You’ve complicated maintenance of both the railway and the solar. If you used the space literally next to it in the picture, both would be simplified and have current real world cost and deployments. This is just an investor scam so they can take a bunch of money, and say it was all for this test, that will turn out to be worse and more expensive than anything else.
Then they will try to sucker another city into funding a new test.
Fair comment, though in real life the space near the tracks is either non-existent either uneven ground filled with rocks and plants, but as other pointed out it could be on roofs, parking lots, etc. Also, apparently the SNCF says they are specifically testing how much it complicates maintenance, so they are aware of this, but even then it’s less direct to test for that, and maybe built it in the future, than to built it in already adapted places.
Or made it easier, since you could do maintenance on the panels with some rail cart directly. I see how solar roadways may not have been convenient, but with rail it’s not as dumb. Placing the panels on the side also means more land use, and not every place in the world is spacious, especially Switzerland
You’ve complicated maintenance of both the railway and the solar. If you used the space literally next to it in the picture, both would be simplified and have current real world cost and deployments. This is just an investor scam so they can take a bunch of money, and say it was all for this test, that will turn out to be worse and more expensive than anything else.
Then they will try to sucker another city into funding a new test.
It appears dumb, until you think of automated deployment and maintainance, leveraging existing infrastructure.
Fair comment, though in real life the space near the tracks is either non-existent either uneven ground filled with rocks and plants, but as other pointed out it could be on roofs, parking lots, etc. Also, apparently the SNCF says they are specifically testing how much it complicates maintenance, so they are aware of this, but even then it’s less direct to test for that, and maybe built it in the future, than to built it in already adapted places.
Or made it easier, since you could do maintenance on the panels with some rail cart directly. I see how solar roadways may not have been convenient, but with rail it’s not as dumb. Placing the panels on the side also means more land use, and not every place in the world is spacious, especially Switzerland