Page 14 - Innovation in energy management: contribution of railways to sustainable mobility

IV. GENERAL TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS

One of the objectives of this document is the identification of challenges facing railway
administrators and operators responsible for better energy management. According to the
procedure in the original document, the different challenges will be grouped according to
their scope of application: Infrastructure, Rolling Stock and Use and Operation.

Specifically, meeting the different challenges may yield improvements in one or several
directions:

Electric energy saving

Decarbonisation

Efficiency in operation

Due to their strategic importance for end users, whether these challenges can be associated
with direct economic investment and their approximate impact is also stated:

No or low economic investment (less than 10 k€)

Average economic investment (between 10 and 500 k€)

High economic investment (greater than 500 k€)

The challenges are also classified according to the technical implications associated with
their implementation. In this sense, there will be challenges of a passive nature, that is, those
that are not based on complex solutions at equipment level (for example, an efficient design
of the electrical network based on good practices). The challenges of an active nature will be
those whose application involves the use of technical equipment that fulfils a
predetermined function based on a control logic (for example, the operation of an Electronic
Power Converter to enable the injection of braking energy into the network). Specifically, a
difference is underlined between technical equipment of a purely electrical nature and
equipment of a digital nature:

Passive nature (does not imply the use of new equipment)

Active nature (new electrical equipment)

Active nature (new digital equipment)

Finally, it is important to bear in mind that many of the challenges are interrelated.

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Position paper: Innovation in energy management: contribution of railways to sustainable mobility
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