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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I expect it would turn it 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.
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
could trains have some kind of mechanism that might help? physical contact seems too much, maybe a blower?
I’m sure enough air is moved simply from the train moving by, but there will probably still be rocks and stuff flying around
Jeez, solar freaking railways.
Railways are dirty, brake dust, oil and lube leaking, human waste (from a car toilet if there is no tank).
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.
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.
Next test: solar panels on the bottom of the ocean.
Subnautica entered the chat.
Cause those things are similar!!
Putting solar panels between rails is as stupid as solar roadways. There is nothing to be gained and just lots of hurdles to overcome to make it (almost) as good as a normal solar panel on a roof or on a stick or on a wall.
Tell me, why on earth would you put solar panels between rails?
Edit: lot of anger here, but no answers why the panels should go between the rails, shaken daily by heavy trains. You invested in it or what?
Tell me, why on earth would you put solar panels between rails?
were just trying to find some efficiency in the space wasted by rail not-in-use. thats a lot of land. im not saying its possible, but i dont think thought experiments about these kinds of things is a bad idea
That’s like 0.00000001% of land.
There is so much unused land, why bother trains and their schedules with a maintenance nightmare between their rails?
It is just a stupid idea with no upside except the oily greasy dirty solar panels up-side that can’t get cleaned because, … wait for it …, there are Trains running over it!
I can’t fathom how such a stupid idea got more that 1 meter away from the bar counter.
I agree, there’s so much land elsewhere. Even just beside the tracks would be better than between the tracks
ha, ok. youll be ok. its alright. everything will be just fine.
why dont you have some nice warm milk and this cookie. youll feel right as rain.
Surely the maintenance of such problems would be very easy though, given it’s already on rails you could run a carriage with washing machinery underneath to clean these occasionally. Interested to see how serious the deterioration over time is due to the grime.
2 axis solar trackers are much more efficient, but fixed installation beats them in cost/W in many cases.
Any solar installation gets dirty, the question is do you save labor/equipment cost by having them cleaned by a single solar cleaning train, vs. tons of workers or automated brushes cleaning a large open field installation. Do you need to do cleaning passes after every train? Daily? Monthly? Yearly? Is there an intersection of efficiency loss and cleaning investment that is profitable?
If you could install and maintain them in a fully automated way with just a few specialized trains, I can see why it might be an attractive idea. Question is how automated can you make it really? Do you need to fasten the panels down? How do you tie them into the grid?
If the savings on installation, maintenance and cleaning offsets the loss in revenue from the suboptimal placement and dirt, it might work.
I could see this working out if deployed on large scales, where the up front investment of developing all the specialized process and equipment, like trains, becomes a small part of the cost.
Any such proof of concept installation of an unproven technology will be more expensive than if you really deploy it at scale.
If rail didn’t exist today and we had to develop the first train and track and all the necessary infrastructure around it, the first 10km would be ludicrously expensive and would never pay itself off compared to the existing road network or shipping routes.
It’s a finetuning and risk taking problem. Does the idea make sense in a vaccum? And does the idea work in competition with existing solutions? Is anyone willing to invest enough money to make it competitve?
I hate it when extremely complex multi-variate problems always get judged based on one or two possibly negligable variables because of ignorance or intellectual laziness. Sometimes you can successfuly jugde things this way, yes, but rarely are things that simple.
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.
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…
