Every time a 320-ton train pulls into a commuter station in The Netherlands, the brakes use 60 kilowatt-hours of energy, enough to drive a Tesla electric vehicle 300 kilometres. Now, engineer and investor Arjan Heinen wants to use regenerative braking systems to put that energy to use. In the town of Apeldoorn, he points out, a fleet of 30 diesel buses needlessly burns 2,500 litres of fuel per day. “Heinen’s plan, to be implemented first at the Apeldoorn train station, but eventually all around the Netherlands, is to connect these two inefficient systems together to make a more efficient whole,” Climate Progress reports. “He has a plan to capture the energy from the trains and use it to power all of the city’s buses, simultaneously solving both the problem of the neglected wasted energy and the expensive, dirty emissions of the diesel buses.”
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