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Across the U.S., dozens of proposed solar, wind, and battery projectsencompassing thousands of gigawatts of potential powerare backlogged as they wait to be allowed to plug into the power grid. And, even in areas where renewable energy projects are already online, their output is often heavily curtailed. This clean energy bottleneck stems from the fact that, as demand for renewable energy rises, the U.S. isn’t building new transmission lines fast enough to transport large amounts of clean energy from point A to point B. Now, theres a company looking to address that problem with a simple yet radical solution: Putting renewable energy into giant batteries and transporting those batteries by train. SunTrain is a San Francisco-based company founded by green energy developer Christopher Smith, who now serves as the companys president and chief technology officer. The idea, he explains, is to use the existing U.S. freight train systemwhich covers around 140,000 miles of terrainto bring renewable energy thats being curtailed by transmission bottlenecks to the areas that need it most. SunTrain is currently working on a pilot project that would run between Pueblo, Colorado, and Denver. If its approved by regulators, Smith says, he expects the pilot could be off the ground in just two years. [Photo: SunTrain] Current challenges to transporting renewables Clean energy is the fastest-growing source of electricity in the U.S. According to a report from American Clean power, 93% of the new energy capacity last year was solar, wind, and battery storage. The issue, Smith says, is that transmission line infrastructure lags far behind the rate of clean energy growth. The United States needs 300,000 miles of new transmission lines, like, right now. That’s the amount that we need immediately to keep up with current demand, Smith says. It’s also estimated that, to reach 100% renewables, as well as the electrification demand that we’ll have by 2050, well need over a million miles of new transmission lines by 2050. Currently, we’re building less than 1,000 miles a year. [Image: SunTrain] Building new transmission lines is challenging for a number of reasons, including environmental regulations, the time it takes, and the fact that any new lines would have to cross thousands of miles of privately owned land. In Colorado, for example, Smith says theres a lot of renewable energy in the states southeast corner, which flows through the grid to Pueblo. However, because theres not enough transmission line capacity between Pueblo and Denver, much of that power can’t ultimately be used. Once that renewable energy gets to Pueblo, there’s not enough transmission line capacity to get it into downtown Denver, Smith says. So that energy basically gets curtaileda fancy word for being wasted. Until now, the costly construction of new transmission lines has been the main solution that’s available. But Smith says this discussion overlooks a resource thats been used to transport energy for almost 200 years: railroads. The freight railroad network already moves virtually every single form of energy known to man that’s used in a real way: natural gas, coal, oil, ethanol, biomass, spent nuclear waste, various fossil fuels, and the list goes on and on, Smith says. So there’s this huge amount of overlap of our great railroad network and our electrical systems already. There is no reason why we cannot be moving battery trains over the freight rail network like we move every other form of energy. [Photo: SunTrain] SunTrain’s solution For its pilot project, SunTrain is partnering with Xcel Energy, Colorados largest electric utility. Xcel owns a coal plant in Pueblo (Comanche Generating Station) and a natural gas plant in Denver (Cherokee Generating Station) that are both set to be decommissioned within the next several years. Through a collaboration with SunTrain, these plants could potentially be re-powered with battery stored energy. Smith says SunTrain would use the existing substation inside Comanche Generating Stationwhich already has extensive railroad infrastructure from its history as a coa plantto charge its batteries from Pueblos bottlenecked grid. During the day, Smith says, the energy will likely be 100% renewable. Then, the batteries would be transported to Denver and the energy offloaded at the Cherokee Generating Station onto Denvers grid. (Charging and discharging take between four and six hours each, and the 139-mile trip from Pueblo to Denver takes about five hours by train.) A substation can turn energy into a format that can cover long distances without losing much energy, Smith says. A substation can also turn electricity generated from a power plant into a format that can be used by local homes and businesses. For SunTrain’s purposes, the Pueblo substation allows us to get the electricity formatted properly for our batteries while also collectively accessing all the various renewable energy generators in the region. [Photo: SunTrain] SunTrains proposed railcars will be made of 20-foot shipping containers, each of which will hold about 40 tons of batteries. The company designed proprietary charging and discharging systems that allow the energy to flow right from where it’s generated, whether it’s a solar array or a substation, right under the batteries on the railcar, Smith says. Then, once the train arrives at its destination, the discharging system would similarly allow the energy to flow right off the batteries. The whole process is designed so that the batteries never actually need to be removed from the train. [Image: SunTrain] In an interview with the podcast In the Noco, Smith said SunTrains first generation railcars are designed to match the freight railroads existing standards for coal trains, to ensure that the system itself doesnt need to change anything in order for SunTrain to come to market. Based on those parameters, each train will be built at between 8,000 and 9,000 feet long, with the capacity to carry around two gigawatt hours of power in total. Thats enough to power a city of 100,000 for a full day. Smith says the team has already tested a proof-of-concept train on several trips amounting to more than 10,000 miles on the Union Pacific network, traveling from SunTrains San Francisco testbed to discharge locations across California, Nevada, and Colorado. Now, the company is waiting for Colorados Public Utilities Commission to approve Xcels expenditure of about $125 million to begin construction on the pilot project. We tested the technology, the feasibility, made sure the mechanical standards were there, Smith says. Our manufacturing partners can deliver entire unit trains of thesemeaning 200 rail cars of batteries that could carry about 1.75 gigawatt hours of energy. So this isn’t something that’s far away, coming in the pipeline, or needing some kind of technological breakthrough. This is an immediately executable idea. It just needs the capital.
Category:
E-Commerce
Visit a celebritys Wikipedia page and theres a good chance youll be greeted by a blurry, outdated, or unflattering photo. These images often look like they were snapped in passing at a public eventbecause, in many cases, they were. The reason? Wikipedia requires all images to be freely available for public use. Since professional photographers typically sell their work, high-quality portraits rarely make it onto the site. Thats bad news for celebrities, for whom this page is often their most-viewed online presenceand therefore the face they present to the world. Some photos are so notoriously bad, theyve even earned a spot on a dedicated Instagram page. Enter WikiPortraits: a team of volunteer photographers on a mission to fix this injustice. Armed with their own camera gearand often covering their own travelthese photographers attend festivals, award shows, and industry events to capture high-quality, freely licensed images of celebrities and other notable figures. Theyve brought portrait studios to major events like the Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, and Cannes, helping to refresh outdated Wikipedia photos or fill in the blanks for biographies missing images altogether. Its been in the back of our minds for quite a while now, Kevin Payravi, one of WikiPortraits cofounders, told 404 Media in a recent interview. Last year, the team decided to turn the idea into action. They secured press credentials for Sundance 2024, sent a few photographers to the festival, and set up a portrait studio on site. It marked WikiPortraitss first coordinated effort in the U.S. to capture high-quality, freely licensed images specifically for Wikipedia. Since launching last year, WikiPortraits has grown to over 30 photographers, collectively covering about 10 global festivals and snapping nearly 5,000 freely licensed celebrity portraits. Their photos have racked up millions of views on Wikipedia and have even been picked up by news outlets around the world. Celebrities? Theyre often thrilled. Just ask Jeremy Strong. At a New York screening of The Apprentice, photographer Nikhil Dixit approached the Succession star about taking an updated Wikipedia photo. Strongs publicist initially declined, Dixit told 404 Media, but the actor interrupted. Wait, youre from Wikipedia? he asked. For the love of God, please take down that photo. Youd be doing me a service.
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E-Commerce
American auto executives have had a rough go of it of late. As calendars flipped to 2025, the leaders of the Big Three (GM, Ford, and Stellantis) were already confronting lukewarm demand for their electric vehicles as well as the ascendance of new and formidable Chinese competitors. Then Donald Trump arrived in the White House, and the headwinds turned into hurricane-force gales. The most urgent issue has been the tariffs that Trump has declared, and then paused, and then resumed on goods imported from Canada and Mexico. Because the North American auto industry is tightly integrated with suppliers in both countries, Trumps proposed 25% tariffs could increase the cost of new cars in the U.S. by as much as $12,000. On March 6, the Trump administration granted the auto industry a one-month reprieve so that companies can shift production here to the United States of America, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. The likelihood of that happening in a matter of weeks is virtually nil. Beyond the looming threat of tariffs, U.S. automakers now face an increasingly wobbly domestic market. As Trumps tumult has rattled the economy (and shaken the stock market), American consumer sentiment has tumbled at the fastest rate in three-and-a-half years. Both tariffs and an economic downturn would make Americans relatively poorer when contemplating a vehicle purchase. For that reason, their likely effect on car-buying preferences is similar: They would tilt purchase decisions toward cheaper, modest-sized models. But U.S. automakers have no small, affordable options available; after decades focused on building increasingly massive SUVs and pickups, the Big Three no longer offer Americans a single mainstream sedanonly foreign competitors do. Detroits devotion to car bloat has left the U.S. auto industry uniquely vulnerable to Trumps economic chaos. The term car bloat describes the steady expansion of American automobiles. In 1977, just 23% of new car sales were SUVs and pickups; that figure now stands at around 80%. Individual models have also grown larger, such as the Chevrolet Silverado pickup, which added around 700 pounds and two inches of height between 1995 and 2024. Car bloats causes are manifold, including shifting consumer preferences, loopholes in federal fuel economy rules, and the billions of marketing dollars carmakers have spent convincing Americans that they need a rugged SUV or pickup even if they haul nothing heavier than groceries and venture nowhere more exotic than a shopping mall. U.S. car companies now rely on their heftiest models to generate profit. The pickup truck is the American luxury vehicle, said Glenn Mercer, a longtime automotive researcher. That’s where they make all their money. Last year, GM announced it was ending production of the Chevrolet Malibu, Detroits last non-luxury sedan sold in the U.S. . Meanwhile, the Big Threes margins have grown juicier due to the supply chains that spread across North America following the 1994 adoption of NAFTA. The elimination of border fees has allowed automakers to capitalize on Mexicos relatively cheap labor as well as Canadas abundant raw materials and many factories. A single automotive component can cross national borders as many as seven times during the production process. Free trade has allowed the automakers to minimize the cost of producing cars that have grown increasingly massiveand expensive. In January, Kelley Blue Book found that the average price of a new vehicle in the U.S. was just shy of $50,000, near an all-time record. Car ownership is even pricier when accounting for the rising costs of insurance and maintenance. According to federal data, the average inflation-adjusted cost of owning a car driven 15,000 miles annually rose a whopping 44% between 2017 and 2023, reaching $12,000 per year. Even in a rich and auto-dominated country like the U.S., theres a limit to how much shoppers can fork out. Last year, the Detroit News noted an affordability shift in car-buying preferences, and a recent analysis by Wells Fargo found that most American pickup owners want to pay between $40,000 and $50,000 on their next truck, well below the typical cost of $60,000-plus. A 2024 survey by the Dave Cantin Group and Kaiser Associates found a three-percentage point jump in Americans planning to buy a sedan as their next vehicleand a decline in those eyeing a truck or SUV, the vehicle types that dominate Detroit. The Big Threes loss has been Asian car companies gain: Companies like Kia, Nissan, and Mitsubishi have seen U.S. sales surge for comparatively cheap sedans like the K4, Sentra, and Mirage. Now Trumps tariffs could add thousands more dollars to the cost of a North American SUV or truck, a price hike likely to catalyze the American shift toward downsizing. (Sedans produced by foreign brands in North American would be likely to see less of a price hike than Detroits hefty SUVS and trucks, and many sedans sold in the U.S. are imported from countries that arent current targets of Trumps tariffs.)Even if Trump ultimately dumps his tariff proposalsa huge ifgrowing fears of a recession, which Trump has refusd to rule out, reveal the vulnerability of Detroits bloated lineups. Some budget-conscious car buyers may save money by delaying their purchase, choosing fewer features, or selecting a smaller model within the same vehicle class. (This may already be happening: The comparatively modest Toyota RAV4 recently dethroned the Ford F-150 pickup as the top-selling vehicle in the U.S.) The other likely scenario: They could switch from an SUV or pickup to a comparatively cheap sedan. In a world of uncertainty, a safe harbor is a lower cost, high quality vehicle, said Mercer. Thats the Japanese and Koreans. For U.S. automakers, losing longtime customers would be a disaster. Its easier to keep a customer than conquer one, Mercer said. I’m sure Ford is kicking itself that it discontinued so many of its car linesand the Koreans and the Japanese are feeling pretty damn smart. For Americans not personally involved in the auto industry, a tempering of car bloat would hardly be a bad thing. Bigger vehicles are more deadly and polluting, and a decline in size would reduce crash deaths and emissions. But those societal benefits are unlikely to be top of mind for U.S. automakers facing tumbling sales. Mercer blames the Big Three for lemming-like behavior as they have dropped all of their smaller models over the last 20 years. That culling process has left them vulnerable to the current consumer shift toward affordability, a trend that Trumps economic chaos will only reinforce. If American auto sales take a hit in the months ahead, carmakers will surely blame whipsawing federal policy. Fair enough, but they should also look in the mirror.
Category:
E-Commerce
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