MT Magazine July/August 2023

FEATURE STORY

JULY/AUGUST 2023

21

BrightDrop: Bringing EV Delivery Vehicles to a Neighborhood Near You One of the abiding consequences of the pandemic is that people discovered that they could buy essentially everything from the comfort of their own home or office. For parcel deliveries – USPS, UPS, FedEx, Amazon, etc. – seven days a week became the rule, not the exception. According to the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index, in 2022, U.S. companies and consumers shipped, received, and returned 21.2 billion parcels. That’s 58 million a day, some 674 parcels per second.

(If you want to know how small the world is, consider this: The batteries that Wabtec is using are Ultium batteries – developed by General Motors.) If you’ve ever seen the front of a freight train (given the lengths, you’re more likely to see the railcars) you might have noticed that there is generally more than one locomotive. (This grouping of locomotives is known as a “consist,” with the emphasis on the first syllable.) The Roy Hill consist that the FLXdrive will be used with has four diesel locomotives. Although FLXdrive will replace just one of them, Roy Hill estimates a double-digit reduction in fuel costs and emissions. Optimization Philip Moslener, Wabtec’s vice president, advanced technology, says one of the important elements to operating the consist efficiently is the use of what is, in effect, a railroad-scale version of an automotive smart cruise control system. The Trip Optimizer system takes into account the makeup of the train, terrain, and other parameters and then operates the engines in an optimal manner. An important element of achieving operational efficiency for the FLXdrive is – again, something you might be familiar with if you have an electrified vehicle in your driveway – is regenerative braking, taking the kinetic energy of the brakes and using it to charge the batteries (otherwise, it would mainly be lost to heat). There is another undertaking, Moslener explains, with great potential: using hydrogen to power locomotives. Last November Wabtec, Argonne National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced cooperative research and development agreements (CRADAs) to develop the hardware and software control strategies that could be used to use hydrogen in existing engines. Moslener says locomotives can be in service for up to 50 years and that the modification “would help decarbonize more quickly without having to get rid of equipment.” And Soon H2 Then there is the second hydrogen track Wabtec is taking: fully powering a locomotive using Hydrotec hydrogen fuel cell systems – which happen to have been developed by GM and are being produced at Fuel Cell Systems Manufacturing in Brownstown, Michigan, a joint venture between GM and Honda. In this case it would be a replacement of the diesel engine with the fuel-cell modules. Moslener points out much of this depends on the availability of economical green hydrogen (i.e., hydrogen produced by using renewable electricity for the electrolysis of water). He says that the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hydrogen Shot program could go a long way to accomplishing this cost competitiveness. The goal of this program is “111”: $1 per kilogram of green hydrogen in one decade. Here’s something to consider: The Industrial Revolution was largely powered by the development of the steam engine. One of the uses of the steam engine that literally transformed transportation was the locomotive.