248
Switzerland authorizes removable PV plant on railway track
(www.pv-magazine.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
248 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
59366 readers
2098 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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).
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