Swiss startup Sun-Ways inaugurated its railway PV project in April in Neuchatel, Switzerland, after more than two years of planning. Joseph Scuderi, founder of Sun-Ways, tells pv magazine that the pilot is attracting international attention.
I think it was EEVBlog (and likely many others) who made calculations on these ideas few years ago and even if at face value that seems like it should work (train tracks, like roads, cover a significant area) it’s still not feasible. You can’t tilt panels on roads/tracks towards the sun, the panels need to be way more robust so that they’ll survive the conditions and thus less effective than purpose built solar plants, vibrations (specially with trains) shake pretty much everything apart and so on.
It doesn’t make sense even on power alone when you put the numbers in and much less in a business case where you’d need to make a profit out of the installation.
I think it was EEVBlog (and likely many others) who made calculations on these ideas few years ago and even if at face value that seems like it should work (train tracks, like roads, cover a significant area) it’s still not feasible. You can’t tilt panels on roads/tracks towards the sun, the panels need to be way more robust so that they’ll survive the conditions and thus less effective than purpose built solar plants, vibrations (specially with trains) shake pretty much everything apart and so on.
It doesn’t make sense even on power alone when you put the numbers in and much less in a business case where you’d need to make a profit out of the installation.
Edit: Here’s one discussion on topic https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-1234-more-epic-solar-roadways-fail!/
Exactly. These projects always try to solve an irrelevant problem with a solution makes things that actually matter much worse.
They’re fine on disused tracks to make the land more useful, which they’re doing in France.