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Trains in Switzerland Are Now Running Over Solar Panels in a First-of-Its-Kind Test (www.zmescience.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/energy@slrpnk.net
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[–] 124 points 3 months ago* (29 children)

Really long and thin strips that can't be angled. They can only be serviced while the track is closed and need to survive whatever debris a train might fling at them. Is this really the best way to place them?

Solar freaking railways.

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  • [–] 111 points 3 months ago (22 children)

    For the life of me I don’t understand why people are putting them anywhere before every rooftop is covered with them. Roofs are dead space and unlikely to have debris issues (at least compared to a railway).

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  • [–] 41 points 3 months ago

    It's companies trying to make a quick buck. They tried this with roads too.

    Obviously every home should have them first and all newly built homes should be built with solar efficiency in mind.

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  • [–] 22 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

    Deployment on rails is dirty cheap. Can be highly automated and you have highvolt power line just a few meters away.

    If you put solar upon your roof, 2/3 of the costs are labor costs. The material bill encompasses electrics, mounting system, cables, and pv panels that can get reduced on railways as well.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Cheap if you only count the cost of plopping them down and walking away, the train could kick up enough dust and debris that efficiency is impacted significantly more than installing them on a roof would have been, necessitating installing new ones sooner.

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  • [–] 24 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)

    It’s all theory. That’s why I think it’s worth a try and learn the facts.

    Edit: A rough estimation with averages: 10 kWp gives 11kwh a year in Swiss, 1kwp panel costs 500€, 1kwh energy costs 0,28 EUR in Swiss. Panel material costs for 10 kWp is 5,000€ and earns you 3,080€ (11,000*0,28€) yearly. This shows the value of the idea.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    Don't forget about the inverters.

    Low voltage (such as the output from a solar panel) suffers badly from losses over distance. Centralised solar makes up for this by having a large amount of panels close to a central inverter. There is going to be a distance tipping point of cost vs losses, if this is short and you need a lot of inverters, that's going to become a major expense.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago (8 children)

    Or in parking lots. It would also have the added benefit of providing cover for cars.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    You need some serious concrete and/or steel hardware to build a carpark roof that can hold the solar panels without easily being damaged by cars or broken by strong wind, so that massively inflates the costs. If you had a state owned company producing cheap solutions for this it could work though.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    Every parking lot needs approval of the location, its probably a a pain in the ass, and would disrupt parking while being built which impacts sales (or will be perceived to anyway). If this worked, you only need to deal with a small group of people for a very large space.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Roofs are actually not that great. Installation is expensive because you are working at height. Roof angles and directions are also not ideal on many houses. Compare it to a simple installation on a field: You just take some corn field, stop growing corn there and can put your panels on some cheap holders and you're good. You can access and service them without the danger of falling from a roof. You can install them on an industrial scale instead of a few square meters on every single roof. You need only one electrical installation.

    People love to cry about the loss of agricultural space, but currently we are growing a lot of corn to convert it to fuel or to put it into biogas installations. If you convert those field to solar, you will get more energy from them. And the loss of a big monoculture that is using a lot of pesticides is also great.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    You can lay them down and remove them again and also clean them with automation. There are power lines nearby as well as consumers, electric trains.

    Installing on roofs is manual labor and needs electricians. Which is why you see so many solar farms by the roadside.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    It seems like the sort of naive gimmick one might expect from a MAD Magazine cartoonist, or Elon Musk on a ketamine binge. It would work to an extent for a while, though whether the amount of electricity generated would justify the maintenance costs to keep it going is another matter.

    The arguments against it are the power yield of a panel pointing upwards, and presumably covered with dirt shed by passing trains. That said, it would suffer less impact damage than photovoltaic roads/bike paths floated elsewhere (the occasional rock impact, as opposed to constant traffic). Also, there is a lot of track, so even if a segment generates little power, it adds up. Not enough to power electric trains, though possibly enough to offset the power bill after operating costs are taken into account.

    I’m guessing this installation is an experiment to quantify these figures rather than a commitment to roll this out more broadly.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 months ago

    I’m guessing this installation is an experiment to quantify these figures rather than a commitment to roll this out more broadly.

    No need to guess, it's right there in the article.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    They can only be serviced

    I don't think this should be a concern, I've had them on my roof for 3 years now and not touched them once

    Is this really the best way to place them?

    Seems so:

    But this is just a pilot program. If the system works safely on a busy rail line, it could point to a new way of expanding solar power without covering farmland, forests or mountain slopes with panels. That’s perhaps important in Switzerland, more so than in other places, where renewable energy is urgently needed, but new solar projects can face resistance when they move into cherished landscapes. NIMBY is sadly a global phenomenon.

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