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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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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).
Hell parking lots are massive areas of dead space, build them over the damned things, it'll help against the heat island affect and give shade.
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
And even if you do not: It's better for the environment to not grow corn and just have some grass underneath the solar panels.
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.
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.
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.
Don't forget about the inverters.
Low voltage (such as the output from a solar panel) suffers badly from losses over distance. Centralised solar makes up for this by having a large amount of panels close to a central inverter. There is going to be a distance tipping point of cost vs losses, if this is short and you need a lot of inverters, that's going to become a major expense.
What if the train runs a street sweeper brush behind it to clean them off every time?
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.
Yeah, a lot of the places around me are putting up these massive structures. I don't know why they don't just install open sided polebarns
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.
Thats a good way to get it to start happening as it avoids a lot of the problems
I do occasionally see parking lots with solar here in LA! So it is happening in some places.
Yes exactly, it makes no sense!