Proposal of the new concept of “interception of regenerative power” and evaluation of valuable and valueless interception

Regenerative energy utilization is one of the most actively discussed topics to improve the efficiency of power supply system for DC electric railway. We, East Japan Railway Company, have already installed four energy storage systems and two regenerative inverters for regenerative energy utilization. In the regenerative energy utilization, the utilization of regenerative energy which is originally utilized by other powering train dose not contribute to energy saving and the appropriate evaluation of the effect of such devices is required. In this paper, a novel concept of “valuable interception” of regenerative energy is proposed and evaluated supposing one of the existing commuting DC railway line in Tokyo. As a result, it is shown that the interception of regenerative power can contribute to the reduction of loss under some conditions.