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[[patent pending - a video podcast series from GE]]
[Hi there, I'm Lembit Salasoo.]
[I'm a PhD research engineer here at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, New York.]
[And, in fact, where we're standing here is next to a hybrid transit bus.]
[We've got a team here that's been working about 30 years on ]
[hybrid vehicles--electric vehicles--starting with automobiles, ]
[then going to vans, and here we have hybrid buses.]
[For the last 10 years or so we've been using this bus as a test bed]
[to develop our technology, both in terms of battery technology ]
[as well as some of the advanced control technology.]
[And this is a 20-ton bus, and in fact, for the last 2 or 3 years--more than that--]
[we've been working on hybrid locomotives which is a 200-ton vehicle.]
[Come on inside, and I'll show you what we're doing.]
[Now the hybrid locomotive has a diesel engine, which burns a lot of fuel, ]
[When the train is braking, in fact, the motors are controlled to make electricity,]
[and that electricity today is wasted as heat.]
[And the whole hybrid concept is to take that braking energy and store it in a battery, ]
[and then the next time it's needed to, in fact, ]
[take the energy from the battery and, therefore, burn less fuel.]
[And we think that this has got potential to save at least 10% fuel on a locomotive]
[Now come on down the back, I'll show you what we're doing here on the bus.]
[So we use this bus really as a test bed for some of the technologies ]
[that we're going to be using on the locomotive.]
[This, for instance, is a battery bank.]
[These batteries hold enough energy, really, to drive this bus anywhere from 60 to 100 miles.]
[And here we can see there is a lot of cabling, and there's some ventilation equipment here.]
[When we use the batteries they do need to be cooled, ]
[and this is one of the technologies that we've got installed right now.]
[We also have some other technologies.]
[We have energy storage inside this case, ]
[and we have another third energy storage actually underneath the bus.]
[And here we see the power electronics which are used to convert the electricity]
[from the energy storage batteries and actually drive the wheels and the motor.]
[How this relates now to the hybrid locomotive is that]
[once we did the proof of principle on these 20-ton transit buses, ]
[we saw that really we could do a similar thing for GE's--]
[one of GE's premier products, the 200-ton freight locomotive.]
[And in 2002, we did a proof of principle where we took an existing GE locomotive, ]
[outfitted it with batteries and showed that, truly in fact, this principle does work.]
[We also went out to the Department of Energy and are working together with them ]
[to develop the right battery system to put onto the locomotive.]
[And we've been so successful that in 2004, based on our results, ]
[GE Transportation has now initiated a design team, ]
[and they're working very hard to actually design a hybrid locomotive ]
[that we're going to introduce to the marketplace in the next couple of years.]
