Switzerland starts installing solar panels on railroad tracks
The startup Sun-Ways received permission from the Swiss Federal Office of Transport and began installing solar panels in the gaps between the tracks of the Buttes railway station.
Interestingly, Sun-Ways is not the first company to deploy solar panels on railroad tracks. The Italian renewable energy company Greenrail and the British technology company Bankset Energy are working on similar technologies, although the Swiss experiment is notable for two reasons:
- Sun-Ways uses standard-sized panels, while the other two companies use smaller panels.
- The process of laying the panels is automated, with a specially built train deploying the system, rather than people manually.
The $560,000 pilot project is expected to be completed this summer and will install about 60 solar panels on a 500-meter stretch of railroad track near the town of Nevshatel. Initially, 100% of the electricity generated by the project will be used to power local households, but in the future, some of the electricity may be used to run trains.
According to Baptiste Danigert, co-founder of Sun-Ways, if all 5,000 km of Swiss railroad tracks were covered with solar panels, up to 1 gigawatt of electricity could be generated per year, enough to power about 750,000 homes.
The panels are laid by a conventional train modernized with special tools for laying panels, but in the future the company will use a two-car train: one for storing the panels and the other for installing them.
