What are the economics of this? Cost to install vs other available options? Durability will certainly be an issue I’m sure. Genuinely curious and not because I think it’s a bad idea. I want solar on all underutilized areas, I just prefer low hanging fruit from a cost perspective at the current time.
It makes more sense than the road, because at least the train isn’t driving directly on the thing. I wonder if the power could be delivered directly to the train. Although the only savings really would be transmission costs, not sure how big of a deal that is…
Did we really fill up all the area on top of roofs, parkings lots, industrial areas, etc., and we're running out, and we have to put solar cells on railroads?
Solar cell is the only practically viable power source with no moving parts. Stop trying to attach it to moving things. Movements breaks things. Just put the panels by the rail, e.g. as vertical sound barriers in reasonable distance (to lower the pressure waves from train) from tracks. Or on a nearby field where it can be protected and inspected all at one place.
> Stop trying to attach it to moving things. Movements breaks things. Just put the panels by the rail
Literally, they are not being attached to a moving thing and are being put by the rail lol. Just in between the tracks.
Like you say, PV cells don’t have moving parts and don’t need much maintenance. So mass produced cells you can slap anywhere are really not a bad idea.
Putting solar panels in familiar places is always popular as an idea, but rarely better than putting them on the usual roofs or as rectangular arrays on the ground.
> the railway was fitted with 48 specially-designed solar panels with a combined power of 18 kWp.
18 kW is less than what gets installed on a lot of houses. It took 100 meters to do this. The farther the panels get from the interconnect, the higher the losses along the line.
It’s easy to set up 18kW of panels in one spot. Covering an entire railway with panels would require a different transmission setup to get the power back to somewhere useful.
I really wish we could just forget all of these ideas to put solar panels in places that are highly trafficked and serving double duty. Just put them in unused space that isn’t used for anything else: Rooftops, empty fields, or over parking garages. I often get downvoted for saying this because a lot of people like these ideas of putting solar panels in space that they see, like sidewalks or roads or railways, but we have so much unused space that isn’t near foot traffic, road traffic, or railways that is so much cheaper and easier to use for solar. These projects usually turn into political grifts to get government funding because the ideas are not economically viable alternatives.
I'm in the south UK, live off grid, and have a bunch of solar panels, none of them are flat aside from the 640w of panels on my van, which generate almost nothing during the Winter.
Panels on the sides ot trains might be a better solution.
I don't know why people fall for this stuff. It doesn't make any kind of sense. You put the panels in a rectangular array in any convenient place. That's what wires are for.
I've been nerd-sniped into google fueled napkin math.
18kw/100 m = 180kw/km
The most powerful Swiss electric locomotive [1] maxes out at 7900kw. That's 44km of track.
The most common Swiss electric (4/4) typicaly maxes at 6100kw requiring up to 34km of track.
Switzeraland has about 5000km of track and 180 is about 200, so a million kilowatts if all the track has solar panels.
Assuming 3000kw per locomotive and 100% efficiency [2], that's 300 electrical locomotives running simultaneously. The Swiss fleet is about four times that.
This is a great example of the solar ecosystem finding new niches. Tracks are likely good because there is already constant maintenance and inspections on them as well as ready hookup to the grid or, as the article mentions, directly providing power for trains. The point here isn't that this is 'the most efficient way to use solar' it is that it works and provides benefit. It is like agrovoltaics. The solar production is lower than a dedicated solar installation, but the dual use of the land and potential secondary benefits make it worth while. It looks like this could even get to the point where solar could actually power the trains completely assuming this expanded a little beyond just the track surface which could be interesting for the design of trains.
Since the 90s our energy policy has been idiotic. Basically just politicians saying 'lets do nothing we can always buy cheap power form Germany or France'. All we had to do is build a single new nuclear power plant and we would have been fine.
But no, instead we have this grifting rail solar nonsense.
This is another bad idea in the same vein of solar roadways. To the layman, these ideas sound fantastic. To the knowledgeable they sound downright absurd. Put them on roofs, over car parks, over land. No way should they be on difficult to access locations with vehicle traffic.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 50.4 ms ] thread(to me it seems especially nuts because there's plenty of space to the side of most railways!)
On the Solar Rail
For there's much we just don't know
So farewell with a kiss
Then it's fast for the mist
Till we're sleeping in the cold below
WHY?! Dave from eevblog did the math and it's bad
Did we really fill up all the area on top of roofs, parkings lots, industrial areas, etc., and we're running out, and we have to put solar cells on railroads?
But ignore the bit of "why not both"
Literally, they are not being attached to a moving thing and are being put by the rail lol. Just in between the tracks.
Like you say, PV cells don’t have moving parts and don’t need much maintenance. So mass produced cells you can slap anywhere are really not a bad idea.
RTFA
Did you forget about batteries and fuel cells?
> the railway was fitted with 48 specially-designed solar panels with a combined power of 18 kWp.
18 kW is less than what gets installed on a lot of houses. It took 100 meters to do this. The farther the panels get from the interconnect, the higher the losses along the line.
It’s easy to set up 18kW of panels in one spot. Covering an entire railway with panels would require a different transmission setup to get the power back to somewhere useful.
I really wish we could just forget all of these ideas to put solar panels in places that are highly trafficked and serving double duty. Just put them in unused space that isn’t used for anything else: Rooftops, empty fields, or over parking garages. I often get downvoted for saying this because a lot of people like these ideas of putting solar panels in space that they see, like sidewalks or roads or railways, but we have so much unused space that isn’t near foot traffic, road traffic, or railways that is so much cheaper and easier to use for solar. These projects usually turn into political grifts to get government funding because the ideas are not economically viable alternatives.
Panels on the sides ot trains might be a better solution.
The most common Swiss electric (4/4) typicaly maxes at 6100kw requiring up to 34km of track.
Switzeraland has about 5000km of track and 180 is about 200, so a million kilowatts if all the track has solar panels.
Assuming 3000kw per locomotive and 100% efficiency [2], that's 300 electrical locomotives running simultaneously. The Swiss fleet is about four times that.
---
Of course I am no expert.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stock_used_by_Swiss_Fe...
[2] and ignoring the 10 per year efficiency loss of the panels mentioned in the article
But no, instead we have this grifting rail solar nonsense.