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Volvo's Electric Roads Concept Points To Battery-Free EV Future
Zothecula writes "While quick charging technology installed at strategic points along a planned route might be a good fit for inner city buses, it's not going to be of much use to electric vehicles that stop infrequently. Volvo sees our future long-haul trucks and buses drawing the juice they need from the road itself, making large onboard batteries a thing of the past. 'The two power rails/lines run along the road's entire length. One is a positive pole, and the other is used to return the current. The lines are sectioned so that live current is only delivered to a collector mounted at the rear of, or under, the truck if an appropriate signal is detected. As an additional safety measure, the current flows only when the vehicle is moving at speeds greater than 60 km/h (37 mph). "The vehicle is equipped with a radio emitter, which the road segments can sense," explains Volvo's Per-Martin Johnansson. "If an electric vehicle passes a road segment with a proper encrypted signal, then the road will energize the segments that sense the vehicle.'"
If one assumes that this is the solution for electric cars, then a logical extension is that everybody will adopt it. Intercity truck hauling is the low hanging fruit so that is where you start. Then it cascades down to everybody. In 20 years half the cars driving would use the technology.
Initially costs would have to be subsidized by the taxpayers, but as usage grows then subsides would disappear with costs being recouped by charging for the electricity.
It’s a long shot but there could be huge wins. That is how I would evaluate it.
You could call them "rails" or something... and connect multiple trucks together when they were all going the same direction.
Brilliant!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
No free lunch. Any electricity you make by passing a a coil over a magnet is coming from loss of forward velocity.
There are wireless charging methods, but they again require outside power.
This has been tried before. It's called a ground level power supply. Trams in Bordeaux use it. The sections are powered on and off in 8-meter sections. When a section is off, it's grounded. For safety, there are two levels of switching. The 8-meter sections each have their own power control box, and there's a second level of control which monitors a number of sections and will cut power for many sections if something is live that shouldn't be. The trams have battery backup so they can get through dead sections. Bordeaux only uses the system in their scenic historic area. Once out of that area, the trams raise pantographs to connect to overhead wire. Two other small cities in France have installed that system, but only short sections in the city center use that system. Dubai is putting in 14km of a similar system.
Drainage, water, and ice are big problems. (Not in Dubai, though.) So is cost. There's a lot of high-voltage switchgear involved.
So we're talking about Volvo, not Volvo. It's hard to see how AC got confused.
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What they could do is have the trucks drive on the rails so they have to put them in. The upside is that there will be lower rolling resistance so it'll be more efficient anyway.
Ok so let's put metal rails between major cities and use electric vehicles on them.
I think volvo, and most people, forget that the benefit of fuels (solid, liquid, or gaseous) is that they are very cheap to transport. Electricity, on the other hand, is insanely expensive to transport. Think about a 10% loss for every major hop. The middle of the road in a large city is likely 4 major hops from the power plant. That takes 100 down to 65. That's up to a 35% total loss.
It took me all of thirty seconds to find a quote on that:
Transmission and distribution losses in the USA were estimated at 6.6% in 1997[10] and 6.5% in 2007.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission
This is a fair cry from the 35% losses you are postulating.
And let's not forget that an electric motor is 90%+ efficient, while an ICE is somewhere around 18%-20%.