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).
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.
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?
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.
Because none of that unused land is set up to allow a machine to easily roll over it and automatically place/replace/clean the panels. Putting panels between the tracks means you get that for free, as the tracks are there anyway, and are already have electrical infrastructure all along their length.
The point of the experiment is to see if those benefits end up outweighing the presumably higher chance of panels getting damaged. In the worst case it ends up not being worth while and there isn’t a huge loss, in the best case we end up being able to add a bunch of additional solar capacity without having to build much new infrastructure or cover any previously unused land.
And it would be trivially easy to have a train run over the tracks to clean the panels, there are already trains which use compressed air/sandblasters/lasers to remove leaves and stuff from the rails. Just add a few more compressed air nozzles in between and boom, all your panels are now clean.
Okay, finally some valid points.
The problem is that it’s just better to put the panels some meters on the side, or better yet, elsewhere. Electronics and solar panels just don’t like the vibrations from 1000 tonne trains making them vibrate all day long.
I also think you wildly underestimate the simplicity to have some sort of automatic, or semi automatic “train” installing those panels. Removing the bad ones etc.
It all boils down to, is it economically viable?
It just adds costs, the cost of setup, the cost of running it, also it will most probably not function as many years, when they are dirty they will produce less. So only more expensive.
Also, how are you going to transport the electricity along hundred of kilometers of panels laid out as a string? Low voltage is secure but lossy. Have power stations that inject it in the 20.000 volt lives overhead? More costs.
If we lived on a very small planet filled with trains, maybe Solar Trainways TM would have a chance, here on planet earth, not so much.
I agree, there’s so much land elsewhere. Even just beside the tracks would be better than between the tracks
This works in factorio really well
That could actualy have real world benefits, like when there are few trains, a special small train could go by and let maintenance people off/on there for example.
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.
Everything will be fine, except this extraordinarily stupid idea.
Did you invest in it or something? I mean you have no answers just other than “here take a cookie” lol
I like the idea. Free land use. I wonder if the rails can be used as electric conductors. A special train can deploy tons per day, and could clean them regularly in a highly automated way.
Unlike roadways, they don’t carry any load.
This just shows you like the idea but don’t have any formal training in say constructing stuff.
Are you going to run 1000 volt through the rails? The rails who are bolted to the earth, like grounded? Did you think that one over :-) ?
I mean we all have thise fun ideas, and that’s actually great, because some are good even if the overwhelming numbers are not. The thing is that all the easy ones has been taken.
About the train “deploying tons a day”, where did you get that from? Also with hundred of thousands panels lining your train tracks you’ll need to replace broken ones, will you stop regular trains to do that?
And god forbid one rattles loose and wrecks the underside of a passing train as it gets sucked up by the wind from the moving train lol.
It’s just not a good idea.
I don’t know about the practicality of rails as conductor, but it wouldn’t have to be high voltage.
article said special train could deploy 1000 panels per day.
The lower the voltage the higher the loss, there is a reason power lines are hundreds of thousands volts.
What about the rails being grounded?
So if the panels are square, like 1km per day? That’s not much for an existing rail line, and when are you going to do it? There are trains rolling there all the time.
What do you think, is it still a good idea?
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 but for cycling pathways in cities (no cars allowed).
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.
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.
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.
Yes because they never close the lines for maintenance or repairs
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.