Switzerland placed photovoltaics on railway tracks. What did it do?
Switzerland protects its landscape. In order not to spoil the surroundings with photovoltaics, she placed solar panels between the railway rails on a pilot basis. What are the conclusions from this experiment?
In this place, photovoltaics does not bother anyone: the space between the railway tracks is invisible to train passengers and local residents. In addition, the embankments are cleared of plants, and the tracks themselves are often maintained – these are ideal conditions for photovoltaics.
The idea is even more interesting because it uses thousands of kilometers of existing transport corridors without the need to cut down forests or take up agricultural land.
The Swiss placed the panels between the rails. The air cleans them of dust
The world’s first solar power plant installed between railway tracks has been operating regularly for just over a year. Since the beginning of the project, over 11,000 trains have passed over the modules. The pilot track is currently 100 meters long and runs along a section of track in the town of Buttes, in the canton of Neuchâtel in western Switzerland. 48 specially designed panels with a total power of 18 kWp were installed there.
The project manager of the startup Sun-Ways is full of optimism. – We achieved our goals both in terms of railway safety and electricity production – said Josepf Scuderi, founder of Sun-Ways, in an interview with Swissinfo.
The test track generates electricity which is transmitted to the local power grid. The pilot installation has since produced over 16,000. kilowatt hours of electricity. This amount roughly corresponds to the annual energy consumption of an average house heated only by electricity.
The next step is to be powering the railway infrastructure, including traction substations or even the lines supplying the trains themselves. If the entire approximately 5,320 km long Swiss railway network were equipped with such photovoltaic modules, two percent of Switzerland’s total electricity demand could be met (1 TWh of energy per year).
The panels do not blind drivers. More countries want to take advantage of the Swiss invention
Interestingly, the current generation of solar panel modules can be easily dismantled during track maintenance – they are not permanently attached to the ground. And as it turned out, the modules clean themselves with each passing train. The airflow from the trains is sufficient to remove fine dust from the panels. Even the brush mounted under the trains turned out to be unnecessary.
Fears about blinding train drivers did not come true. “There were no collisions with infrastructure, maintenance works or train movements,” said a spokesman for the Swiss Federal Railways, quoted by Swissinfo. Engineers applied on the panels coating limiting light reflections.
However, flat-lay solar panels have lower efficiency. According to Sun-Ways calculations, we are talking about decrease in energy production of approximately 10%. However, the company believes that this is an acceptable price for the opportunity to use a huge area that already exists and does not require the acquisition of new areas.
According to Sun-Ways, during the first year of operation the installation operated without any problems and did not require additional service work.
Italians were also interested in the invention. The v company has already signed a cooperation agreement with an Italian partner, which is in talks with the manager of the national railway infrastructure, Rete Ferroviaria Italiana. The startup also received approval to build a similar installation in South Korea. Talks are also underway with partners from the Netherlands, China, India and Singapore.
