New York City To Get Manhole Covers That Wirelessly Charge Electric Vehicles

Lucas123 writes "A new project between NYU and start-up HEVO Power will disguise wireless charging stations in manhole covers. The wireless charging stations are aimed at providing fleets of delivery vehicles with power in parking spaces around the city. Next year, Toyota plans to test a wireless charging Prius in Japan, Europe. And, U.S. Auto electronics giant Delphi is developing technology for electric vehicles that could be used industrywide. The charging stations could be embedded in asphalt or pads that lay on garage floors. Wireless charging, however, still has many obstacles to overcome, including the time it takes to recharge a vehicle, cost to deploy the technology and power loss during electrical transfer."

Comments

ConEd has had that for a while

[disposable60]

I recall news stories from over a decade ago lamenting the fact that ConEd manhole covers were being used to charge dogs. Inadvertently, and sadly fatally, but this technology has been around for a while.

Re:ConEd has had that for a while

[rhazz]

Citation: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/nyregion/15dog.html?_r=0

I recalled this too and had to find the article :)

Now THAT is E/M radiation

[i kan reed]

Will the nutjobs afraid of wireless routers be able to survive walking down the sidewalk in NYC now?

Re:Now THAT is E/M radiation

[Obfuscant]

I would hope that the wireless charging manhole covers would not be on the sidewalks, otherwise a large number of pedestrians will be peeved, not just the tinfoil hat crowd.

Re:Now THAT is E/M radiation

[icebike]

Well, the article is fairly vague on the exact details of the technology but it did say:

HEVO's manhole covers work via electromagnetic resonance, which makes a magnetic connection between a charging coil to a car equipped with a wireless charging coil.

Without some NFC communications built in, I don't see how they monetize that, or even control the on/off condition of the system.
If they simply leave them on all the time, simply driving over one of these could induce eddy currents in any passing vehicle, (like passing a wire through any magnetic field), which might prove uprising on a rainy day, not to mention induction in re-rod built into sidewalks, lamp poles, underground wiring, the fillings in your teeth, etc. There is also significant loss in any transformer running without a load on the secondary side.

So they would probably have to be switched, and therefore OFF unless a known subscriber vehicle was parked on it.
That would be no consolation to those who insist they can "feel" wireless routers, (who invariably fail to accurately do so in double blind tests).

Re:Now THAT is E/M radiation

[danomac]

Eh, I think the drivers will be more peeved. Low on battery? Just stop in the middle of the street on top of a manhole cover. Traffic hilarity ensues.

Re:Now THAT is E/M radiation

[TheRaven64]

Stopping in the middle of the street in NYC is largely impossible, as the precondition - moving in the street in NYC - is almost never met.

Tax dollars at work?

[HockeyPuck]

So who pays for this? Is it everyone or just those that own electric vehicles?

I have a diesel car and nobody is helping to pay for my fuel consumption.

Re:Tax dollars at work?

[CanHasDIY]

I drive an EV because it's better for the environment

You depend on a healthy environment, so this benefits you too

Yes, but unfortunately all the environmental benefits are offset by the hot, noxious gas emanating from your ego-inflated sense of moral superiority.

Re:Tax dollars at work?

[icebike]

No, they don't. (as your won link shows).

They collectively, get to write off 4 billion of taxes for foreign tax paid, depletion allowance, domestic manufacturing, all of which are tax breaks available to any industry. Depletion allowance can even be claimed by a Gravel Pit owner. The oil industry is Huge, and the total tax writeoff is only 4 billion.

That's less than the cost of one Navy DDG-51 destroyer.

Apple alone wrote off 1.1 billion all by itself.

  You don't get to call a general tax write off a subsidy. At least until you accept the fact that a the Standard Deduction that every tax payer gets to claim is a subsidy.

What did the oil companies pay in taxes:

ExxonMobil in 2011 made $27.3 billion in cash payments for income taxes. Chevron paid $17 billion and ConocoPhillips $10.6 billion. And not only were these the highest amounts in absolute terms, when compared with the rest of the 25 most profitable U.S. companies, the trio also had the highest effective tax rates. Exxon’s tax rate was 42.9%, Chevron’s was 48.3% and Conoco’s was 41.5%. That’s even higher than the 35% U.S. federal statutory rate, which is already the highest tax rate among developed nations.

Just the top three alone paid about 55 billion in taxes. Add in the drillers, smaller oil companies, the pipelines, and you are talking serious money.

Note: About here is where someone invariably posts the War for Oil bullshit. But the US doesn't import any oil from Iraq or Afghanistan. The US is a Net Exporter of oil and gas.

Recycling bonus

[bob_super]

Cool, my Manhole cover recycling business will get a boost from all the extra tech I can resell!

What? If they don't want me to take them, why do they leave them lying on the ground?

Disguise?

[stillnotelf]

I was really curious about the need to "disguise" the chargers as manhole covers - it's not like they'd be an eyesore, and they'll be "public enough" that they won't be secret, either. Unfortunately it was poetic licence in TFS, not in TFA...

The Second Law of Thermodynamics isn't your friend

[SirGarlon]

Color me skeptical -- between the energy losses in electricity generation, transmission to the wireless charger, the wireless charging process, storage in the car's battery, and finally conversion to mechanical energy, it is hard to imagine this being a win in terms of overall energy efficiency or emissions reduction. If NYC had a big surplus of low-cost, zero-carbon energy sources, of course, this would make perfect sense. I suspect they'll instead end up burning more fossil fuels to charge the electric cars than they would to just drive equivalent diesel or internal-combustion vehicles.

Michael Bay!

[Culture20]

How much power will this add to manhole explosions? Will the explosions be triggered more often with live wires in the manholes (and the loose connectors that manholes would require)? Was Michael Bay involved in the design?

Re:OMG TEH MAGNETS

[CanHasDIY]

They forgot to mention the potential issue with all those alternating magnetic fields everywhere. What happens when they start resonating?

Then it's time to bust out the crowbar and ask yourself: WWGFD?

Re:85% efficiency

[godrik]

If we could do it with 99% efficiency then the cost of being lazy would be acceptable. But 15% seems like a lot. (And frankly, I am kind of doubting that you can actually get that much.) Essentially it means that the power is 15% more expensive (at least) just for the luxury of not plugin a cable. If I could not get out of my car but still get gas at a 15% surcharge, well, I'd get out of my car and pump my own gas...

Re:The Second Law of Thermodynamics isn't your fri

[holophrastic]

My grandfather, now 92 years old, has been screaming at his condo building for two decades now. They have a pool, and a sauna. It's an electric sauna. Because it takes time to warm up, people turn it on, go for a quick swim, and come back to it 15 minutes later when it's hot. In the end, the electric sauna runs electric current through a resistor for an hour to heat up and stay hot for the people inside. It winds up being something rediculous like 10 kWh for a 1 hour sauna, where just a few drops of liquid fuel would easily achieve the same levels of heat, at a tiny fraction of the cost.

The energy loss across the electrical grid is staggering when you look at it from cradle to grave. It winds up being close to or over 40%, and it's absurd.

Data Acquisition is Proabably the Real Motive

[twmcneil]

"Oh, and we'll have to bill you for charging your vehicle of course. Just sign here to authorize us to obtain your credentials wirelessly anytime your vehicle passes over a manhole cover."

Who needs old fashioned tracking devices that have to be surreptitiously installed under a vehicle? You just gave them permission to track you full time.

Re:The Second Law of Thermodynamics isn't your fri

[holophrastic]

Many link me to those numbers. But they miss 90% of the cradle-to-grave. Think about before and after those measurements are taken. Think about repairing all of those lines after storms and damage.

We're not comparing grid-efficiency to fuel-efficiency. We're comparing grid-efficiency to nothing and fuel-efficiency to nothing. We'll then compare those final numbers.

The nice part about fuel like gasolene, is that the explosive force carries quite well into turning an axel. Most electric motors work through magnets. That's like working through a belt; there's a lot of slippage.

No, liquid fuel doesn't happen for free. Transport requires fuel. But that fuel is only spent while it's being transported. Liquid fuel sits still for reasonable periods of time at virtually 100% efficiency.

Look at electricity. See how business lights remain on at night. It's not for fun. It's not for safety. It's because if all lights turned on or off at the same time, the grid would choke. So in the end, lights stay on way longer than needed. That too is a big huge part of the waste. That's not in these numbers though. These numbers are purely end-to-end along the network. They don't take into account the accessorial needs of the network. Batteries lose charge just sitting still. Batteries lose electricity as they charge.

Liquid fuel can be transferred from tank to trunk to pump to car with effectively zero loss of fuel -- except for the few drops that you spilled onto the ground, and paid for anyway, all of the other transfer-loss simply gets gained again on the next use.

All I'm saying is that you need to look at it cradle-to-grave, end-to-end, start-to-finish. From a point where there is no electricity in existence to the point where your car moves that first micron. If you left your car in the garage overnight, it discharged 1%. There's your first 1%, and you haven't done anything yet. There's a small loss within the electric motor itself. There's a big loss when you charge the battery from the wall. Your wall has the 7% loss from the power plant that you mentioned. That 7% doesn't count the efforts to repair power lines when they break. Does it include charging the battery in the power plant? I doubt it, because most don't have any batteries. But that too will change. It'll need to change in order to support fleets of electric vehicles.

So for the electricity of the future to charge electric cars, we're in and out of batteries probably three times between the solar panel and the axel. That means six transfers. Then you have three transmissions -- to the plant, to the curb, to the garage. Then you have repair on all of those systems. See liquid fuel skips the garage step entirely, and the many curbs are replaced with the fewer pumps. So the number of transmissions drops precipitously.

Oh, I almost forgot. Yes electric heaters are near 100% to convert electricity into heat. But that doesn't mean it gets very hot very fast. Combustion, on the other hand, is the very definition of hot fast.

Re:The Second Law of Thermodynamics isn't your fri

[gmhowell]

My grandfather, now 92 years old, has been screaming at his condo building for two decades now. They have a pool, and a sauna. It's an electric sauna. Because it takes time to warm up, people turn it on, go for a quick swim, and come back to it 15 minutes later when it's hot. In the end, the electric sauna runs electric current through a resistor for an hour to heat up and stay hot for the people inside. It winds up being something rediculous like 10 kWh for a 1 hour sauna, where just a few drops of liquid fuel would easily achieve the same levels of heat, at a tiny fraction of the cost.

The energy loss across the electrical grid is staggering when you look at it from cradle to grave. It winds up being close to or over 40%, and it's absurd.

Since we're supposed to blame Edison, maybe we should also blame your grandfather for not punching him in the nose when he had a chance?