Submitted 4 weeks ago by Chewie@slrpnk.net to energy@slrpnk.net
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).
you have to keep the panels clean in order to work. this is not a great position to do so
Hopper cars lose coal and ore all the time
This is Switzerland, outside of a small number of corridors the majority of tracks see virtually nothing but passenger trains.
Trains with hoppers are not present on all railways though.
i’d be more worried about about smudgy stuff. they get dusty, then it rains and the panel is covered in a film of dirt. bird shit on solar panels is already plaguing home users
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.
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 gain from being able to swap old panels with a dedicated machine on the rails, versus the other option.
Solar freaking railways
I expect it would turn it like this:
sciencealert.com/the-world-s-first-solar-road-has…
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
Yeah but they have thousands of tons of steel going overhead and rocks and dust all around. I don’t really see the advantage compared to a solar farm or a roof where they’re easier to set up and maintain
An idiotic idea which will go nowhere just the one about putting PV modules on road surfaces was.
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.
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.
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 1/10th 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.
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.
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
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.
I doubt if this project will “fly”, however. A totally horizontal solar panel at ground level is a far cry from producing energy efficiently.
Trains drop metal bits pretty often too. A lot of these panels will get shattered
What’s the plan for when people start stealing the solar panels? Good luck trying to stop people
The plan is the same for people stealing spikes and rail to sell as scrap: Railroad police don’t fuck around.
A lot of the comments here are, pretty fairly, sceptical if whether this is a viable idea.
My question is, what’s the advantage meant to be over just having an electrical railway and seperately some solar panels plugged into the grid? Especially since the article mentions the solar railway would be grid connected?
Wouldn’t it be better to place panels on the train roofs?
Or, hear me out: on the roof of the train stations
Panels on the roof of everything, the roof of cars, the roof of buildings, the roof of your mouth…
These people can get fucked. Everyone can get fucked. We don’t need new ideas we need old ones.
We need the market to be able to react. Being able to build on land, fuck the NIMBYs. And being able to connect to the grid quickly, there is different ways to sort this but it comes from government intervention.
Then if you want more progress it’s externalities. Tax fossil fuels and use the same money to subsidise renewables and batteries, and grid upgrades.
Or another possibility is mandate shutdowns based on a percentage over time (this will work better for EVs I think than than utility power. “Oh you want tariff on Chinese cars. Well fine you will have that for 10 years and in return 100% of your sales need to be evs in 10 years and to get you moving in 5 years its 25%, 6 40%, 7 55%, 8 70%, 9 75%.”)
It’s getting so tiring now that they have evidence of what works and instead just talk about how the worlds going to be different in 2050. Start building some fucking grid upgrades then. You know it is going to take 10 years tondo anything meaningful, you know you are 10 years behind, you know if you build it they will come.
Christ
Covered Highways. The benefits of additional PV and the benefits less rain and less sun glare on drivers. You could also install a tram like wires above in one lane for maintaining the EV charge on trucks and buses.
To clean them, simply attach a big brush to the underside of the trains. 👍
lnxtx@feddit.nl 4 weeks ago
Jeez, solar freaking railways.
Railways are dirty, brake dust, oil and lube leaking, human waste (from a car toilet if there is no tank).
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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.
Valmond@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Next test: solar panel on the bottom of the ocean.
Disaster@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
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.
Zachariah@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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.
Wanderer@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
This but for cycling pathways in cities (no cars allowed).
4am@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
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.
Mitchie151@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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.
sonori@beehaw.org 4 weeks ago
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 definitely feels like the sort of idea that some high level manager came up with and no one with any ground level experience was allowed to contribute to.
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.
zante@lemmy.wtf 4 weeks ago
Yes because they never close the lines for maintenance or repairs