Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, June 6 (Xinhua)-- Sun-Ways, a Swiss start-up, is installing solar panels on Swiss railway tracks, which are carpeted in the track gap near Buttes railway station and approved by the Swiss Federal Transport Agency.

Sun-Ways is not the first company to install solar panels on railway tracks. Italian renewable energy company Greenrail and British technology company Bankset Energy are developing similar technology, but the Swiss experiment has two noteworthy features. First, Sun-Ways uses standard-sized panels, while the other two companies use smaller panels to accommodate track gaps. Second, the entire installation process of the Sun-Ways is automated, completed by a special train rather than manual installation.

The pilot project, which is expected to be completed this summer at a cost of US $560000 (CTOnews.com Note: currently about 3.982 million yuan), will install 60 solar panels on a 140ft section of railway track near the city of Neuch â tel. It's not big, but this is just the beginning. The electricity generated by the project will first be 100% used for local residents, but in the future, some of the electricity may be used to drive trains.

According to Baptiste Danichert, co-founder of Sun-Ways, solar panels covering Switzerland's 5000-kilometer railway network could generate up to 1 gigawatts of electricity a year, enough to supply 750000 homes. For the pilot project, Sun-Ways used a modified ordinary train to lay the panels. In the future, the company plans to use a custom train with two carriages-one to store panels and the other to install panels. The panels are expected to remain on the track, and if maintenance or repair is needed, the same train will pass through the track again to dismantle it.

According to Bill Nussey, founder of Freeing Energy Project, a clean energy advocacy group, the experiment will be successful only after overcoming some major challenges, including debris from trains and the geographical distance between panels and grid connections.

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