Solar is just another component in the grid. Attach solar to the grid if you want, the trains to the grid too.
Like all the countries with electrified railed do.
Electrifying trains with only solar seems a bit stupid IMO, but who am I compared to tech firms betting on electrification.
⇒ This moves production close to where power is consumed, removing/decreasing the need for new grid infra.
They're a result of looking at an idea and saying "I bet I, personally, can make money off of this."
The degree to which VCs decide the direction of human endeavor is disheartening. We have real problems to solve, and in the case of rail, a really robust set of tools and approaches that are proven to solve them.
Putting solar actually near the tracks is presumably not on the cards: not only because the regulations for bolting techy shit to a railway are there for a reason, but also the vibration, the overshadowed nature of much railway, thick black grime, and difficulty in getting access for maintenance, and impediment and vulnerability to normal railway maintenance. It sounds a nightmare in both operational and capital terms.
And since the trains mostly run at 25kV (the 750V third rail systems are basically a dead end in the UK) it would probably be quite a headache to step a few dozen panels here and there up to that, even if there was a way to feed it in near the panel. So exporting to the national grid is probably more cost effective in many cases.
Then again, it's understandable that if Network Rail has to have the land anyway that it wants to get something out of it rather than it just being a net cost.
THAT'S CALLED A FUCKING TRAIN.
It's a fucking train.
In Europe we are integrating ETCS since 1996 and it is still not done.
It seems to generally be clustered with a sort of leftish, anti-AI, maybe anti-tech worldview. Like they feel they have ownership of railways as a concept as sort of a charity case, and if "tech bros" are working on improving them, it's sort of like taking their cause away from them.
- solar over day slowly charges batteries in train cars (easy to add, weight issue is trivial)
- train cars dynamically dispatched during night in response to pretty granular JIT demand for next day
- everything can be slow and maximally efficient, the charging, the trains themselves
Seems like potential to cut costs by a lot and enable new usecases
At least, one could say: let's occupy the available space between the tracks to produce some energy (https://www.sun-ways.ch/en). At least...
I don’t know though. I assume someone with a really nice spreadsheet has looked at this before deciding to pay to build all this.
Trains are famously risk-averse designs. They're also really expensive and have to work for decades.
It will be hard sell to convince a train operator that adding literal tonnes of batteries to a train with a complicated mesh of solar microforms spread over thousands of km of track will be a good deal in terms of regulatory approval, cost effectiveness, maintenance overheads in time and money and that your company will still be around in 20 years to run the system rather than going belly up in a tech crash and leaving them with a bunch of bricked hardware.
How different is it to the train cars themselves being built by some company and then maintained by train company mechanics? And battery + electric motor setups are famously pretty straightforward, so this seems even more true.
I don't disagree on the regulatory stuff being an issue, that's a very good point.
The solar mesh feels like an orthogonal problem, also feels very solvable with just standard interfaces which would surely be mandated. I mean the solar bit is an add on too, you can always fall back to other means for battery charging, but seems like solar is just an obvious economically optimal solution in the circumstances.
Sometimes it feels like that all the tech "innovations" lately have all been due to a certain group of people's desire to experience what Steve Jobs had. A generation of impressionable young people who grew up into a world where tech is going to save the world, and watching Jobs on stage are now trying their hardest to make their dreams a reality.
I try to remember that episode when building tech products. We all like solar. We all like trains. It doesn't mean that we need to have solar panels between the train tracks.
I think that although it could be cool, it seems like train right-of-ways is a particularly harsh environment for solar panels. There's dust, harsh vibrations, heavy cast iron components, and other things right next to a sensitive bit of electronics. It seems like it would be more economical to have a solar farm managed by the train company. This way the panels can be easily cleaned, angled properly, and maintained not in the proximity of giant rolling metal boxes.
Animats•3mo ago
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Animats•3mo ago