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Trains in Switzerland Are Now Running Over Solar Panels in a First-of-Its-Kind Test
(www.zmescience.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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Really long and thin strips that can't be angled. They can only be serviced while the track is closed and need to survive whatever debris a train might fling at them. Is this really the best way to place them?
Solar freaking railways.
For the life of me I don’t understand why people are putting them anywhere before every rooftop is covered with them. Roofs are dead space and unlikely to have debris issues (at least compared to a railway).
Roofs are actually not that great. Installation is expensive because you are working at height. Roof angles and directions are also not ideal on many houses. Compare it to a simple installation on a field: You just take some corn field, stop growing corn there and can put your panels on some cheap holders and you're good. You can access and service them without the danger of falling from a roof. You can install them on an industrial scale instead of a few square meters on every single roof. You need only one electrical installation.
People love to cry about the loss of agricultural space, but currently we are growing a lot of corn to convert it to fuel or to put it into biogas installations. If you convert those field to solar, you will get more energy from them. And the loss of a big monoculture that is using a lot of pesticides is also great.
You can still grow stuff in them with agrivoltaics. You don't have to lose the productive land below it
You can lay them down and remove them again and also clean them with automation. There are power lines nearby as well as consumers, electric trains.
Installing on roofs is manual labor and needs electricians. Which is why you see so many solar farms by the roadside.
It's companies trying to make a quick buck. They tried this with roads too.
Obviously every home should have them first and all newly built homes should be built with solar efficiency in mind.
Or in parking lots. It would also have the added benefit of providing cover for cars.
You need some serious concrete and/or steel hardware to build a carpark roof that can hold the solar panels without easily being damaged by cars or broken by strong wind, so that massively inflates the costs. If you had a state owned company producing cheap solutions for this it could work though.
I don't think they're a lot of surface parking on Switzerland like in the US
Every parking lot needs approval of the location, its probably a a pain in the ass, and would disrupt parking while being built which impacts sales (or will be perceived to anyway). If this worked, you only need to deal with a small group of people for a very large space.
Meanwhile...it's mandatory in France for any newly built parking lot over a certain size.
I do occasionally see parking lots with solar here in LA! So it is happening in some places.
Deployment on rails is dirty cheap. Can be highly automated and you have highvolt power line just a few meters away.
If you put solar upon your roof, 2/3 of the costs are labor costs. The material bill encompasses electrics, mounting system, cables, and pv panels that can get reduced on railways as well.
Cheap if you only count the cost of plopping them down and walking away, the train could kick up enough dust and debris that efficiency is impacted significantly more than installing them on a roof would have been, necessitating installing new ones sooner.
It’s all theory. That’s why I think it’s worth a try and learn the facts.
Edit: A rough estimation with averages: 10 kWp gives 11kwh a year in Swiss, 1kwp panel costs 500€, 1kwh energy costs 0,28 EUR in Swiss. Panel material costs for 10 kWp is 5,000€ and earns you 3,080€ (11,000*0,28€) yearly. This shows the value of the idea.
What if the train runs a street sweeper brush behind it to clean them off every time?
Yes exactly, it makes no sense!
I don't think this should be a concern, I've had them on my roof for 3 years now and not touched them once
Seems so:
It seems like the sort of naive gimmick one might expect from a MAD Magazine cartoonist, or Elon Musk on a ketamine binge. It would work to an extent for a while, though whether the amount of electricity generated would justify the maintenance costs to keep it going is another matter.
The arguments against it are the power yield of a panel pointing upwards, and presumably covered with dirt shed by passing trains. That said, it would suffer less impact damage than photovoltaic roads/bike paths floated elsewhere (the occasional rock impact, as opposed to constant traffic). Also, there is a lot of track, so even if a segment generates little power, it adds up. Not enough to power electric trains, though possibly enough to offset the power bill after operating costs are taken into account.
I’m guessing this installation is an experiment to quantify these figures rather than a commitment to roll this out more broadly.
No need to guess, it's right there in the article.
The whole point of the exercise is to put solar panels in the not best location. Otherwise this article would be about wireless power transmission from space.
It’s stupid and genius at once. So, worth a try.