On the Use of Train Braking Energy Regarding the Electrical Consumption Optimization in Railway Station

Nowadays, many projects have been conducted in order to reduce CO2 emissions, with the objective of reducing energy consumption. In the context of the urban railway area, the energy consumption is huge. It is respectively split into 70% for the traction and 30% for station consumers. Many works have already been carried out on traction systems, but very few of them were oriented towards the station energy problematic. This paper describes the project led by “Efficacity” Institute which concerns the use of the braking energy to manage and optimize the railway station energy consumption.Efficacity investigates energetic concepts in order to store the braking energy of the trains with a stationary electrical saving system, and to reutilize it for the power supply of electric and thermal consumers or actuators in a railway station thanks to a microgrid. The idea is to store train braking energy in hybrid storage system (composed of batteries and super-capacitors cells) and to restate it judiciously at different moments of the day (during peak or low energy consumption hours) to various kind of station loads.