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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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.
But these solar panels will be present on those with hoppers.
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
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.
My dad worked with a guy who is designing a system like this and it makes all the sense.
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you shade the parking spaces
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you absorb less heat into the ground than tarmac
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free energy
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direct panel-to-car charging for EVs
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solar canopys are actually quite expensive. Needs a very sturdy structure to hold panels high up and deal with wind loads. Solar panels are getting so cheap, that it becomes very reasonable to lay them on the ground instead of optimal angles, higher up.
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.
Solar freaking railways
I expect it would turn out like this:
And here’s a Hacker News thread discussing it
i think they’ll crack from the vibrations, or to avoid that they’ll need to be built a lot sturdier than normal.
In which case just make the cheap version put them on top of buildings, in cities, near to demand; like everyone with a quarter of a brain has known since their invention.
Don’t install sensitive/ fragile equiipment in dangerous places near massive energetic machines uness it’s neccesay for those machines or there is really no where else to put it.
Can I get 60 grand to shove a solar panel up my arse as an “experiment”? Maybe some of these dumb experiments will help figure out a way to manage all the challenges of idiots who have more money than sense - that might be worth it.
how about those flexible printed ones? They’re protected from the wind by two metal barriers
Yeah but they have thousands of tons of steel going overhead and rocks and dust all around. I don’t really see the advantage compared to a solar farm or a roof where they’re easier to set up and maintain
Fair point, that won’t help
An idiotic idea which will go nowhere just the one about putting PV modules on road surfaces was.
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.
Also, costing €623,000 over three years sounds rather expensive for just 100m
It’s hugely expensive, but I expect most of the cost to be in the wagon that lays panels down and picks them up - and could hopefully service a big stretch of railway (if it works). That kind of systems will cost a pretty big penny.
I doubt if this project will “fly”, however. A totally horizontal solar panel at ground level is a far cry from producing energy efficiently.
Trains drop metal bits pretty often too. A lot of these panels will get shattered
Even if not between the tracks, aside the tracks there is quite a bit of empty space. That space gets a lot less of a hard time from the trains rolling by
A lot of the comments here are, pretty fairly, sceptical of whether this is a viable idea.
My question is, what’s the advantage meant to be over just having an electrical railway and seperately some solar panels plugged into the grid? Especially since the article mentions the solar railway would be grid connected?
What’s the plan for when people start stealing the solar panels? Good luck trying to stop people
The plan is the same for people stealing spikes and rail to sell as scrap: Railroad police don’t fuck around.
Covered Highways. The benefits of additional PV and the benefits less rain and less sun glare on drivers. You could also install a tram like wires above in one lane for maintaining the EV charge on trucks and buses.
