Solar panels between the rails: Switzerland’s small experiment with large ambitions

Switzerland has found another way to make its railways do two jobs at once. In Buttes, in the canton of Neuchâtel, a 100-metre stretch between the tracks has spent the past year hosting solar modules, and the verdict from Sun-Ways is reassuringly dull: the system stayed stable, trains kept running, and the electricity kept coming.

Joseph Scuderi, the company’s founder, says the pilot met its aims on both safety and production. More than 11,000 trains passed over the installation, and the panels were said to have remained completely secure. The local operator TransN confirms that the daily timetable was not disturbed. Even the usual complaint about glare for locomotive drivers has, so far, failed to produce complaints. In the world of new infrastructure, that already counts as a small miracle.

The numbers are not trivial. The pilot has generated more than 16,000 kilowatt-hours, roughly the annual consumption of three to four households. Sun-Ways argues that the country’s 5,320 kilometres of rail lines could, in theory, produce up to one billion kilowatt-hours a year, once tunnels and badly exposed sections are excluded. That would cover the consumption of about 300,000 households, or around 2 per cent of Swiss electricity use. Modest, perhaps, but not nothing — which is more than can be said for many grand energy slogans.

The idea is drawing attention abroad. France’s SNCF signed a cooperation agreement with the start-up in February, and Scuderi sees that market as especially promising. Talks are also under way with RFI, which manages Italy’s rail infrastructure, while partners in South Korea and Indonesia have also entered the picture. The Swiss Innovation Agency is backing the technology, which helps, though in this country support often arrives with the warm embrace of caution and the paperwork of a minor treaty.

There are still limits, of course. Julien Pouget of the Fachhochschule Westschweiz has said the current technology is not suited to sections longer than 500 metres, and the main challenge is pushing the generated power up to high voltage so it can travel over longer distances. The Federal Office of Transport has set the pilot period at three years, but Sun-Ways hopes for final approval sooner. For the company, the logic is obvious: if the system is safe, the rest is mostly a matter of permission.

That may be the real lesson here. Switzerland, which often prefers to admire innovation from a safe distance, has at least allowed one to be tested on its own rails. If the country can turn a strip of track into a power source without interrupting trains, it may have found something rarer than a subsidy programme: a practical idea that survives contact with reality.

Written by Christiane Hofreiter christiane.hofreiter@alpineweekly.com