| dc.description.abstract | As of today, more organisations act on their Corporate Environmental Responsibility (CER) and
acknowledge their contributions to environmental impacts. ProRail, responsible for the Dutch railway
network, is one of these organisations and set clear sustainability goals as a result. One of these goals
is to reach energy neutrality in 2030. To reach this goal, renewable energy on ProRail assets is
needed to ensure the energy demand is met annually. As a result, this study investigated the
potential of solar photovoltaic (PV) energy and the implementation within the ProRail infrastructure
to contribute to this goal.
The perspective of the 2030 energy demand of ProRail was investigated with scenario creation. Two
frozen technology scenarios were created which showed increases in the energy demand due to the
expected rise in train passengers. In addition, an energy efficiency scenario was constructed that
contained proposed energy efficiency improvements that significantly contribute to a 22% reduction
in energy consumption. Despite this demand reduction, the analysed energy efficiency measures
were not sufficient to reach a 30% reduction in the energy demand compared to 2015 levels. ProRail
pursued this goal from 2015 onwards with yearly 2% energy efficiency improvements. As a result of
this finding, additional energy efficiency improvements need to be explored and implemented.
Furthermore, the technical and techno-economic potential for solar photovoltaic technology
installations on ProRail assets was analysed. This analysis was performed through ArcGIS software.
The technical analysis showed limited potential for the roofs of buildings and platforms, as it could
only provide 26% of the energy consumption of ProRail in the most favourable energy efficiency
demand scenario. On the other hand, the open fields owned by ProRail have a technical potential to cover 100% of the energy demand and facilitate additional energy for other consumption sources
such as trains. However, it was also found that the uncertainty of this finding indicates that detailed
further research is necessary to retrieve results with higher accuracy. The techno-economic potential
showed that 37% of the PV installations had a positive NPV value. Despite this relatively low
percentage, the overall positive Net Present Value (NPV) for all the investigated PV installation
locations of the rooftops was positive. This indicates that 37% of the surfaces with positive NPVs
outweigh the negative values and relatively high financial attractivity is reached. The range of
Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) values found for all the PV locations is quite comparable with the
general outlook of the LCOE of solar PV in 2030. In addition, the LCOE range was cheaper than all
fossil-fuel technologies indicating financial attractiveness and competitiveness.
A SWOT analysis was performed and found that the implementation of PV is troubled by the
electricity network administrator role of ProRail, as they are unable to generate electricity for other
organisations that use the overhead electricity line of the railway network. The availability of
subsidies and research projects could be used effectively to investigate new opportunities for PV
implementation. Furthermore, an increased number of trains will contain an electricity meter on
board. As a result, railway transport operators like NS measure their electricity use and could enter
their own individual contracts. ProRail, responsible for the railway infrastructure and overhead
electricity lines, is left with the energy losses in the cables that is not included in the energy contracts
and administrated as ProRail energy use. Consequently, the energy demand almost doubles in 2030.
This indicates that a fast implementation process of PV is required and energy efficiency improvements are crucial | |
