Writer: Nicole Chow 

“Matchmaking the UK’s biggest electricity user, the railways, with the nation’s favourite energy source, solar power, looks like the start of the perfect relationship.” said Leo Murray, Director of Riding Sunbeams, a British social enterprise that has collaborated with the Network Rail to power trains in south-east England and launched the pilot scheme.

Solar-powered train stations are nothing new to the UK. For example, in Blackfriars, a train station in Central London, the solar energy collected is fed back to the electricity grid in order to power the operation of the station. 

A breakthrough comes as the 30kW pilot scheme, founded by the charity 10:10 Climate Action and Imperial College London, developed a trackside solar farm at Aldershot, southeast England. It allows solar energy to bypass the electricity grid and directly feed the railway’s “traction” system. That is, as long as the sun is shining, every train that passes this section of track is picking up a little bit of energy directly from the sun. Bypassing the electricity grid also helps to reduce the cost of collecting solar power. 

Using solar energy helps to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Network Rail, the UK train operator, hopes to solar-charge its rail lines across the country so that greener and better railways could be delivered to more passengers.

In fact, the same model of trackside solar farms can be used across the world. In India, 250 trains are powered directly through the solar panels that are attached to the roof of the trains. However, solar panels could be a weight burden to the trains, and causing them to take more energy to operate than usual. Therefore, India Railways is also planning to build large-scale trackside solar farms by 2025.  

Let's get back to Hong Kong. Constructing trackside solar farms requires land and space while land shortage is one of the main issues in Hong Kong . But what about building solar farm on the rooftop of train stations? The rooftop solar farm could be part of the energy supplier for trains in Hong Kong. As solar-powered railways become more common across the world, we shall look forward to seeing them in Hong Kong!

Source:
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/solar-powered-train-intl-scli-gbr/index.html

Image Source:
https://www.raillynews.com/2019/08/The-world%27s-first-working-with-solar-energy-railway-opened-in-England/