Switzerland’s solar railway has been a success. What happens next?
(www.euronews.com)
EuropeOne can't help but think that the solar panels 5 meters to the left out of the permanent way would be a lot more cost-effective and not require degreasing of the panels.
Exactly.Theyre basically a roof with no moving parts. Why insist on installing them into the least hospitable place?
Is there buildup of grease? I didn't notice mention of it in the article. Being centered would give more exposure time vs. on the side where there might be trees. Having them above as a roof means more cost and structure to maintain, and accessibility issues. Maybe whatever they do get on them isn't a lot over time and is easier to clean than dealing with the other options.
Train bearings are greased with grease guns like a lot of things, and you tell when it's full by when grease shoots out. The reason there's room for grease to fill a bearing before it finally shoots out during maintenance (since it had to do that the last time it was greased) is by slowly losing grease over time just due to things moving and seals not being perfect. Multiply that by hundreds of axles each with two bearings, and 8-15 trains per day per direction.
I get that, it must be something to consider, as well as just general dirt and other pollutants. But is that grease loss over the rails primarily or thrown everywhere? Someone who works the rails might know just from experience. Or the first run of this would have noted the problem, and maybe it wasn't anything different than any other solar panel and what crap they pick up regardless of where they are. But ground level is about as easy access for cleaning as you can get.
From what I know it should be within the rails since that's where the roller bearings are and the underside of rolling stock is coated with a constant film of rust and grease.
Cleaning wouldn't be too hard especially if you made a train that carried its own water tanks and pressure washer spray. The downside is needing to take up a slot of revenue service to run a washing train. Putting more maintenance inside of the revenue generating part of a permanent way is pants on head regarded in my opinion. Like OOP said, put them next to the permanent way since the right of way usually is big enough you can do that.
There's also the fact that railhead grinders probably don't work with these in place which wears the rails out faster if you can't grind it (we're talking an order of magnitude faster if you don't grind microfractures or microcracking out), or necessitates removing them so you can regrind the rail head profile and delete micro cracking from fatigue cycling before it spreads and the entire rail needs to be replaced. Then you have to put these panels back in place.
In a normal rail setup you can run a grinding train in between revenue trains. With this you probably need to close the track, set up derails, remove panels with a crew, grind the rails, and put them back. Each step in that process is a crew day as opposed to a grinding train.
That makes sense. Wonder how much of that was considered in the test runs. Often times some of these green projects like to leave out the extras to pad their worth. At least this makes more sense than solar roads, which have so much more issues to deal with in wear and tear, even though the real estate is huge.
I think it should have been obvious to anyone at the railroad at the very least. They obssess over this stuff since it's their entire business... They've been around for 2 centuries so what impacts a railway is really well understood.
IMHO there's a not-insignificant amount of environmental grifting dressed up like incompetence... The trial gets funding, the railroad gets compensation... Everyone makes money and now a second trial is guaranteed once this one fails.
I'm not saying all environmental stuff is like this but c'mon... It's either political or grifting or even both... I don't see why else they would think this is worth trying.
It's profitable to greenwash. Every once in a while something legit gets through.
Are rail right-of-ways that wide though?
HS2 is currently being built and you can see the worksite from space.
Thats a lot of workspace to fit solar after they move out.
Usually, the right of way, atleast in countries like the UK are quite wide. Some of that is because beeching pulled up the rails and there is just empty space now, some of that is because it just needs room to breath and put switchgear and control boxes.
In Canada they have 10m left and right of the rail alignment usually. It's a massive strip of land when you add it all up, and it already has power runs for signaling, axle counters, hotbox detectors .etc
This just reads like a press release from Sun-Ways laundered through Euronews. ~~The title reads "Italy could be the next country" but never mentions Italy a single time in the body of the article.~~ The entire idea seems comically inefficient compared to easier, higher-yield places to put solar panels.
"Oh, we have to specially design these so they resist cracking and setting on fire, we can't nearly angle them properly for optimal efficiency, they sit on top of critical infrastructure, and they're as low to the ground as humanly possible? Perfect!"
Edit: Whoops. My brain straight-up skipped a paragraph.
Italy is referenced in the very last paragraph, with a vague statement that they are talking about starting a test there too
