Green Energy

Jeez, solar freaking railways.

Railways are dirty, brake dust, oil and lube leaking, human waste (from a car toilet if there is no tank).

you have to keep the panels clean in order to work. this is not a great position to do so

Why not on the sides of the railroad? Often, there is significant free space on both sides of the track.

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.

Solar freaking railways

I expect it would turn out like this:

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-world-s-first-solar-road-has-turned-out-to-be-a-disappointing-failure

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.

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.

The 600000 € probably include the development cost. Thus, on a larger scale, the cost per unit length will decrease significantly.

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

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 - 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.

A lot of the comments here are, pretty fairly, sceptical of 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?

What’s the plan for when people start stealing the solar panels? Good luck trying to stop people

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.

Wouldn't it be better to place panels on the train roofs?