out: “There’s plenty of wind up there.”
He said that it was “critical” for rail to prioritise an environmental focus, as transport is such a major contributor to CO2 and emissions, despite rail’s relatively good record compared with road travel.
“It is important that wherever organisations are doing new development, they look and maximise the opportunity to put in energy saving emissions and things that will help CRC [the statutory Carbon Reduction Commitment that applies to all large organisations].
“It’s about being able to mitigate the impact of technology and the energy costs of technology by putting in the sustainable forms as well.”
Ticket to Kyoto
The project was part of a European initiative known as Ticket to Kyoto, funded to provide innovative ways to improve climate reduction. The cities in the programme are Manchester, Brussels, Rotterdam, Paris and Bielefeld in Germany.
The partners are exchanging best practice, investing in new green techniques and technologies, developing strategic plans to target neutral CO2 emissions for public transport by 2020, working to better understand their current energy context and promoting both public and industry to act against climate change.
The programme is due to finish in around 18 months, following the implementation of an education programme to raise awareness about how sustainable power generation can be used.
Time to retrofit
There is also a move to retrofit station and transport stops, to make them more energy efficient and produce less CO2.
Hytch said there was a good case for doing a similar programme to home insulation on transport properties. TfGM was bidding for funding to ensure that “all of our buildings in the future might be either modified or built from scratch to conform to these guidelines”, he added.
This would see transit buildings achieving BREEAM standards, something Hytch hoped could be rolled out to different stations across the country. He described a wide range of possible interventions that could be trialled and implemented, from water turbines to PV panels, biomass generators and work with fuel cells.
“We want to look at all of the opportunities to apply the right sort of technology and develop some understanding of how that can get used,” he said.
Moving faster
The industry needs to speed up its work on climate change and developing cleaner sources of energy, he said, and could achieve this by thinking creatively about the challenges and potential solutions.
Hytch added that: “It’s quite surprising how much information there is, but how little that is understood by the people who design and develop these things.
“Part of this is about creating an awareness and a knowledge amongst the architects, the designers and developers that these things are entirely possible, they’re not just figments of somebody’s imagination.”
As to the reasoning behind the lack of standards for transit buildings, Hytch suggested that sometimes the industry does not “move as fast as it might do”.
He continued: “It took a long time for people to accept that smartcards were a good thing for mass transit. I think we’re in a similar state with environmental technologies; moving from a sort of fringe activity to being seen by businesses and organisations as a demonstrably valuable contribution to the way they run their businesses and how they supply energy but also meet the requirements for CRC and emissions.”
Infrastructure can last for many years, which means the stations and services the industry builds now will invariably impact on the 2050 carbon reduction targets we should be looking towards.
Hytch concluded: “We can’t afford to be complacent about it.”
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