High $peed Rail Hires Yet Another Consultant – For Sustainability?

The California High Speed Rail Authority now has a sustainability consultant.

The Authority tapped the decades-old, London-based consultancy Arup for the gig.  The firm has provided engineering services for such iconic structures as the London Eye (the Ferris wheel,) the utterly soulless monstrosity that is the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles, and the iconic Sydney Opera House, until recently known for having some of the worst acoustics on the planet.

But Arup’s work on the opera house does make it familiar with at least two salient features of the high-speed rail project: that project was completed ten years late and 1,357% over budget.

Arup announced a three-year, $11.7 million contract earlier this month (it is also working on Central Valley station construction) and is tasked with handling “renewable energy modeling and procurement, climate change adaptation and resilience, setting sustainable design criteria, managing greenhouse gas and air quality emissions, carbon offsetting, and sustainability reporting.”

A key part of its work will be to plan out the Authority’s rather ambitious goal of building its own 100% solar powered utility system to operate the trains.

The project, said the Authority, will include “a new utility-scale system on land it already owns that includes 445 acres of solar panels; generating 44 megawatts of electricity; and batteries to store 62MW/124 MWh megawatt hours of power.”

Why the Authority believes it has to build its own power system rather than just buy it off the grid is readily apparent to anyone who has been asked not to do laundry between 4 and 9 p.m. – California’s electricity grid cannot handle the power needs of the system.

In fact, the Authority took a bit of a dig at how the state is operating the grid, saying that in Europe, for example, such a system would not be needed because they have “robust, open market, and interconnected grid systems” and therefore no need for the trains there “to be self-reliant.”

Exactly where that system will be built is not yet known – the logistics of building it entirely alongside the train tracks would be rather daunting (and expensive) so it can be assumed there are a few larger parcels along the route to make up the difference.

You may be wondering if 44 megawatts is enough to power the entire system and you would be correct in thinking it is not. This $200 million project will power only the Central Valley portion of the entire system; in other words, the line from Bakersfield to Merced (or Shafter to Madera if that ends up being the whole thing)

And as to that $200 million – like every other number that has come out of the Authority throughout the entire process, it is almost certainly incorrect and not on the high-side.  Considering the going rate for both panels and the all-important battery storage needed, an estimate of $250 million would be closer to reality. Additionally, that amount of electricity would power only about seven round-trips a day.

The Authority estimates that generating its own power will save about $14.3 million per year in operating expenses – again, only on the Central Valley portion of a system that was originally supposed to run from San Diego to Sacramento with an LA to San Francisco “backbone.”

The Authority said in March – point blank – that it does not have enough money to build the entire $33 billion Bakersfield to Merced line, let alone have enough money to build the entire $100-and-who-the-hell-knows-billion-dollar statewide system.

And the hope of getting more federal money to move forward may have hit a snag – earlier this month, a House of Representatives transportation funding committee specifically inserted language into this year’s budget bill that explicitly bars the project from getting any more federal money in any form. While it is doubtful that that clause will make it all the way through the entire federal budget process, it is at least a very clear signal that a Republican-controlled House will be a very very tough place for California to turn to for money.

Arup let the Authority do the talking for this article and did not respond to an email requesting comment. The questions were the same, except for one:

“I see on the Arup website a reference to “Greater China” which includes Taiwan.  Why is that?”

Even though they do work in Taiwan and have an office in Taipei, their lack of a response is not that problematic as I think we all know the answer to that question.