I’m all for putting solar panels all over the place, but won’t these get dusty and oily and need loads of cleaning after trains pass over?

Also, costing €623,000 over three years sounds rather expensive for just 100m (although that roughly equates to 11KW).

  • Valmond@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    That’s like 0.00000001% of land.

    There is so much unused land, why bother trains and their schedules with a maintenance nightmare between their rails?

    It is just a stupid idea with no upside except the oily greasy dirty solar panels up-side that can’t get cleaned because, … wait for it …, there are Trains running over it!

    I can’t fathom how such a stupid idea got more that 1 meter away from the bar counter.

    • DaPorkchop_@lemmy.ml
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      55 minutes ago

      Because none of that unused land is set up to allow a machine to easily roll over it and automatically place/replace/clean the panels. Putting panels between the tracks means you get that for free, as the tracks are there anyway, and are already have electrical infrastructure all along their length.

      The point of the experiment is to see if those benefits end up outweighing the presumably higher chance of panels getting damaged. In the worst case it ends up not being worth while and there isn’t a huge loss, in the best case we end up being able to add a bunch of additional solar capacity without having to build much new infrastructure or cover any previously unused land.

      And it would be trivially easy to have a train run over the tracks to clean the panels, there are already trains which use compressed air/sandblasters/lasers to remove leaves and stuff from the rails. Just add a few more compressed air nozzles in between and boom, all your panels are now clean.

    • SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml
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      5 hours ago

      I agree, there’s so much land elsewhere. Even just beside the tracks would be better than between the tracks

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        That could actualy have real world benefits, like when there are few trains, a special small train could go by and let maintenance people off/on there for example.

    • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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      6 hours ago

      ha, ok. youll be ok. its alright. everything will be just fine.

      why dont you have some nice warm milk and this cookie. youll feel right as rain. .

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        Everything will be fine, except this extraordinarily stupid idea.

        Did you invest in it or something? I mean you have no answers just other than “here take a cookie” lol

          • Valmond@lemmy.world
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            5 hours ago

            It did cost 600.000 euros and you call it efficient, for an idea that can be scrapped by thinking straight for 2 minutes lol.

            You think the idea sounds cool, but it’s just a nightmare. If you are really interested in efficiency you should look up engineering and related studies. Or just work with mechanical things. Or both.

            What did you think about solar roadways?