This has some more photos of the solar panels and the laying of them https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/emissions-reduction/solar-energ...
Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland
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Re: Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland
#82I've been nerd-sniped into google fueled napkin math. 18kw/100 m = 180kw/km The most powerful Swiss electric locomotive [1] maxes out at 7900kw. That's 44km of track. The most common Swiss electric (4/4) typicaly maxes at 6100kw requiring up to 34km of track. Switzeraland has about 5000km of track and 180 is about 200, so a million kilowatts if all the track has solar panels. Assuming 3000kw per locomotive and 100% e…
You don't need peak power all the time. The point of trains is that they're extremely efficient; most of the time they're essentially coasting, they only need a lot of power when accelerating or ascending.
If you want hard numbers, SBB used 1685GWh for passenger trains in 2025 [0].
The bigger problem with this idea is solar in Switzerland. It's fantastic during the summer but close to nonexistent during the winter [1]. Trains need to run year-round, so you'd need to overbuild solar monstrously to power SBB during the winter, or you'd need to solve seasonal electricity storage, which isn't easy. Pumped hydro is great but Switzerland has already built about as many artificial alpine lakes as the population is likely to tolerate.
[0]: https://reporting.sbb.ch/en/sustainability?=&years=5,6,7,1&s...
Re: Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland
#83What are the economics of this? Cost to install vs other available options? Durability will certainly be an issue I’m sure. Genuinely curious and not because I think it’s a bad idea. I want solar on all underutilized areas, I just prefer low hanging fruit from a cost perspective at the current time.
This might be exactly what you are asking for: low cost and low hanging fruit. On paper, this should be pretty cheap. Normally, you need some mounting infrastructure to put the panels on, land preparation, etc. In this case, the train track provides the supporting infrastructure. You can bring in the panels via train wagons. Installation should be pretty quick and straightforward. And for cleaning, you could just do…
Another issue with solar deployment is that there needs to be power cables that can consume the electricity.
But a train company practically always has running trains when the sun is shining. So they wouldn’t need to worry about disabling and losing money on the panels.
The real challenge is economically connecting the panels to a rail substation.
Re: Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland
#84[flagged]
Apparently it is so slow and expensive to build nuclear power so no commercial entities are interested without extreme government subsidies and guarantees.
Re: Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland
#85I've been nerd-sniped into google fueled napkin math. 18kw/100 m = 180kw/km The most powerful Swiss electric locomotive [1] maxes out at 7900kw. That's 44km of track. The most common Swiss electric (4/4) typicaly maxes at 6100kw requiring up to 34km of track. Switzeraland has about 5000km of track and 180 is about 200, so a million kilowatts if all the track has solar panels. Assuming 3000kw per locomotive and 100% e…
You don't need peak power all the time. The point of trains is that they're extremely efficient; most of the time they're essentially coasting, they only need a lot of power when accelerating or ascending. If you want hard numbers, SBB used 1685GWh for passenger trains in 2025 [0]. The bigger problem with this idea is solar in Switzerland. It's fantastic during the summer but close to nonexistent during the winter [1…
You don't need peak power all the time
3000kw is about 1/2 power for the most common Swiss electric engines.
And peak demand determines grid size.
Re: Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland
#86Re: Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're getting 180 watts per meter, so it would take 50 km of panels to power one high speed train. And that's when the sun is shining. Double this at least if you want to store the energy and run trains in the evening.
This is incorrect, you mean 180 kWp/m. > in one year, the project has produced around 16,000 kWh. 160 kWh per meter. Urban Metro / Trams: 2 to 10 kWh/km Commuter Trains (EMUs): 4 to 12 kWh/km Regional / Intercity Trains: 6 to 20 kWh/km High-Speed Trains: 15 to 60 kWh/km Freight Locomotives: 10 to 50+ kWh/km
It's obviously not 180 kWp/m. If it was I could put 1 meter of panels on my roof and power my house and 200 of my neighbors.
I didn't try to calculate the amount of energy it produces in a year, just the length of panels required to power a high speed train when the sun is shining. 18,000 watts / 100 meters is 180 watts per meter. At 180 watts per meter, 50 km gives you 9 MW, which is about what a high speed train consumes at cruise.
Re: Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're getting 180 watts per meter, so it would take 50 km of panels to power one high speed train. And that's when the sun is shining. Double this at least if you want to store the energy and run trains in the evening.
This is incorrect, you mean 180 kWp/m. > in one year, the project has produced around 16,000 kWh. 160 kWh per meter. Urban Metro / Trams: 2 to 10 kWh/km Commuter Trains (EMUs): 4 to 12 kWh/km Regional / Intercity Trains: 6 to 20 kWh/km High-Speed Trains: 15 to 60 kWh/km Freight Locomotives: 10 to 50+ kWh/km
> This is incorrect, you mean 180 kWp/m.
This is incorrect. 18000 Wp/100m = 180 Wp/m or 180 kWp/km. So parent is correct, and you can either add or drop a "k".
That is peak power, obtainable in summer months & muuch less in winter.
Over the whole year: 16000 kWh/100m = 160 kWh/m = 160 MWh (160,000 kWh) per km.
Re: Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And yet it did work, You can put panels on anything and generate power for a couple years. This system was only 18kW. That’s less than what we put on some residential houses. They didn’t address any of the hard parts like a transmission system capable of scaling up along a linear row of panels extending kilometers long. > Solar panels have gotten so cheap that it might not be as important to install them in perfect…
A first version is always going to be low in scale and problems will of course be found. The question isn't 'are there problems', of course there are, the question is 'are the benefits here worth more than the problems'. If you already have the land, a maintenance operation, a user of energy, etc etc then integrating solar into that system has a lot of strong benefits that can make the problems manageable. Start look…
> A first version is always going to be low in scale
They don’t have a first version of the hard part: The electrical transmission.
Maybe this isn’t obvious to people who haven’t worked on solar power systems, but you can put a couple panels anywhere and generate electricity for a couple years. It doesn’t prove that it’s viable to run thousands of kilometers of panels.
It’s like baking a tray of muffins in your kitchen and saying you proved that you can run an industrial scale muffin factory. They are different problem sets.
Re: Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
People hate the idea of solar in currently-unused space. Even if that space is bare desert. So you can get a big PR boost if you propose "solar, but on a thing" (roadways, water, and now trains).
Which is just odd to me because why are we holding one of the cleanest means of generating electricity to a higher standard than like, coal and oil? Why does solar have to have 0 footprint when everything else gets as much of a footprint as it wants? (I know the answer is profit)
That is not the answer (plenty of profit in solar), it's probably that society is literally older and so people don't like change as much.