Italian Trains Get Solar Boost
by Michael Graham Richard, Ottawa, Canada 
on 10.24.05
The first solar-power-assisted trains in Europe are from Italy. "The PVTRAIN project, partly funded by the EU, has been under development since 2003, and involves 10 prototype units: 5 carriages, 3 cargo wagons and 2 locomotives." The solar panels on the roof do no help power the wheels, but they provide energy for air-conditioning, lighting and safety systems, which helps make the trains more efficient by freeing the engine from having to create power for that electrical load. "The panels on a rail car can deliver approximately 1.36 kW of peak power. In the development and testing from July 2003 to May 2005, the solar panel system generated a total of 1,017.41 kWh." If the experiment is successful, solar-assisted trains could be produced on an industrial scale.
::Italy unveils solar-energy train, ::PVTRAIN (Italian), via ::Green Car Congress
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For reference, the locomotive that's pulling the train cars has a peak power of about 1500kW. So a 10 car train would generate +- 1% of its own power this way.
Or more, depending if there are batteries and the train can recharge while not moving.
But since it is only used for things other than moving the train right now, and since for now there are only 10 prototypes and when a full train is outfitted with panels it will obviously be more, it certainly could reach more than 1% and probably the whole non-mobile needs of the train.
I’m going off the rails on a PV train
- Ozzy
Randy Rhoads would be proud!
There are two key positives I see here: Slightly less power use on the train, and local recharging if they're on batteries (which they're likely not). If you could feed the power each train generates back into the grid as well, and you had, say, fifty trains, that'd be a bit of cost savings - maybe a whole train's worth of electricity. That could be worth it in the long run.
cool