We are making Metro quite green
06/06/2022 -
Metro de Madrid is the most environmentally friendly means of public transport. This has been the case since its inception, as it does not use fossil fuels to provide its service, but runs mainly on electricity.
Moreover, as it runs mostly underground, it avoids the circulation of cars on the surface and contributes to reducing congestion and air pollution, thus improving air quality. These are the numbers:
- Travelling with Metro pollutes 4 times less than travelling in a private vehicle.
- Every year, Metro prevents above-ground traffic of 79 million vehicles and 14 million motorbikes
As if that wasn’t enough, at Metro want to go even greener. In recent years, many R&D&I initiatives have focused precisely at further improving our environmental impact. What does this mean? Well, Metro's cleverest engineers have come up with a set of measures to save energy and take even greater care of the environment and the planet.
These are the main measures...
EFFICIENT LIGHTING
Logically, the lighting of stations, depots and offices entails major consumption of electricity. But perhaps you don't know that at Metro we have over 330,000 luminous tubes installed in stations and 48,970 tubes in trains, operating over 17,000 hours per year. How about that.
Well, we have replaced all the luminaires with new lighting technology (LED, Induction and/or high-performance fluorescent) with energy savings of over 50% while maintaining the same brightness.
SMART VENTILATION MANAGER
The smart part will give you a clue... It's a system that uses artificial intelligence to achieve the highest energy efficiency in ventilation equipment, maintaining maximum comfort for customers (and keeping you cool, of course).
Do you know that this is the first "metaheuristic analytical tool" put into service at Metro de Madrid for facility management? Don't panic, this just means that, with this system, each fan is individually controlled and decides the best programming every 8 hours, balancing air quality parameters with energy costs.
And most impressively, it employs advanced artificial bee colony algorithms... That’s right: an algorithm based on the intelligent behaviour of swarms of bees foraging for honey.
Our fans aren’t very glamorous, but they work just fine...
REVERSIBLE CELLS
No, we aren’t talking about a prison... The reversible cell system consists of electrical equipment that allows the braking energy produced by trains to be reused for auxiliary station services, from vending machines to lights, escalators and fans.
But that's not all: braking energy recovery prevents the room temperature in tunnels and stations from rising. This way, we can also improve comfort and reduce the resources used to lower the temperature of the facilities through ventilation and air conditioning.
