Energy is the largest single cost in running a railway and the only one that moves while you sleep. Everything your trains draw — diesel in the tank or power at the pantograph — is bought as one commodity and priced in cents per kilowatt-hour, the unit that lets you compare the two at all. A diesel multiple unit and an electric set running the same line can then be read off against each other directly, which is the whole reason the industry settled on kWh in the first place.
You buy energy before you run it, store it up to a real limit, and pay whatever the market asks on the day — unless you have signed a contract that says otherwise.
That last part is where the game gets interesting. An energy contract is a bet on where the price is going, made against a market that does not know you exist.
Energy and emissions quota both have a price that updates every half hour. The price is synthetic — it is not a live feed from a commodity exchange — but the way it behaves is calibrated against real fuel statistics: it drifts, it reverts towards a long-run mean, and it occasionally moves further than anybody expected.
You cannot depart without energy in store. You can depart without emissions quota — the uncovered emissions are simply bought on the spot at 75% over the market, added to that service's cost sheet. Nothing breaks and nobody's reputation burns while you are away; you just pay a standing order you never signed. Buying quota ahead at a price dip is the entire skill, and the spread between a dip and the spot surcharge is real money on a busy timetable.
The market page keeps a history so you can see where the price has been. That history is the only forecasting tool you get, and it is worth more than it looks: a price well below its long-run average is a different proposition to the same price on the way up.
Energy does not appear when you need it. You buy it, it sits in your store, and the store has a capacity you can outgrow. Running a large fleet with a small store means buying constantly at whatever the price happens to be — which is exactly the position you do not want to be in when the price spikes.
An energy depot raises your capacity. Each level doubles what you can hold, which turns storage from a chore into a strategy: with enough capacity you can buy heavily when energy is cheap and simply not buy at all for a while when it is not. The depot does not give a discount on the energy itself, and that is deliberate — the value of storage should be the timing it buys you, not a quiet rebate.
A contract locks a price per kilowatt-hour for a fixed number of weeks, against a volume you commit to taking every week. Every week of the contract, the energy is delivered and the money leaves your account whether you ran a single train or not.
The price you are offered depends on four things you control or can see:
None of those terms is a fixed switch. The offer moves continuously as you change the volume and the length, and it moves as the market does — a contract quoted this morning is not the contract quoted this afternoon.
A contract is a genuine commitment. If you sign for more energy than you can burn, the energy still arrives and still gets paid for, and it goes into a store that may not have room for it. If the spot price falls below your contract price, you are the railway paying above the market, week after week, until the contract runs out.
You can break a contract. It costs a fifth of everything remaining on it, which is usually more than the mistake was worth and occasionally less. Deciding which is which is the whole point.
The honest summary is that energy rewards patience and punishes drift. A railway that buys reactively — a little, whenever it runs low — pays close to the average price forever. A railway that watches the history, holds capacity, and commits when the market is high pays less than the average, and takes on a real risk of paying more.
See also The economy and Facilities.
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