Any person thinking objectively would have questioned these improbable figures and anyone wishing to discus HS2 based on facts would have refrained from making any rash judgments or claims, however the article which has been on the net for a year has been re-tweeted by those fervently opposed to HS2 as some sort of evidence that HS2 will use astronomical amounts of energy..
However this article should not have been taken literally and appears simply to be pointing out the interesting conclusion that could be drawn from using I Mech E figures for energy usage which themselves appear to be nothing more than a typo. The figures seem show the kwh/ per seat-km in whole numbers rather decimal.
Despite this, HS2 protesters upon unearthing this year old letter jumped straight onto it and immediately began to make misleading and inaccurate statements based on these figures.
The whole basis for this comes from the projected energy demand per seat/km, which for the HS2 reference train was projected to be around 0.05 kwh/seat-km (1), to put this into context current 9 car class 390 Pendolinos use .04 kwh/seat-km (2) and current Eurostar trains which provide services between London and Paris use 0.05 kmh/seat-km (1&2). These figures are based on independent work carried out on behalf of HS2 Ltd by Imperial College and other work carried out by the Cambridge energy Forum.
The claims on twitter however used calculations based on whole numbers, so instead using the figure 0.05 kwh/per seat-km the claims in question used the whole number value of 50 kwh/seat-km. Every energy study which uses this unit of measure that I have found has been in the 0.03 to 0.06 range, whereas the figures for the claims are over 1000 times greater.
This little fact hasn't stopped those opposed to HS2 using these figures on twitter to manufacture audacious and inaccurate claims though. If those opposed to HS2 really want to be taken seriously then they really ought to double check the facts and figures before making any claims regarding HS2.
The current HS1 Eurostar which use the same energy travelling at 300km/h as HS2 trains will when travelling at 360km/h
(1) page 16 http://www.hs2.org.uk/assets/x/56774
3 comments:
It beggars belief both that such a ludicrous claim was made in PE, normally a sensible journal edited to higher standards than Wikipedia, and that it hasn't been retracted. I'd be surprised if even Concorde was that energy-hungry! I think you should write to the editor and ask for thisd obvious error to be removed, for the sake of their own credibility.
Panic ye not! The original I Mech E statement was clearly a simple typo, putting seat-km where it should have been train-km. The letter-writer, Mr Hobbs, has a sense of irony and is gently and humorously pointing this out by showing the absurd conclusions that follow from a simple typo.
Antis, by swallowing the letter whole as if fact have simply made fools of themselves.
Thanks William, the voice of reason as always, it sometimes hard to see the irony in such letters.
This episode does show though just how much the antis think they can get away with. If any supporters had posted any thing like the tweets posted by the like of Lizzy we would of instantly been called liars and had all sort of abuse thrown at us. This really does go to show the level at which the antis are still working at despite claiming always to have the moral high ground.
It's frustrating that I should even have to write such a blog but these sorts of inaccurate comments must be dealt with.
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