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).
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.
Jeez, solar freaking railways.
Railways are dirty, brake dust, oil and lube leaking, human waste (from a car toilet if there is no tank).
This is Switzerland, not India. Also, it’s a test. It’s designed to find out exactly how serious those problems are and if they prevent the system from being effective.
Is this the same bunch of people that wanted to make solar roads/bike lanes too?
I could see a solar road working with some kind of passive heating medium circulated underneath but even then, the maintenance on that would be a nightmare. We can barely maintain all the roads we have already, and that’s just goopy rocks and grading.
There are “defect detectors” on railways to warn engineers when their train has a chain, air hose, etc dangling and dragging along the ground - which is a potential for accidents of many varieties.
I guess now you can replace that with trains that automatically stop when the Katamari of dislodged solar panels eventually builds enough mass to force a car off the rails.
They make a better roof over the tracks that the train passes under than being on the ground. They could even be tilted to better face the sun.
Don’t forget that maintaining all this means people working directly in the track trying to fix high voltage electrical issues while dodging trains and hoping dispatch doesn’t forget about them, or that ballast(the gravel between the ties) needs to be renewed regularly, much less all the things like realignment and rail grinding that use specialized machinery that needs to go right in the space between the rails.
This means that those panels are going to have to be removed and installed often, at best vastly increasing wear and tear on them as compared to a fixed installation, and adding the risk that a failure in the pickup/deployment process could scrap a significant number of panels if not caught immediately.
Or that the hard part of installing solar panels is the wireing, inverting, and grid interconnection, all of which are just made that much harder by having to have electricians doge trains.
Look, if there really is absolutely no possible available space, like say desert, farmland, roofs, parking lots, yards, fences, well just put the panels up on a simple metal frame over the railway, maybe even integrate the catenary hangers if your feeling daring.
This at least provides some benefit to running the railway by keeping snow and leaves off the tracks to some extent while also keeping the panels out of the way of running the railroad.
Typically not for more than a few hours when it comes to in service track, and management actively despises those maintenance windows even when it’s necessary to the continued existence of the track, much less a third party startup.
There is a reason why even when the entire track and ballest on a main line are wiped out by a natural disaster it will usually be up and running again in a few days.
As such I would expect any non experimental contracts between the startup and the railway to come with not insignificant financial penalties if they interfere with service, such as requiring a shutdown of the track for repairing the panels being subjected to said harsh environment, thusly either delaying fixing the panels for the next scheduled major maintenance window in a few years or else like most railway inspections doing the work an an active line between trains.
When the competition is a large open field of dirt that can be accessed at any time for maintenance, can leave the panels up for decades, is centrally located for easy grid access, and requires far less frequent cleaning, I just don’t see how this startup is going to outperform.
To clean them, simply attach a big brush to the underside of the trains. 👍
These people can get fucked. Everyone can get fucked. We don’t need new ideas we need old ones.
We need the market to be able to react. Being able to build on land, fuck the NIMBYs. And being able to connect to the grid quickly, there is different ways to sort this but it comes from government intervention.
Then if you want more progress it’s externalities. Tax fossil fuels and use the same money to subsidise renewables and batteries, and grid upgrades.
Or another possibility is mandate shutdowns based on a percentage over time (this will work better for EVs I think than than utility power. “Oh you want tariff on Chinese cars. Well fine you will have that for 10 years and in return 100% of your sales need to be evs in 10 years and to get you moving in 5 years its 25%, 6 40%, 7 55%, 8 70%, 9 75%.”)
It’s getting so tiring now that they have evidence of what works and instead just talk about how the worlds going to be different in 2050. Start building some fucking grid upgrades then. You know it is going to take 10 years tondo anything meaningful, you know you are 10 years behind, you know if you build it they will come.
Christ
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
