Make money doing the work you believe in
Solar panels between railway tracks sounds like an idea from a first year engineering student.
But a pilot project in Switzerland has now run more than 11,000 trains over track-mounted solar panels, with the developer saying the system has stayed stable and produced electricity as expected.
The clever bit of course, is the land use. The panels sit inside existing rail lines, meaning no new land clearing, or farmland tradeoff, no expensive rooftop installations. Apparently a purpose-built machine can lay up to 300 metres of panels an hour.
There are still obvious questions: cleaning, maintenance, shading, vibration, and whether rail operators are willing to deal with another thing that can break inside their already rickety infrastructure.
Still… worth trying in other places, surely?
