I’m all for putting solar panels all over the place, but won’t these get dusty and oily and need loads of cleaning after trains pass over?
Also, costing €623,000 over three years sounds rather expensive for just 100m (although that roughly equates to 11KW).
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have we run out of convenient places to put panels? that’s news to me, last i checked we still had a hilarious amount of free roof space and stuff like parking lots where we can just slap up the panels.
Putting a solar roofs over any open-air carpark you happen to own is just a hilariously easier option. Hell, you could erect these OVER the train tracks.
https://greenox-group.de/photovoltaik-carport/ (Article is in German, but it’s really more around the picture)
According to a completely un-sourced picture I found online, one carpark (in the USA) is typically around 5.5 x 2.6m, so if you had even 50 carparks on your site you could have ~715 square metres of panels. More, if you figure a way to cover the aisles between the rows of carparks too.
At the top end of all applicable figures (panel efficiency, solar irradiance, inverter efficiency), that could net you ~160kW at solar midday.
Now on the other side, standard-gauge railway is around 1.4m wide, and maybe you could cram a 1m width of panels between the rails.
That sounds like a lot - 1000 square metres per kilometre, and there are thousands of kilometres of railway lines out there - but it’s harder to install, harder to service, gets dirty faster, is liable to get damaged, and now you have to figure out how to extract power from somehing a kilometre long, instead of an area that could be a square only around 35m (~115’) on a side (for the above 50 carparks).
I know which one of those I’d want to run the cables for.
As has been pointed out many times when this dumb-ass idea comes up, only once you’ve exhausted every other possibility (carparks, rooftops, putting panels ABOVE roads/rivers/canals/cycleways/railways) and have literally no other viable installation locations, then we can talk.
I expect it would turn out like this:
And here’s a Hacker News thread discussing it
Solar freaking railways
Why not on the sides of the railroad? Often, there is significant free space on both sides of the track.
I was about to comment that it makes more sense to put panels in open space, but looking into it does appear some numbers crunchers did the math on efficiency gains from being able to swap old panels with a dedicated machine on the rails, versus the other option.
Trains drop metal bits pretty often too. A lot of these panels will get shattered
you have to keep the panels clean in order to work. this is not a great position to do so
Hopper cars lose coal and ore all the time
This is Switzerland, outside of a small number of corridors the majority of tracks see virtually nothing but passenger trains.
Trains with hoppers are not present on all railways though.
i’d be more worried about about smudgy stuff. they get dusty, then it rains and the panel is covered in a film of dirt. bird shit on solar panels is already plaguing home users
could trains have some kind of mechanism that might help? physical contact seems too much, maybe a blower?
won’t really help against bird poop and such
It seems like it a bad place. It would probably shorten the panels’ lifetime, and maintenance would be tricky without interrupting train traffic.
Let’s work on putting more solar panels on schools, malls, parking lots, train stations, and any structure with a large roof.
The 600000 € probably include the development cost. Thus, on a larger scale, the cost per unit length will decrease significantly.
True, but it still seems rather excessive…
That’s like 1/7th of the cost of a single passenger car. I’m sure they can easily afford to take that hit if it doesn’t end up panning out.
It’s free real estate and incredibly efficient use of space. If it works, with all the challenges other have outlined - even at a reduced yield - it’ll still pay off.
