Solar power on Mont Soleil

In Switzerland it’s easy to climb mountains. All you do is hop on a cable car and up you go! The other day my Grandparents, Dad and I did just that. We travelled to St-Imier in the French part of Switzerland and took to the sun.

Bottom station of the Funiculaire St-Imier–Mont Soleil.

The cable car from St-Imier to Mont Soleil started operating in 1903. In 2002 the line was completely overhauled and a brand-new car was put into operation in 2003.

The car with three compartments with a total capacity of 60 passengers.

We started out at 828 metres…

…and climbed at a rate of 5 metres per second on a gradient between 39 and 60%—that’s pretty steep!

Rapidly we climbed, 351 metres all up. St-Imier looked smaller and smaller with every breath we took.

This was our life line: The cable that pulled us up—it looked quite thin but I’m sure it’s very strong.

Mont Soleil, the top station at 1179 metres. From here we walked for a half an hour to another attraction:

The solar power station on Mont Soleil. It makes perfect sense to build a solar power station on a mountain that’s called “Mount Sun”, doesn’t it?

4500 square metres of solar cells transform sunlight into roughly 600,000 kWh of electricity every year, enough to provide 200 households with power.

The Mont Soleil power station was built in 1992 and is one of the biggest research and demonstration facilities in the field of photovoltaic power. On guided tours you can learn interesting facts and how it all works.

The mountain range provides a perfect location to capture the sunlight.

The two hectares of land the station sits on is still farmed. Sheep keep the pastures at bay. We didn’t see any tough—perhaps they had gone on a holiday to New Zealand?!

The other big attraction on Mont Soleil were wind turbines. Last year eight of these wind turbines produced almost 9,000,000 kWh of electricity. They are huuuge! One of those rotor blades is 33 metres long, reaching 100 metres into the sky. And it’s heavy: The whole structure weighs a solid 200 tonnes. Hmm… how did they weight it? I can’t imagine scales big enough for the job…

This is not my photo but it shows how the wind turbine was assembled—wow!

I love this photo. Unfortunately we didn’t get to go in. It looks a tad bigger than the Esterli Tower! Next time perhaps…