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).
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.
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.
you have to keep the panels clean in order to work. this is not a great position to do so
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
won’t really help against bird poop and such
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.
have we run out of convenient places to put panels? that’s news to me, last i checked we still had a hilarious amount of free roof space and stuff like parking lots where we can just slap up the panels.
Putting a solar roofs over any open-air carpark you happen to own is just a hilariously easier option. Hell, you could erect these OVER the train tracks.
https://greenox-group.de/photovoltaik-carport/ (Article is in German, but it’s really more around the picture)
According to a completely un-sourced picture I found online, one carpark (in the USA) is typically around 5.5 x 2.6m, so if you had even 50 carparks on your site you could have ~715 square metres of panels. More, if you figure a way to cover the aisles between the rows of carparks too.
At the top end of all applicable figures (panel efficiency, solar irradiance, inverter efficiency), that could net you ~160kW at solar midday.
Now on the other side, standard-gauge railway is around 1.4m wide, and maybe you could cram a 1m width of panels between the rails.
That sounds like a lot - 1000 square metres per kilometre, and there are thousands of kilometres of railway lines out there - but it’s harder to install, harder to service, gets dirty faster, is liable to get damaged, and now you have to figure out how to extract power from somehing a kilometre long, instead of an area that could be a square only around 35m (~115’) on a side (for the above 50 carparks).
I know which one of those I’d want to run the cables for.
As has been pointed out many times when this dumb-ass idea comes up, only once you’ve exhausted every other possibility (carparks, rooftops, putting panels ABOVE roads/rivers/canals/cycleways/railways) and have literally no other viable installation locations, then we can talk.
It seems like it a bad place. It would probably shorten the panels’ lifetime, and maintenance would be tricky without interrupting train traffic.
Let’s work on putting more solar panels on schools, malls, parking lots, train stations, and any structure with a large roof.
I expect it would turn out like this:
And here’s a Hacker News thread discussing it
i think they’ll crack from the vibrations, or to avoid that they’ll need to be built a lot sturdier than normal.
In which case just make the cheap version put them on top of buildings, in cities, near to demand; like everyone with a quarter of a brain has known since their invention.
Don’t install sensitive/ fragile equiipment in dangerous places near massive energetic machines uness it’s neccesay for those machines or there is really no where else to put it.
Can I get 60 grand to shove a solar panel up my arse as an “experiment”? Maybe some of these dumb experiments will help figure out a way to manage all the challenges of idiots who have more money than sense - that might be worth it.
how about those flexible printed ones? They’re protected from the wind by two metal barriers
An idiotic idea which will go nowhere just the one about putting PV modules on road surfaces was.
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…
That’s like 1/7th of the cost of a single passenger car. I’m sure they can easily afford to take that hit if it doesn’t end up panning out.
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.
Trains drop metal bits pretty often too. A lot of these panels will get shattered
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.
Also, costing €623,000 over three years sounds rather expensive for just 100m
It’s hugely expensive, but I expect most of the cost to be in the wagon that lays panels down and picks them up - and could hopefully service a big stretch of railway (if it works). That kind of systems will cost a pretty big penny.
I doubt if this project will “fly”, however. A totally horizontal solar panel at ground level is a far cry from producing energy efficiently.
Even if not between the tracks, aside the tracks there is quite a bit of empty space. That space gets a lot less of a hard time from the trains rolling by
