PV = Photovoltaic
At least for right now it’s just a test on a 100-meter length of track, but this reeks of a startup trying to innovate its way out of NIMBYs not wanting to put solar panels where they actually belong without considering why nobody has put solar panels in the middle of a railroad track before (cough rocks, dust, wildlife, vibration, and vandalism cough).
PV Magazine is neat for reading about potential new innovations, but one thing I really dislike about it is that it basically just regurgitates what solar companies say about themselves in press releases in a way that’s completely uncritical. For instance:
Similarly, removal and installation tests will be carried out to demonstrate that the Sunways pilot installation is perfectly adapted to the constraints related to maintenance work and the operation of the line.
One more reason. The reason they tell people not to lay on the tracks under the train, the freaking cables and chains that could come loose and dangle under the cars and drag along the ground that would cut you in half the long way. Those loose parts would just destroy the solar panels.
Maybe they only put them on the “Off Road” Tracks of the Street Trains. They usually have a covered bottom (like Cars) to avoid debris flinging into its soft parts… but that will only solve one Issue of the many MANY there are. (Lots of Ifs here)
Solar panels need to be on every home and how new builds in many countries still don’t require them baffles me.
Might be cause they make roof redos or fumigation even more expensive. I had a customer say they were paying 3k to get their panels removed so they could pay another 3k to fumigate the house. Almost doubled the price.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree that we should require panels in new builds somehow but I don’t know what the best option is.
Why did they have to remove the panels in order to fumigate? If the company couldn’t work around them then they should have found a different company.
You drop heavy ass tarps on the roof and roll them to tent a house, I’m taking couple hundred pound tarps. The workers need to be able to walk on the roof to set them up, the tarps can and have damaged panels so companies in the area don’t fumigate with them on anymore.
I work closely with a fumigation company and that’s what they’ve told us.
Seems like they could use a boom lift and work around them if they wanted to. I’m sure there’s a way to cover the panels with plywood to where they wouldn’t get damaged. Much cheaper and easier than removing and replacing.
You would need to screw the plywood into the roof so it doesn’t shift around and damage stuff during the whole process, nobody is gonna wanna do that. Boom lifts are ocassionally used for extremely tall properties but they add to the price. You’re forgetting the biggest issue though, liability. My company stopped doing fumigations cause of the liability involved. Getting the plywood on the roof is gonna take a lot of effort and more than just a boom lift, you’re gonna need huge slabs of it to properly cover panels, I don’t know if you’ve seen them but they’re not small. They usually cover significant portions of the roof.
At that point it would just be cheaper to pay a company to remove them and reinstall vs all that other effort.
If there was a better way the companies would do it to make money. There just isn’t unless the owner is willing to shell out and many aren’t, even the rich ones and we work with A LOT of rich people. They own million dollar homes and have multiple homes all over the area.
Sounds like a scam. Houses round me had their roof tiles replaced recently and the guys just took the solar panels off and put them back on after no problem without inflating the price. Perhaps it varies on how the panels are installed, but most I have seen are just under the tiles and attached to the roof frame.
And the benefits far out weigh the slight extra cost of a roof retile every 20 or so years.
What sort of prices were they charging?
There and around $13000 I believe
Houses are expensive enough, no need to make it worse
The cost of solar panels on a new build is extremely marginal for the long term benefits they provide to the owners of the house, the environment and the general electric grid. They should absolutely be a requirement.
They paid back in around 5 years on my moms roof, and that was 11 years ago, and panels are waaay cheaper now than they were back then.
Yeah your right, my only concern is them having a captive market which would allow them to jack up prices but right now there are lots of competing companies so it shouldn’t happen withing the next decade
Why not just make solar roofs over things like parking lots and sidewalks? That way it can provide cover and power, you can use off the shelf panels, and they are unlikely to get damaged.
And you can repair them without needing to shut down a whole railway. All these projects to put solar panels in novel places are totally pointless and solving a problem that doesn’t exist.
Yeah until we literally run out of roofs, fields, parking lots, and fucking ocean space and are contemplating a fucking Dyson sphere I really don’t understand these projects.
In France, solar panels are mandatory for roofs of commercial and industrial buildings and also car parks occupying 500 m² or more of ground surface need to be covered by solar.
Wait, France requires parking lots to be covered?
parking lots would require the government to own said parking lots. its why you often see them at schools (because its government funded)
I doubt they’re doing this and only this.
wouldn’t make much sense to put up a solar roof after doing this. it would block the sun.
Covering parking lots is expensive and you lose spots to supports and there’s the inevitable car hitting those supports.
Putting panels between rail lines doesn’t need a structure so it should be far cheaper and easier to install and fix, even if they aren’t ideal.
They will get dirty very fast, either from dirt thrown around by passing trains, or by the brake dust.
Also the heavy vibration that can occur when a train passes over
What brake dust? Where they’re contemplating putting this the trains are fully electrified and use regenerative (magnetic) braking during routine operations, the only time the abrasive brakes are engaged is during emergencies
It shouldn’t be too hard to clean them with something running on the tracks, but it does seem less than ideal.
A chain or wire hanging off a train car and dragging along will “clean” them real quick…
NIMBYs and their freedoms* to do whatever they want.
*not applied to not wanting “golf grass”, wanting a different color of paint on the house, etc.
I’m interested to see how this turns out, because I’m thinking this would significantly increase maintenance costs on those panels due to rocks being kicked up, vibration from the train, etc.
Maybe it’s like a blanket that the train picks up over its head and runs underneath, setting it back down on the ground after it
Reminds me of this, but in reverse:
Pretty close. Quick lets patent it
There shouldn’t be any rocks kicked up because the trains should stay on the rails, not touch the ballast.
But dirt, debris, and brake dust will absolutely collect very quickly. Maybe they’re counting on rain to keep them clean.
There’s still massive amounts of air pressure changes Those can definitely lift some smaller rocks
They are saying in their FAQ that there are some brushes they can mount on the tails of trains running overhead. Can’t see any published picture of them though.
Comment garantir la propreté des panneaux ?
Il est vrai que des panneaux sales produisent moins et ce problème se vérifie également sur les toits des maisons ou dans le désert. Cependant, pour ce qui des panneaux placés entre les rails, il existe des systèmes de nettoyage, sous forme de brosse cylindrique, qui se place en queue de train et qui procède au nettoyage automatique des panneaux lorsque le train passe au-dessus. Ce dispositif garantit un rendement maximal des panneaux à un coût minime.
You do get the advantage of easy and above all fast placement.
Not sure how this would work out. There’s pros and cons I suppose.
anyone remember solar roadways?
This isn’t nearly that dumb, because the train isn’t actually riding directly on top of the solar cells.
It’s close though, random shit gets dragged, kicked, dropped, etc all the time by trains.
A chain , cable, or wire comes loose on a car and goodbye panels and like all of them …
If a chain, cable, or wire comes loose on a car then the panels are the least of anyone’s worries. Also expect emergency brakes to kick in automatically. This is a train, not a bicycle.
I don’t why they don’t overhang them on frames. It’d cost more upfront, but hell alot cheaper than replacing the broken panels all the time.
A chain , cable, or wire comes loose on a car and goodbye panels and like all of them …
where are you from and when have you last seen a train?
If that happens you got bigger things to worry about. When did you last see a train dragging along debris?
They could pair that with sensors / cameras for hanging things. These are already being produced and installed on tracks.
But still, what is the point of this? What problem does this solve? It’s not like solar power deployment is bottlenecked by a lack of space to put the panels.
This just makes it more expensive and more difficult to maintain for no reason.
Honestly if they’re using the power lines for the train and a cleaning attachment on the train I can see it.
Actually, yes, I do. SOLAR FREAKING ROADWAYS
solar FREAKING roadways!
Yeah, I looked up the French solar roadways after seeing this to see the headline of ‘total disaster’. So as expected.
Lamps were “total disasters” until they weren’t. Crosswalks even. Toilets in Seattle.
There are lots of things that were “total disasters” at one point but were developed into safe reliable things. That’s not a reason to abandon an endeavor entirely, but a great reason to redirect or refine it.
Also, headlines are not news, and most non-electrical engineers, let alone journalists, know jack fucking shit about electrical engineering. EEVBlog did a great few videos about solar roadways and their flaws.
Solar FREAKING
RoadRailways!I was looking for this comment so I can vent my extreme irritation to the world.
God, can this concept please die already‽ If you want to put solar panels where the cars/trains are, just 👏 fucking 👏 put 👏 them 👏 on 👏 top👏
Do not put them on the ground where they will get smushed and covered in dust and snow and dirt. do not. Just make a little roof for the train tracks/road/bike path/sidewalk/game trail/snail raceway and then put the panels on top of the roof and then if you’re feeling fancy angle the panels to point towards the sun and if you’re feeling really quite fancy then you can use bifacial panels to capture the backscatter from the ground and shit and then we can all be happy. solar ground no, solar roof yes, ground no roof yes. do not play the trolley problem with solar panels on the railroad tracks. we have been doing solar energy for decades and have fucking minmaxed this shit so why are they still trying to do this just STOP.
Fuck.
Person I’m responding to, please know that none of this is directed at you. I’m just sour right now and should get off the internet.
Solar parkings!! Park your car over solar panels!! Solar pools, put them at the bottom of your pool!! Put them INSIDE!
It’s like an idiot manically obsessed with solar panels got their hands on some heavy drugs.
Good thing they stopped emptying train toilets on the tracks.
My first reaction was how stupid this is. Dirt, debris and other things will get on the panels and cause lots of problems, but after a few minutes I realized it’s actually quite brilliant.
There are three major costs of solar, the panels, the location, and the wiring + inverters. If the tracks are used as the wires (extremely low resistance paths back to an inverter), the location is wasted space so basically free, and the inverter can be placed anywhere along the path to remove the power from the tracks, the cost of this comes down to mainly the cost of the panel, which is actually pretty cheep these days.
The real challenges will be in cleaning & maintenance, vandalism, and modifying the track to limit the conductive paths (assuming they’re used for this).
If the tracks are used as the wires
They’re not. Swiss rails are extra made so that you can walk over them. All electricity goes overhead for security reasons. If anything, they would probably tap into this overhead-grid.
cleaning & maintenance
possibly. But I can very easily imagine specialized trains cleaning them once every day
vandalism
not really a problem here in switzerland
modifying the track to limit the conductive paths (assuming they’re used for this).
They’re most likely not used for this. All electricity is overhead for security reasons, routing solar energy through the rails would destroy that. Doing that (beyond the 100m test-track) would mean a prolongued political discussion.
All electricity is overhead for security reasons, routing solar energy through the rails would destroy that. Doing that (beyond the 100m test-track) would mean a prolongued political discussion.
Electricity is overhead for safety reasons (maybe that’s what you meant by “security reasons”). As long as the voltage is kept low (< 48V) and the runs of solar panels aren’t too long, the power can be run safely in the tracks.
So I have a solar setup-older panels, like 15 years old. They can be 3/4 obscured by a building or whatever, and still make 85% of what they’re rated to.
Which is fucking awesome. Right now, they’re covered in so much dust I can see the ‘clean’ spots where the morning dew condensed on them, and they’re still kicking 20 amps, about 15 more than I actually need.
Daily cleaning? Way excessive. Monthly? Maybe, probably less. Not a whole lot going on in between rails.
I’d be way more worried about tweakers trying to steal the wiring
The cleanliness of the panels isn’t actually as big a deal as it’s made out to be. Like yeah, they can’t be completely obscured, but you’d be surprised at how fucking filthy they can be and still make juice. Or half-or more- covered with trees, or other shade.
Right now, my panels are covered in enough crap I really should hose them off, and they’re still kicking 20 amps. So ahhh… fuck it. Maybe it’ll rain and I won’t have to.
Same with cloudy days-sometimes I get more power on cloudy days because the panels don’t get at hot. Hell, some streetlights put out enough light to harvest energy from-but they’re largely getting replaced with LED’s. Sad face?
I expect with the type of traffic going on between rails, these will need vanishingly little maintenance. I hope it goes well
Throw a few of those sexy lady mud flaps on the back of a train with a hose. Darn near auto squeegee!
Standing next to trains as they pass, or on one’s with open decks, you’ll know they produce a lot of wind. I assume under the train this is even stronger, with a strong low pressure area. This should be able to clear most obstructions without an issue whenever a train passes. Sure, it’ll also toss more on, but there’s some equilibrium that it’ll reach and it shouldn’t ever get worse. My guess is that’s well before it is a major issue for the panels.
While I know things are generally more expensive in Switzerland, $685,000 is crazy expensive for just 18 kW (48 panels).
This doesn’t seem like it would work. Debris falling off the trains, dusty buildup, vibrations, rocks bouncing around the tracks; heck, even just wildlife crossing the tracks. So many things are gonna damage those panels if they’re just lying on the ground between tracks, and solar panels are extremely fragile.
I hope they have some sort of bullet proof glass or something over those panels. Probably going to need a special train to spray water over them to clean regularly, too.
I dunno about Swiss trains, but the tracks behind my house in America leave a thick black film on everything, and it’s very hard to clean by hand. I think they transport coal.
I feel like the vibration is going to induce microfractures in the photovoltaic crystals, no matter how well the panel is protected from debris.
And the piss and shit.
Our trains don’t generally dump those anymore.
Seems interesting. As far I know I think why not, as long as you place Dragging Equipment Detectors (example) before and after the installation areas. Seems a good a place as any for solar panels, especially on only occasionally frequented lines.
Reminds me of “solar freaking roadways!”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H901KdXgHs4&pp=ygUgc29sYXIgcG93ZXJlZCByb2Fkd2F5cyB2YXBvcndhcmU%3D
Relevant Dave Jones debunk. https://youtu.be/7vItnxhWRqw?feature=shared
I remember doing this in factorio
That’s not much of a pilot. I run 43kW at my house.
The capacity limit of the system is not the objective of the pilot project.
It cost 600k euros
Gut, dass da zwischen den Schienen nie irgendwelche Steine rumfliegen…???
