At first glance, covering rail tunnels with solar panels, as has been done on a two-mile Belgian tunnel, makes a lot of sense – creating renewable energy and money from otherwise ‘dead space’.
The tunnel, near Antwerp station on the Paris-Amsterdam high-speed line, will supposedly produce enough power to power all the trains in Belgium for one day a year, but more prosaically will probably help power Antwerp station.
But similar projects in Britain are apparently on hold as the Department of Energy and Climate Change reviews the subsidy scheme as it applies to large scale projects.
A similar scheme may well be uneconomic in Britain, although the Belgian company Enfinity says the cost of cells has halved in the last two to three years because of economies of scale.
The new Blackfriars station over the Thames will be home to 4,400 panels when it opens next year, but it remains to be seen how much more of our rail infrastructure becomes a source of renewable power.
