Solar collectors are not a new technology. To change the world these days is just an idea. Nowadays, the need for energy is only growing. In previous articles, we looked at different ways to extract energy – people create an artificial Sun and drill into the depths of the Earth. Nevertheless, where can we make more efficient use of existing electricity generation technologies? Wind farms are built offshore and solar power in the desert, but construction and energy infrastructure in the sea or in the desert are complex and expensive. Where else can we find a little-used area that is not far removed from civilization? That’s right – the rails.
Solar collectors on railway sleepers. A capacity of 1 MW can be produced from a 6 km section of track. That’s enough to load 150 electric cars. The 1 MW wind turbine has an average weight of almost 70 tonnes, is equivalent to a 20-storey building and requires 5,000m 2 for newly installed solar panels.
1 MW of energy requires about one hectare of land for both solar and wind energy, but the area occupied by railways is already being used efficiently. According to the latest figures, there are 420 million Km of railways worldwide. If all this length were covered by solar panels, it could generate over 70 GW of power.
70 GW – how much power is it?
We probably all remember the legendary 1985 film “Back to the Future” by Lithuanian director Robertas Zemeckis. In the film, scientist Emmet Brown was shocked to learn that traveling with a time machine requires 1.3 GW of power, and only lightning can generate that much energy.
We won’t travel in time, but we can see what can be done with 70 GW instead of 1.3 GW:
- 7.7 Billion LED Bulbs – The standard LED bulb uses 9W. So, with 70 GW, 7.7 billion LEDs could be turned on;
- 823 529 JAC iEV7S car power – The JAC iEV7S has 85kW of power. So 70GW divided by 85kW makes 823,529 JAC iEV7S electric cars;
- 8,750 standard wind turbines – on average, one wind turbine produces 8 MW. The 70GW / 8MW has 8,750 wind farms.
This list can be continued and continued. However, its main purpose is to show how much power can be obtained by covering the rails with solar panels that are unused most of the time and are simply waiting for the train to arrive.
So ideas are changing the world. And while this idea, with the added use of train tracks, is neither new nor original, it can really help people with ever-increasing energy needs.
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