Batteries for long distance trains are hard to imagine. Better we start stretching wires as Russia did to convert the Trans-Siberian from fuel to electric.

“Along the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway, trains of oil tank cars extend across the landscape for miles. Each tank car, black and tarry-looking, with its faded white markings, resembles the one that follows it… a trainload of these cars defines monotony.

The Trans-Siberian Railway covers 9,288 kilometers between Moscow and the Pacific port of Vladivostok, or 5,771 miles. In other words, if it were twenty-one miles longer, it would be exactly twice as long as Interstate 80 from New Jersey to California. Laying awake near the tracks in some remote spot at night you hear trains going by all through the night with scarcely a pause.
…

(T)he Trans-Siberian Railway is all-electric, with overhead cables like a streetcar line – you find the tracks are empty of traffic only for five or ten minutes at a time.
…

Besides oil, the railway carries coal, machinery parts, giant tires, scrap iron, and endless containers … just like the containers stacked five stories high around the Port of Newark, New Jersey, and probably every other port in the world.”

Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier (2010)

Lithium-ion batteries come in many chemistries and variants. They can be attractive in stop-start applications if they come down in price. Do not forget the weight advantage of lithium-ion, which is probably not an issue in a locomotive. But car manufacturers are more and more focused on reducing weight, so a lithium battery might help.

The price reduction in my view is mostly a matter of economies of scale and commoditisation. That is where the EV manufacturers come in. They push the development of cheap, reliable large format lithium batteries. All chemistries will take advantage of that progress, not just the high energy density variants used in EV’s.

The way I see it is that lithium-ion will achieve the economies of scale and maturity to be the preferable choice in all automotive applications. But it is not there yet, and until that happens, there is narrow window of opportunity for Axion recoup their investments. That is why Petersen is so anxious: time is running out.

What is the biggest threat to his lead-acid revival evangelism? Right, lithium-ion, cheap lithium-ion. Which company is pushing the development of cheap lithium-ion more than any other? Right. Tesla.

He has been consistently trying to talk up his own stock and talk down the competition. I see him as a pump-and-dump scammer trying to save his pension.

He once said that EV’s are only for the ‘philosophically committed and mathematically challenged’ and that he estimated there are 100,000 of those in the US. After selling an EV to each of those 100,000, the market would collapse and the EV disappear for good. Really, that is the level of absurdity that has become the norm in Petersen’s universe.

Numerous people have tried to warn him that his blind hatred led him to dismiss the reality of the fast progress in EV technology and underestimate it’s potential. Reality is proving him wrong much quicker than he could have imagined and I could have hoped. But I don’t think that will serve as a reality check for Mr. Petersen. He is ‘economically committed and realism challenged’.