Was GE hybrid locomotive ever commercialized?

[massrig]

Hi all,

I'm looking for some recent updates on GE's hybrid locomotives project. I know they shut down the factory that was supposed to produce the batteries. But were these locomotives ever commercialized, and if so do you where I can find some information of their sales? Immelt said in the following interview that they sold 4000 hybrid locomotives, however that seems a very large number to me.

http://business.financialpost.com/investing/immelt-charges-on-as-ge-thrives-and-wall-street-yawns

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

[carnej1]

massrig

Hi all,

I'm looking for some recent updates on GE's hybrid locomotives project. I know they shut down the factory that was supposed to produce the batteries. But were these locomotives ever commercialized, and if so do you where I can find some information of their sales? Immelt said in the following interview that they sold 4000 hybrid locomotives, however that seems a very large number to me.

http://business.financialpost.com/investing/immelt-charges-on-as-ge-thrives-and-wall-street-yawns

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

 

No, there were no production units built or sold of the hybrid GEVO....

 In fact there is no information to verify that the "Demo" unit; GE 2010, ever had the hybrid energy storage system fully installed and functioning. The unit was outshopped before the Molten Salt batteries were fully developed and in production.

 Keep in mind that Tier IV emissions compliance was the most important priority for the North American OEM locomotive firms and most of their R&D resources in the last few years have been devoted to that rather than other projects (and just look at EMD's predicament with getting knocked out of the marketplace for nearly 2 years due to having to develop a new compliant engine derived from the 265 H engine rather than the re-engineered 710 as they initially planned.)...

Reuters is generally an accurate Media outlet but that nearly 6 year old article got it wrong: what GE had sold nearly 4,000 of in the 4 years prior to 2011 were non-hybrid GEVO locomotives..

[massrig]

Thank you for your reply! That's what I thought. It's just weird that nobody called GE out for this passage from the article cited above:

"One example is the hybrid railroad locomotive GE unveiled in 2007. The head of GE Transportation thought the product would not work, largely because no one made the scale of battery they would need to store enough engine power to move a 50,000-ton freight train. So the former Dartmouth College football player set Little’s team on the problem.

“This started out sort of as a joke, him pushing us,” Little recalled. “And I came back and said, ‘Hey, we can really do it. Do you want to do this?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, let’s go.’ So he gave us the money for the battery program. We got the locomotive out there and we then developed our own battery chemistry for hybrid locomotives.”

The company has sold more than 4,000 of that model locomotive in the past four years, which Immelt said proves the value of taking risks."

 

Thank you!

[Wizlish]

Makes a good story if you don't know any better, doesn't it?

For those interested in the specific details of the battery chemistry, the COMSOL company (makers of multiphysics software) discussed it in some detail as their software was used for the GE development effort.  They provided this on a 'demo reel' CD-ROM that I believe can still be obtained from them; at one time I recall it could be downloaded, too.