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Comment by ryanmcbride | Hacker News Reader

I'll never understand why people latch onto these kinds of solar "solutions" in search of problems. Like that solar roadways fiasco a decade or so ago.

Just normal-ass solar is already safe proven and effective. Why do we need to remix it when there are still so many easy wins to be achieved?

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> Like that solar roadways fiasco a decade or so ago.

Should have many of the same drawbacks, with 2 big differences:

1. Trains not driving directly on the panels' surface (which makes solar roadways a bad idea in any case). And

2. Trains on their own track, so the 'road surface' conditions of the panels (rain, snow etc) don't matter safety-wise.

That said: imho there's still so many spaces better suited to put solar panels, that between train tracks is among the last places I'd go for. Especially if it requires custom-design panels.

Yeah, I can understand putting solar on things when it lets them become standalone off-the-grid setups but for something like railroad track it’s just not that much space and the costs are so much higher. Except on the tightest urban lines, just putting rows of normal panels next to the tracks should be significantly more space with much easier engineering.

Exactly. For example, I think the lifted solar panels that have been popping up over parking lots are a perfect win-win. Cars get shade, power gets generated, it's out of the way of most day-to-day threats, and if they have to do repairs, it's just blocking off part of a parking lot instead of a major thoroughfare.

If there's a single downside I'm not sure what it is.

The closest thing to a downside I can come up with is that, at least in CA, there's more than enough solar already. Adding solar to the grid without batteries included isn't really productive.

I think that’ll rebalance over time but one of the biggest questions I’d have is how to use all of the batteries people are driving around. A buddy shifted his car charging to work because they have a convenient setup with a bunch of solar panels and that seems like a good path to encourage going forward: let sunny day over production shift vehicle charging off of times where load would need to come from grid batteries, fossil, or wind.

Would be interesting if solar panel rows laid right on the ground could make sense for autonomous vehicle parking lots where cars can drive over the panels precisely enough to not crush them.

Not really. Solar panels laid flat on the ground are less efficient than solar panels raised above ground and angled to get more yield (if you're in the Northern hemisphere the Sun is never* in the North, vice versa for the South).

* Midnight sun notwithstanding.

Definitely, the tradeoff is that it is cheap/easy to install things on the ground. https://erthos.com/ is testing that.

yes but things on the ground are exposed to significantly more dirt and critters than things suspended off the ground.

People hate the idea of solar in currently-unused space. Even if that space is bare desert. So you can get a big PR boost if you propose "solar, but on a thing" (roadways, water, and now trains).

Which is just odd to me because why are we holding one of the cleanest means of generating electricity to a higher standard than like, coal and oil? Why does solar have to have 0 footprint when everything else gets as much of a footprint as it wants? (I know the answer is profit)

That is not the answer (plenty of profit in solar), it's probably that society is literally older and so people don't like change as much.

I know there's profit in solar, but the game is rigged to favor oil and gas so that's still more profitable for the people who make the decisions.

This is bizarre to me, because the energy markets in my country (the UK) are bent to benefit solar and wind over all else. We banned oil and gas exploration, and even regulated out coal from the entire market. It's extremely hard to see how this benefits fossil fuel companies.

must be nice

Legacy electricity generation isn't going to go down without a fight and a lot of overpriced PR campaigns.

I'm a big fan of solar but this seems like a stretch. Generating the same amount of power as one fossil fuel plant requires a vast amount of land area, so of course that's why people complain about it. Coal plants and mines can be pretty large but natural gas plants, the realistic alternative, are pretty compact. I'm not sure how the size of oil/gas fields compares to a similar amount of solar, but they are generally sited far away, where people don't see them - and can be built relatively visually unobtrusively (see LA). And then there's nuclear plants, pretty big, but putting out multiple gigawatts.

Again, I think fossil fuels need to go and solar is our best bet, but no sense in hand waving the entire argument. They need a lot of land area.

>Generating the same amount of power as one fossil fuel plant requires a vast amount of land are

Lets not forget that it's not just the land the power plant sits on that is used by fossil fuels.

VAST areas are mined and drilled out

Yes, I mentioned that. And especially for coal, it's a big issue. But realistically coal is dying anyways, it's natural gas that's the main competitor. And oil&gas:

- ... often has its land use sited far away, in Texas and the Dakotas, or even offshore. Solar would realistically have to go everywhere; even assuming perfect transmission(!), you don't want to bunch it up in one region so it's not a single point of failure.

- ... employs lots of people / requires constant high-paying labor. Solar is built once then mostly just sits there. Which is good! But explains why residents might be fine with the former, but not the latter.

- ... is more easily hidden away. See LA's hidden oil rigs.

- ... already kinda exists. Which is a lame argument, yeah, but obviously people are going to be fine with the pumpjack or oil field that's been there their entire lives, vs. new solar farms coming in and taking over what was forest or farmland.

Again, I'm on solar's side here, obviously it's a better land use. But we can't just handwave away the entire land use issue, it's that kind of stance that makes people grow hostile to it.

There's a load of land near me that's just used entirely for some horses to chill in.

Planning permission was put in to add a solar farm. Got "objections" because it's "farm land".

It's not viable to grow anything on...

Because they are people who make trains. The people who own farms think about making solar fields. The people who own roads think about making solar roadways. The peo who make trains think about making solar trains. All of these possibilities can be trialed in parallel by different people. It is the same reason that if asked to design a combination lock safe, you would probably reach for a microcontroller and a keypad instead of a bucket of gears, because you are (I presume) a software person and the hardware people can try the other way.

> safe proven

More like engineered and worked around to be safe (unless you are in Australia lol). 400v around people is unforgiving. Batteries catch fire occasionally too - a lot of places you are not allowed to install indoors.

People have been convinced by energy company propaganda that solar still needs a trick or selling point other than protecting the environment. There’s widespread disinformation about cost and environmental impacts from the panels themselves.

friends of friends simply need all that sweet government grant money

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