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INFORMED SOURCES March 2007

Electrification in limbo

With the Government rubbishing electrification it's time to sign up and be counted

Here is Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander addressing an industry function back in November.

‘Further electrification of the network is an issue raised frequently. Often it has the subtext that it is something that it is obvious we should be doing from the point of view of carbon emissions. But it is not a simple decision.

Electrification is expensive and adds to the complexity of the overall railway. Although we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, thermal losses in power stations and electrical transmission losses can mean that the diesel railway could be of the same order of overall efficiency as an electrical railway.

Engines can already run on biofuel and fuel cell technology is developing fast, so portable power for railways is by no means a thing of the past'.

Sound familiar? Yes, you read it almost word for word in the article by Transport Minister Tom Harris in the January 2007 Modern Railways.

Actually, Mr Harris did add ‘Nevertheless we are looking very carefully at the case for further electrification of key routes and expect to be able to make some decisions within the next year'. But then, Mr Harris is MP for Glasgow South and the Scots Parliament is all for electrification, with three schemes under development.

Of course, the cut and paste similarity of the speech and the article is a reminder that Ministers don't actually write the words they speak. To a civil servant with a first in Classics, each new minister is a tabula rasa. To us techno word jocks living on the bleeding edge of 21 st Century neologisms, that man in a suit is a wetware based audio presentation system.

This point was made with more than customary brutality in a footnote to Mr Alexander's speech. It ran, ‘ This speech represented existing departmental policy but the words may not have been the same as those used by the Minister'.

Institutionalised

So it is the civil servants, not the ministers, who believe that ‘electrification is expensive and adds to the complexity of the overall railway'. And the thought that grown-ups like Director Finance & Procurement Mark Lambirth and my old chum Director Technical & Professional Clive Burrows can endorse such vacuous sound-bites is worrying.

But when we delve into the routine traffic within the Department it appears that the negative view of electrification is institutionalised. For example, one assumption behind the specification of the InterCity Express Programme (NEVER) is that the extent of electrification in the UK ‘will remain broadly similar to that today with possibly some incremental growth on existing main line routes'.

Then again, there was a Rail Strategy Workshop at DfT on 1 February. Under the heading ‘What are the difficult issues and where are the priorities?', participants were asked to identify six issues to discuss in roundtables. To help focus minds, some ‘possible themes' were listed. They included ‘Put the wires up or take them down?'

Of course, I'm a fine one to complain about deliberate provocation. But there is a consistent theme in there. And, for Mark Lambirth, who is busily juggling the HLOS and the SoFA, introducing an electrification programme would completely ruin his pitch to the Treasury for funding for Control Period 4 (CP4), which runs for five years from April 2009.

Apparently, ‘passive provision' for schemes at some future date might be acceptable to DfT Rail. And one reason why the ECML was such good value was the decades of passive provision by the Region's civil engineers by building in extra clearance for the wires every time they rebuilt a bridge or tunnel.

But, somehow, I can't see Network Rail, which I reckon will be really under the cosh in CP4, having any time or money for such long term planning, however passive. Unless, that is, there is the prospect of a rolling programme.

Deconstruction

So back to the anti-electrification arguments expounded by the ministers.

As a critique of capital investment ‘It's expensive' is so bereft of intellectual content as to be meaningless. When it comes to investment, what matters is not what something costs, but the return the expenditure generates. It is cost:benefit analysis which determines whether something is worth having and where it ranks in your investment programme.

In the 1981 Joint Review of main line electrification, carried out by heavyweight civil servants and hard nosed railwaymen, a rolling programme of electrification not only showed a positive rate of return, but the bigger the programme, and the faster it was implemented, the better the rate of return.

Back in the May 2006 Modern Railways I revisited and updated the 1981 review to modern prices. And to my surprise I found that the case was still robust. The article is in the archive section of Alycidon Rail ( www.alycidon.com ).

One surprising discovery when researching the article, was that electrification costs have avoided the boiling frogs. Current costs of overhead electrification continue the steady reduction ever since the first scheme in 1966.

Costs

Of course, definition affects cost. Recent Network Rail electrification projects have come in at between £200,000-£260,000 per single track km (stkm) for the overhead line electrification (OHLE) equipment plus associated civils works. But a recent consultants report puts the figure at £500,000/stkm, for something straightforward like the Great Western main line.

One of the factors is claimed to be signalling immunisation. This a blatant red herring, because the GWML is overdue for resignalling and in a grown up railway you would resignal and electrify in parallel. You could even call it total route modernisation (copyright CEW Green).

So I still reckon £250,000/stkm is a good bench mark, and other consultants concur. In fact, we could make it a unit of railway currency. Let's call it the ‘Spark' and look at some conversion rates.

A franchise bid today costs 20 Sparks . Bidding costs for the two new Midlands franchises, with four bidders each, will total 160 Sparks . Lengthening the Pendoling fleet would have cost 720 Sparks .

Electrification ‘expensive'? I don't think so.

Complexity

What about ‘complexity'? This was first postulated by Network Rail Chief Executive John Armitt. However, he does not speak for the railway on this issue – only his company.

As we all know, running Network Rail is such an unattractive job that top class managers need the prospect of substantial bonuses to make getting out bed in the morning and doing the best job you can bearable.

Thus in 2005-06 John Armitt's salary was 2 Sparks and his annual bonus was a touch under 1 Spark. But 11.25% of that bonus was linked to the reduction in those delay minutes for which Network Rail was responsible.

Hence John is incentivised to keep the infrastructure simple and get rid of things under his control which might cause delay minutes. And a dewirement creates a delay minutes rich environment.

So taking down the wires would be a good move for the Network Rail board. But in total railway terms, all that would do is shift the complexity and delay minutes onto the TOCs.

De-electrification would replace lineside switch gear and the catenary by with thousands of pistons, camshafts fuel pumps, fuelling facilities and so on, multiplying the complexity of the total railway and reducing its reliability. But it would be the TOCs' fault.

There is nothing so simple as an electric railway, especially given the diminishing number of moving parts in modern traction equipment. And this is before we get onto unlimited power for unlimited periods, the ability to switch on and go and simpler maintenance. So the complexity argument is equally irrational.

Green

Finally, what about the argument that losses in power generation and transmission mean that the diesel railway could be of the same order of overall efficiency as an electrical railway?

Well, at its optimum power setting, the new MTU 20V 4000 R42, engine being fitted in the IC125 power cars has a thermal efficiency of 44%. Gas fired power stations are perhaps a percentage point better. A combined cycle power station, where the exhaust gases are used to heat boilers supplying a steam turbine are up in the 50-55% range.

Coal fired power stations have been less efficient, but the technology continues to improve and the Table shows what is being achieved in other countries

What about the losses? Here's another table and as you can see we are talking about 2% or so.

Losses in the National Grid

Source: National Grid 2006

So, unless you have combined cycle generation, it looks as though the argument stands up? But, no one burns diesel oil for power generation, and the diesel's efficiency assumes it is always barrelling along at its optimum combination of engine speed and power.

In practice, traction diesels are subject to frequent changes of load and also spend long periods idling. All of which hit fuel efficiency.

So while the claim stands in green terms, as an argument against electrification it is spurious. As for the fuel cell, the energy cost of producing and distributing hydrogen in unprecedented quantities will surely outweigh any benefits on the vehicle.

Petition

If DfT Rail is using spurious arguments against electrification, those of us who believe that the future of railways is electric, have to do something. So I have posted this petition on the No 10 web-site.

No, of course I don't think Tony Blair is going to take a blind bit of notice. Mind you, it might appeal to Gordon Brown, given Lenin's dictum ‘ Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country'.

But the No 10 web site is a new way of demonstrating support for a cause. In fact, the best supported petitions oppose issues. In the Transport & Infrastructure category, where you will find Electrify, the petition against vehicle tracking and road pricing is heading for a million signatures as I write.

However, second place in the category has 5000 signatures and my aspiration is to have electrify in second place by July when the HLOS, SoFa and Review of the railways white paper are all published.

So please sign up. The internet address is http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Electrify/

Continues.........