Switzerland turns train tracks into solar power plants

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/climate-change/switzerland-turns-train-tracks-into-solar-power-plants/89227914

by Typical-Plantain256

13 comments

  1. I’m sorry, but this is dumb. Let’s break it down:

    What characterizes solar PV today? It’s made up of panels of aluminum and glass. They’re very simple to manufacture and therefore extremely cheap. In fact, the world market is flooded with Chinese panels, to a level where people are using them for fences, because they’re cheaper than regular wooden panels. Solar panels, themselves, are dirt cheap. Like, an installation like this is roughly 15kW solar panels – that’ll set you back about €3000 at retail. That’s about half a percent of the total budget for this project(!)

    What makes solar (somewhat) expensive is land, labor, inverters, and ‘balance of plant’, i.e. the structures keeping the panels fixed and pointing towards the sun. Fair. This project seems to solve one of these four issues: land. But it comes at the cost of significantly increasing labor costs. You need specialized workers with railway safety training and equipment to work on railways. And you need to remove and re-install the panels occasionally – and typically at night to not disrupt train traffic (adding overtime cost!). As for balance of plant, they also seem to be using specialized and pretty complicated structures to hold the panels in place; instead of just sourcing standardized mounting racks which are mass produced.

    Taken together; it seems a very complex and expensive way to install solar panels in order to cut the land use requirement. Honestly, I think maybe just putting them on rooftops as everyone else – or, better yet, installing them in large fields – is by far the way to go.

    2/10 wouldn’t recommend.

  2. I hope the cleaning brush consumes less power than the panels generate.

  3. Oh no, this again.
    Suboptimal angle, low on the ground so its easy to get dirty, possible debris and damage from trains overhead.

    Meanwhile there is ample unused space over supermarked parking lots that could use shade. So much less gas wasted on AC if you can sit in a cool-ish car.
    A pedestrian walkway or bikeline with some panels overhead would be nice in summer.
    Shade the desert to reduce desertification, half-shade water hungry plantations (the drying out vineyards in france come to mind) – literally anything where the shade is welcome other than putting panels at a suboptimal angle between traintracks where the maintenance cost alone will most likely outstrip the value of the energy produced.

  4. please stop shoving solar panel in a regarded angle.

  5. Better on farm land at an angle or buildings. This is daft and likely a bigger rail maintenance nightmare.

  6. Why? Like literary why?

    There is land everywhere?

    Tracks also bend and are affected by heat and snow. The trains Will drag dirt and all sort of disturbance making these useless.

    This is a complete waste of resources because of a regulatory mess.

  7. Great idea, but some questions: How do they feed the electricity into the grid? The electricity for trains has a high voltage, the panels are spread out, you’d have to connect kilometers to one larger inverter.
    How do they prevent the gravel from destroying the panels? Fast trains might throw some of it around.

  8. At the end of the day, it comes down to this:

    >The budget for this initial trial phase in Buttes amounts to CHF585,000 ($704,600).

    I want to be more sceptical, but don’t want to waste any more time. If only the trial is this much, any full blown deployment is going to be a lot, and you might as well use the money elsewhere.

    In the UK, you could install 70 houses with panels, with little to no maintaince

  11. This is a stupid idea. The difficult part for solar isnt finding bits of (dirty, dusty, fragile in this case) land, its the grid connections and connecting kms of solar in series along a rail track simply won’t work electrically

  13. We use AC as default here in Europe. I imagine that the power is transported to the nearest station somehow and then the train is charged when it has a regular stop. It looks to only be auxiliary power since there are power lines above the tracks.

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