Universities, Gov't Testing Magnetic Resonance Charging For EVs In Transit (computerworld.com)

Lucas123 writes: At least two universities are testing the use of magnetic resonance and mobile receivers to charge electric vehicles while they're on roadways. Partially funded by a multi-million dollar DOE grant, Clemson University's International Center for Automotive Research has been testing stationary wireless vehicle charging and is now preparing to test mobile wireless recharging for vehicles.In the U.K., the government is expected to perform off-road trials of dynamic wireless charging that it acquired from researchers at North Carolina State University. The idea behind dynamic wireless charging is to create a series of embedded highway stations that can incrementally recharge EV carrying mobile receivers as the vehicles drive by. The vehicles would use a Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) technology to communicate with roadway chargers. DSRC can support both stationary wireless charging and in-motion wireless charging with the same system architecture. DSRC is already being used in crash avoidance systems and is expected to be required over the next five years, so the charging technology could piggyback on the DSRC modules already installed.

Comments

Lenz's law

[ClickOnThis]

You could make some really sweet invisible speed-bumps with this technology.

Re:Lenz's law

[postbigbang]

And for more fun, I see a bunch of coils on the bottom of my hybrid in my near future.

Re:Lenz's law

[Coren22]

Yeah, I can't imagine how they will "secure" this system from people "stealing" their magnetic waves.

Re:Lenz's law

[TechyImmigrant]

Yeah, I can't imagine how they will "secure" this system from people "stealing" their magnetic waves.

With a camera, the same way they collect revenue from drivers exceeding the speed limit.

Re:Lenz's law

[postbigbang]

There might be a mutual auth like RFID tags, or even Hall sensors. Where there's a will, there's a hacker way, although I like the idea of field charging from a logistics perspective. I wonder what snow and rain and road grime might do to it.....

Re:Lenz's law

[thesupraman]

with regard to the inmotion charging..

Not to mention the fact that you better not be carrying anything magnetizable or magnetically erasable while you drive anywhere near these things.
The power density would have to be astronomical - have this really got past back of the envelope analysis?

Even if you assume a vehicle is only using 15HP to maintain itself in steady state cruise, thats a little over 11kW.
Allow for inefficiency in the motors and storage/drive, call it 15kW steady state
Allow for losses in the transmission and reception of the energy over a decent airgap and with a moving target, you are probably looking well over 20kW.
Now, say the charging stations are 5 minutes drive apart, and you spend 30 second over their 'charge grids' (those will be some LONG grids..)
you will now need a power rate of around 200kW to be transfered continuously for 30 seconds to provide enough energy.

Could all the people willing to sit in close proximity to a 200kW field, at speed, for 10% of their driving time please raise their hands?

Even the idea of stationary contactless charging is just foolish - why not simply attach contacts and increase the safety/efficiency massively.

I smell pork, lots and lots of nice fat goverment funded pork. Facts never get in the way of pork..

Re:Lenz's law

[CCarrot]

There might be a mutual auth like RFID tags, or even Hall sensors.

Then I can see 'drafting' becoming more popular...along with the inevitable spike in rear-end collisions at highway speeds...

Re:Lenz's law

[doug141]

Yeah, I can't imagine how they will "secure" this system from people "stealing" their magnetic waves.

All they have to do is report your location to a patrol car.

Re:Lenz's law

[Coren22]

How does a camera show that you installed a coil in the bottom of your car (could be covered, doesn't have to be exposed) to steal power while you are driving on a road.

Re:Lenz's law

[Coren22]

How would they even be able to tell, you can modify your car to install the coils in the bottom, and they don't even have to be exposed where they can be seen. It would just be another draw on the system, just like all the other ones.

Someone else suggested some kind of authentication, but I don't see how that would work at highway speeds, if someone has an idea of that, I would love to hear it.

Re:Lenz's law

[TechyImmigrant]

With a current sensor in the road triggering the camera.

What an incredibly stupid idea...

[rgbatduke]

... even with mod points to burn I can't resist weighing in on this one. Some ideas are just too dumb for words. Just what sort of energy efficiencies do they think that they are going to manage? Who is going to pay for this "free" (incredibly inefficient) energy? Just how much power will they have to deliver to even break even on a moving vehicle, and how much power will their "transmitter" have to radiate in order for the car's pickup to be able to receive enough power?

Shades of Nikolai Tesla! Why not just put up megawatt Tesla coils ever fifty meters and leave them on all the time! This is an idea that was proven stupid 100 years ago.

But hey, the government has lots of (my) money. I'll just try to think of it as scientific welfare, sort of like climate science. Too bad they aren't spending it on something that isn't quite so obviously a boondoggle, though.

rgb

Re:What an incredibly stupid idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

B-b-but Tesla. Battery powered cars. Elon Musk. It has to be a great idea.

Re:What an incredibly stupid idea...

[sbaker]

It doesn't have to be stupid.

If the car negotiates with the emitters on the roadway via some carefully encrypted radio gizmo, then the road can turn the charging field on and off (and track the vehicle) as needed. The cost for this service can be deducted from your credit card in just the way that toll roads currently manage that.

If you think of this like a tollway charge, it makes more sense. Companies are prepared to undertake the huge capital cost of building tollways in return for a continual income stream from drivers over decades...maybe they'll want to do the same for these kinds of recharging stations...and the likely companies to do this will be the ones who sell electric vehicles.

Efficiencies come from being able to make EV's with MUCH smaller batteries - which makes them cheaper, safer, lighter and better for the environment (batteries have ikky heavy metals and such)...and because it opens up the use of electric power to people who need to make longer journeys - which would hasten the uptake rate for EV's. Instead of needing 200 to 300 miles of range, you only need enough to haul the car to the next charger. This improvement can only happen gradually - because initially you'll still need to cover 100 mile stretches between suitably equipped roads - but eventually, we'll see a big win here.

There is obviously an infrastructure cost here...it's hard to tell how big that would be because it all depends on how many of these things you need to embed in a mile of roadway in order to transfer enough power to drive a mile at whatever speeds...and it's too early to know how hard that is.

    -- Steve

Re:What an incredibly stupid idea...

[AmiMoJo]

EV owner here. Even if this worked with 100% reliability it would still be pointless. There are there types of charging that matter:

1. Home charging, which is 99%of what most people do.

2. Destination charging. Doesn't matter if it takes a few hours, you are parked doing shopping or watching a movie or whatever.

3. Rapid charging on motorways and main roads. For long distance trips only, and in the future few people will use them regularly because 300+ mile batteries will be the norm.

The shear cost of installing inductive charging and the basically non-issue of having to stop for 30 minutes and charge every 3-4 hours on occasional long trips make it useless.

Re:What an incredibly stupid idea...

[SuricouRaven]

It still runs into an engineering problem though, one that can't be escaped easily. EVs need a lot of power. If you can't maintain continuous connection (if the vehicle was stationary, you'd use a cable), that means you need to send several times that power. A posted above did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and came up with half a megawatt. At that sort of power level you'd need a sizable substation for your charger, some really expensive electrical gear, cables as thick as your arm to power the monstrosity... and that's for just one car at a time. There'd also be safety issues with the sort of high-frequency field you'd need - no matter what tricks you do with resonant coils, it's going to leak, and a field strong enough to transmit half a megawatt is going to pose a danger to anything electrical nearby. ECUs, the laptop on the back seat, pacemakers.

It's just too much power to transmit wirelessly. It's hard enough to charge your phone - the losses are quite bad even for that.

Re:What an incredibly stupid idea...

[SuricouRaven]

I can see only one possible niche: 2, but unobtrusive. Chargers are exposed and thus subject to vandalism, weathering and accidential damage. It might be cheaper to install an inductive charge system that sits under the road for ten years with an annual service than several conventional charging stations that need a call-out every couple of months because someone backed into one and smashed it. It also eliminates the issue of forgetting to hook up the charger.

Fun point: Every parking space in a lot could be fitted with a coil, but the charger is unlikely to be able to charge them all at once because doing so would melt the local power grid. Does the building administrator get to set rules for priority? 'Management cars take priority, charge underlings only when all managers are at full charge.'

Re:What an incredibly stupid idea...

[Rising Ape]

While it certainly seems unlikely to work, if it did then it would be useful to reduce the battery capacity needed on board the vehicle. Enough batteries for 300 miles of range doesn't come cheap, and is the main reason why EVs are niche vehicles for enthusiasts rather than the standard.

Re:What an incredibly stupid idea...

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Most of the answers to your questions will come from... wait for it.... testing, like the summary says they're doing.

Settle down, we're learning a lot more from their doing than from your whining.

Re:What an incredibly stupid idea...

[Ol Olsoc]

It's just too much power to transmit wirelessly. It's hard enough to charge your phone - the losses are quite bad even for that.

They are talking about 50 KW and 85 percent efficiency! That's nuts.I can't imagine anything near that in real life. But 50 KW a couple inches below my sorry butt is not a tempting thought. I'm seeing RFI problems, Magnetization and other induction issues in places they don't want it. I wonder about pacemakers or insulin pumps as well. I wonder if there will even be diamagnetic effects as well. I've got titanium in my ankles. Problem is, at thos power levels and those distances, weird stuff sometimes happens.

To get any sort of efficiency the charging AC is going to have to be pretty high in frequency as well. I'm smelling a lot of RFI.

I loves me my EV's, but this sounds like something right up there with Broadband over Power Line, and Smartphone service right by the GPS frequencies.

Re:What an incredibly stupid idea...

[Ol Olsoc]

While it certainly seems unlikely to work, if it did then it would be useful to reduce the battery capacity needed on board the vehicle. Enough batteries for 300 miles of range doesn't come cheap, and is the main reason why EVs are niche vehicles for enthusiasts rather than the standard.

So far. But improvements have been pretty steady. Not too many years ago, the idea of an EV at all was relegated to golf carts. I'm expecting in our lifetimes that petrofueled engines might become as anachronistic as hit and miss engines are today. Ot a specialty nich in their own right.

Re:What an incredibly stupid idea...

[Ol Olsoc]

Most of the answers to your questions will come from... wait for it.... testing, like the summary says they're doing.

Settle down, we're learning a lot more from their doing than from your whining.

Possibly. Most of the EV issues to date have been energy density and efficiency. My concerns are more of the laws of Physics variety. Maybe we'll have to make the cars out of Mu metal?

Re:What an incredibly stupid idea...

[Rising Ape]

Well, my life probably has about 45-50 years left, so possibly. But the current lot of EVs don't seem spectacularly better than the EV1 of the 90s. A bit better, yes, but rather less than I'd hope for nearly 20 years of development. And here's nothing obvious in line to replace the diesel engine there in big trucks or big ships, or the jet engine in aircraft. I think it's more likely than not that I'll die before the combustion engine does.

Re:What an incredibly stupid idea...

[Doppler00]

From my experience using several charge stations over the last year, I don't believe your concerns are that much of an issue. I haven't seen any charge stations vandalized in my area yet. If it did become a problem, I'm sure security cameras and law enforcement could deal with it.

As far as weathering, that should be a non-issue as charge stations are engineered to be outdoor rated (check out NEMA ratings).

What kind of "accidental damage"? Cars running into the charge station? I suppose this is a valid concern, but usually a bollards are installed in front of them.

Re:What an incredibly stupid idea...

[ThatsNotPudding]

Hush! It's been years since I've played F-Zero! Don't screw this up for me!

Re:What an incredibly stupid idea...

[rgbatduke]

it all depends on how many of these things you need to embed in a mile of roadway in order to transfer enough power to drive a mile at whatever speeds...and it's too early to know how hard that is.

Not so hard, if Fermi didn't live in vain. One gallon of gasoline contains around 32 kW-hours of energy. One car gets (on a good day, an efficient car) around 32 miles per gallon. One car therefore requires roughly one kW-hour of energy to go one mile. Unfortunately, that one car on a normal roadway drives that mile in roughly 100 seconds (all we care about is orders of magnitude, it might be somewhat less or a somewhat more in a city). There are 3600 seconds in an hour, so we require the power to be delivered at the rate of roughly 36 kW, continuously, in order to maintain the energy content of the car and restore one kW-hour of energy to the car in the time it drives a mile. However, it won't be continuous. If the coils are too close together, one will have a serious problem with mutual inductance and back voltage -- the neighboring coils will be working against one another. If we assume a reasonable geometry of 10% of the roadway occupied by the little puppies (that is, allowing for the coils to be actively charging your car 10% of the time as it drives, continuously), it increases the power requirements to be 360 kW.

Now, let's see. The average house uses around 2 kW in steady state (more or less in variable peaks). My neighborhood has around 180 houses. Each coil in the roadway has to be ready to deliver as much power as my entire neighborhood is using on average in order to deliver 1 kW-hour to the car in ten seconds of actual connection time while it is tooling down the road at 40 miles an hour. At the same time, there will be a car off to my side, a car behind me, two cars in front of me, all drawing power from whatever source at these phenomenal peak loads. Worst case scenario, the cars in the roadway line up spaced out in traffic by the ten meter spatial period of the 1 meter coils. Now we have (say) 100 cars all getting charged synchronously, pulling 36 megawatts peak power in a single kilometer of roadway. Multiply it out a bit because people want to think in miles instead of km, and your roadway has to be able to provide (for engineering robustness) roughly 50 MW per lane per mile. A four lane highway 5 miles long would require a GW power plant all by itself to be able to provide peak demand in resonance. And in case you think you can get away with smoothing it out (which is a silly assumption as cars naturally space out in ways that can create a resonance -- they are strictly antibunched compared to a poissonian, and the antibunching is just in the right range to tap whatever spacing you are likely to use) even if you divide that number by ten in order to try to get funding and be paid to investigate an absurdity, every fifty miles of a four lane highway (two each way) would require a GW, 2 GW if you plan to let cars drive at 70 mph, and that still won't have much of a margin, 4 GW per 100 miles.

There is a reason cars burn gasoline (or diesel, or peanut oil, or even ethanol). That reason is that the energy density of gasoline is enormous. A gallon weighs a bit less than 8 pounds and contains 33 kW-hours of energy. The best battery on Earth currently provides energy density of under 3 kW-hour in the same 8 pounds. The simple, hard truth is that gasoline is still about an order of magnitude ahead of our best, most expensive batteries in terms of energy density if not absolute volume. This provides electric cars with a host of reasons to lose any fair competition with them. In order to charge an electric car with the energy equivalent of a single gallon of gasoline, you have to deliver 33 kW-hours of energy. If I put a 5 kW solar system on my roof (at a cost on the order of $10,000) and devoted it to nothing but keeping an electric car charged, I would be able to get no better than the equivalen

Re:What an incredibly stupid idea...

[rgbatduke]

And you have the fundamental problem that solar cells are basically incapable of pushing an actual car with any surface area they are likely to be able to carry, let alone their own surface area. As I noted above, it costs roughly in 1 kW-hour to travel roughly 1 mile. That's kilowatt-HOUR, so even if your "car" were sitting on the top of the atmosphere and getting full sunlight at perihelion, its surface area at 100% efficiency wouldn't provide this much energy in anything like the amount of time you might like to drove that mile.

A 5 KW plant covering 10s of square meters on top of a house, running all day, on a good day can harvest the energy content of a single gallon of gasoline. Sure, efficiencies have to be factored in and can make a difference of a factor of 2 or 3 either way, but basically, unless you build a car with an enormous roof covered in ultralight solar cells, you're not powering a car on sunlight.

As I also pointed out above, there do exist electric "cars" (e.g. the ELF) that can run for a short commute on a daily basis on the sunlight they can harvest or very near that. But these cars are legally bicycles because they are light enough for a single person to pick up and have a top speed of maybe 20-25 mph without a pedal assist.

rgb

stationary inductive already exists.

[Noah Haders]

Not blown away by this. Stationary inductive charging already exists. it's not quite commercialized, but there are several demos going on including at Monterey-Salinas Transit and at Utah Transit. There's a company called WAVE out of Utah that is doing this. Their current system is 50 kW, but they say they're working on a 250 kW version (vaporware at this point).

In-motion inductive charging seems a bit more far fetched.

Re:stationary inductive already exists.

[bobbied]

I'm wondering why we are even considering this, it doesn't really help with anything...

All these clever ideas will never really allow us to do away with the two simple problems that an EV has, limited range followed by long recharge times. Once you got outside of the electrified roadway area, you have 100 miles before you stopped either charging or walking and nothing we do from a public infrastructure standpoint will fix that. EV's just don't yet work for a lot of folks, and putting all this time and money into crazy ideas for charging while driving isn't the answer.

Re:stationary inductive already exists.

[Noah Haders]

EV buses work work pretty well. The buses come back to the depot every night. they are large and can accomodate all the batteries you need to get 150+ miles a day. The depots are in industrial areas and usually already have a direct 480V line to the grid, so there are fewer roadblocks to installing 100kw chargers (or even greater).

it's not perfect, but it overcomes a lot of the logistical issues that are associated with EV cars and trucks.

Re:stationary inductive already exists.

[bobbied]

A battery powered BUS? Now that's just nuts. 150 miles in a day is all they can do? You better get more out of your bus fleet in a day than 150 miles per bus or you are wasting the resources. Looking at Chicago's bus routes, I can assure you 150 miles is just getting started for a bus, which is likely going to do two to three times that in 24 hours. You'd be better off using CNG powered vehicles which can be quickly fueled, or if you simply must go electric, use a bus/trolley system that uses overhead line for power when possible.

Personally I like the ideas behind parts of the transit system in Boston, specifically the connection from downtown to the airport. THAT is an idea that works really well if you ask me. For those of you who don't know, I'll try to explain how it works.

They have these busses which are both electric powered and diesel powered depending on where they are. For part of their route they run in tunnels which are for them alone, mostly around down town. For these parts of the system they are powered by overhead electric lines and they are emissions free. However because it was difficult and expensive to have the entire route electrified because they needed to share the road with the general public, there where parts of the route where the bus ran on diesel. There where other bus/trolley routes which where either all electric or split like this route, and of course a light rail passenger link.

Generally I don't support light rail systems for mass transit. They are expensive, inflexible and soak up cash. Bus based systems are much better, they are generally cheap, flexible and you can control your operating costs. And I like the approach in Boston, where they use multi-mode buses to extend their light rail's reach economically. It's flexible, low cost, easily expanded and it works fairly well.

Re:stationary inductive already exists.

[Ol Olsoc]

Not blown away by this. Stationary inductive charging already exists. it's not quite commercialized, but there are several demos going on including at Monterey-Salinas Transit and at Utah Transit. There's a company called WAVE out of Utah that is doing this. Their current system is 50 kW, but they say they're working on a 250 kW version (vaporware at this point).

In-motion inductive charging seems a bit more far fetched.

Stationary is a cakewalk by comparison. There are going to be all manner of inductive effects from a lot of cars moving over the charging inductors sorta kinda at random, but not quite always.

Re:stationary inductive already exists.

[Ol Olsoc]

I'm wondering why we are even considering this, it doesn't really help with anything...

All these clever ideas will never really allow us to do away with the two simple problems that an EV has, limited range followed by long recharge times. /p>

2002 called. They want you to get your mind out of their time.

If we were still in the golf cart era, and the laws of physicis made it impossible to have anything other than a lead acid battery, I'd agree with you 100 percent, that EV's will never work.

But what is your metric? That an EV never has to charge? The times are a-changin' mutate, and all it takes now is infrastructure.

And considering the immense, massive infrastructure that has been built for our petrofueld cars, it will be easier to build one to offer charging ports.

Perhaps much easier than drilling, building and operating pipelines,rail cars and tankers to deliver the fuel.

Re:stationary inductive already exists.

[Noah Haders]

A battery powered BUS? Now that's just nuts. 150 miles in a day is all they can do? You better get more out of your bus fleet in a day than 150 miles per bus or you are wasting the resources. Looking at Chicago's bus routes, I can assure you 150 miles is just getting started for a bus, which is likely going to do two to three times that in 24 hours. You'd be better off using CNG powered vehicles which can be quickly fueled, or if you simply must go electric, use a bus/trolley system that uses overhead line for power when possible.

dude, you don't know anything. there's a variety of electric bus configurations that will meet the needs of many or most of the routes in many transit agencies. You don't need to go 100% battery bus overnight, but a transit agency could introduce electric buses into their fleets and use them for a significant portion of their routes.

Re:stationary inductive already exists.

[Hamsterdan]

I've always wondered why they insist on going EV instead of hybrid for transit busses. A bus is the perfect use for an hybrid.

Re:stationary inductive already exists.

[necro81]

One important difference between stationary and in-motion inductive charging is that, well, the car is in motion. This means that every metal component in the vehicle will be passing through a magnetic field (unless they figure how to switch the field on and off only when the receiver is directly over the emitter, and doesn't have much flux leakage). A changing magnetic field in metal creates eddy currents that oppose the change in the field (Lenz's law), which is usually a repulsive effect. This is the basis of an AC induction motor (no permanent magnets involved - just induction). It can also be used as a non-contact braking mechanism (it is used to bleed speed from roller coasters, for instance). Should be great for vehicles!

Re:stationary inductive already exists.

[Plugless Steve]

Disclosure, I work for Plugless, the world's first wireless EV charger for sale to EV drivers. I'll keep it quick. We began trials in 2011 at Google, Hertz, UC Davis, SAP and other partners across the country. We began selling our 3.3kW charger to LEAF and Volt owners in early 2014 and later than year to ELR owners. Our 6.6kW Plugless systems for Tesla S and BMW i3 are months away. The stats that this thread seem most interested in - we're ~7% less efficient than level 1 (standard plug) charging and ~12% less efficient than Level 2 (240v, 30A) corded chargers. You should not believe me. You should believe Idaho National Laboratories which conducted more than 8,700 separate tests on Plugless - our data is comparing our efficiency on those tests versus the countless tests they have done on corded chargers. http://avt.inl.gov/evse.shtml - note: we are the only WEVC system with published 3rd-party data (a requirement of INL...and it was important to us too). It should also be noted we have been on the Clemson team (we are Evatran, makers of Plugless).

Re:stationary inductive already exists.

[Noah Haders]

parallel hybrids (similar to a prius configuration, both diesel/cng engine and electric motor) have been around for years. They have proven to have marginally improved fuel economy. The real-world difference ends up being very small. One company is coming out with a series hybrid where the wheels are powered by an electric drivetrain and a separate small diesel/cng generator provides additional electricity. This either new on the market or near commercialization, although it will be interesting if the company is truly committed to it.

honestly, battery buses are only a little more expensive than CNG or hybrid buses, and they meet many routes just fine. you just don't use them on routes where it doesn't work.

Re:stationary inductive already exists.

[bobbied]

So.... You are claiming that "EVENTUALLY" EVs will be viable.... Maybe so...

However, they are not viable for a lot of folks now. Anybody who commutes more than 100 miles in a day like me doesn't have a viable option in the Electric Vehicle market. There are a significant percentage of people who fall into this category. EV's will need to double their range to be viable for me and in large metropolitan areas it seems likely that a significant number of commuters will still have range issues. Feel free to call me when we can reliably get 200 miles out of a single 8 hour charge from the 115V 15A receptacle in my garage.

The infrastructure doesn't yet exist for EV's in most areas and development will be slow.. Infrastructure won't be built until EV's exist to use it and EV's won't be practical until the infrastructure is there. This is similar to the infrastructure we've build up around gasoline, where gas stations and the distribution infrastructure didn't exist until the automobile came into common use, and automobile use didn't really take off until the infrastructure existed. For EV's the distribution infrastructure exists, but the recharging stations are *still* not getting developed. Why? Because EV's take hours to fully charge in the best case when attached to high rate chargers, and can take more than half a day to recharge when using 115V 15A sources. Literally you spend nearly HALF of your travel time hooked up to a charger on long trips. So that "over the river and through the woods" trip to grandma's doesn't work out so well. Nobody really wants to make that 8 hour trip into 16 hours.

So you want to do things like quick change batteries and "in motion" charging to deal with this. Neither are solutions which work now and both solutions have even more infrastructure problems than just wiring up charging stations every 50 miles. Replacing batteries requires some kind of standard battery format used by enough vehicles to make this work. EV battery packs are pretty darned expensive things (in the tens of thousands of dollars at least) and unless there are enough of them out there to be assured of having a fully charged battery ready when some vehicle shows up for a swap, being able to quickly change packs doesn't help anybody. You will need one or two batteries on the shelf, and that's a boat load of inventory cost, the equipment to charge them sans the car plus the equipment necessary to do the swap. This is sounding pretty expensive for that back woods gas station operator trying to make a living off of selling overpriced gas to the few cars willing to jump off the road to fill up or use the bathroom.

So, it's going to be awhile for your dreams to happen. IMHO - I'm just guessing that something else will come along before then, but Call me when you think EV's are viable replacements for fossil fueled transportation.

Re:stationary inductive already exists.

[bobbied]

I think you overestimate the utility of a bus that only goes 150 miles and then needs to sit to refuel for a couple of hours.

If you want to go electric powered, do what Boston does... Put up overhead power wires and run buses that can pinch hit by running on fossil fuels when they need to go outside the electrified areas, and leave the heavy battery packs off the bus.

Re:stationary inductive already exists.

[rgbatduke]

Yeah, sort of like driving a pot over an inductive cookrange! You won't need to worry about keeping warm in the winter...

Re:stationary inductive already exists.

[Ol Olsoc]

So.... You are claiming that "EVENTUALLY" EVs will be viable.... Maybe so...

However, they are not viable for a lot of folks now.

Do you actually have a point? Exactly which vehicle is viable for 100 percent of people?

I have a motorcycle. It is not viable for a lot of people/ So in your view, should motorcycles not be available?

I have a 4WD Jeep. It's awesome off road, but you might not want to take it across country on the interstate. So not viable for everyone - Let's call them and rtell them they aren't allowed to sell them any more, becausee they aren' viable for everyone.

I have an RV so lets - oh hell, you know.

The argument of universal viability or even majority viability means absolutely nothing.

But all that aside, I'm pretty certain that EV's will bercome more and more popular, as range increases, and infrastructure improves.

My answers to all of your questions is that there is not one single technological impediment to having charging ports in any parking lot with lights, or parking meters. If you dispute that, take it up with Alaska, If you dispute that apps can be used to pay for charging in parking lots, take that up with the folks who have payment systems in place for parking already. No technological impdiments, hell, it's even simple.

It will be a lot easier to buid this Infrastructure than the mess we have for shuttleing petrofuel around at present.

Re:Question I haven't seen yet

[sbaker]

Perhaps the receiver coil (or whatever it is) can dynamically adjust it's height to maintain an appropriate distance above the transmitter. Assuming the car and the transmitter talk to each other, this would be fairly do-able.

Re:Don't we know how to do this now?

[rtb61]

The whole idea makes no sense at all. Where there is money to be made a solution will be found. Quite simply expect a range of companies to do exactly what major vending machine companies do. Basically install vending machines at numerous locations and give the owners of those locations a percentage of the profits. So car charging vending machines at every location where cars regularly park. Even parking zones in the central business districts can be done. Instead of paying for a park, you buy electricity from that parking zone, spend enough and free parking, don't spend enough pay for you park. So you have an induction zone built into every car park, and when parked and you authorise the transfer of electricity, the vehicle's induction unit drops down and starts picking up charge. Every business can also start to recover income from their investment in car parks, from staff and customers. The inductions units will be cheaper than the cost of attempting to identify vehicle and owner and the cost of billing in order to recover money from the energy supplied. You can also build a similar system into residential garages (without the billing). So in metropolitan areas, pretty much every time you park you can pick up a charge.

Worthless nonsense

[WaffleMonster]

Surprise! More worthless impractical use cases to justify forcing DSRC surveillance on everyone.

Re:Getting real close...

[Electricity Likes Me]

"a power transfer rate of 6.9 kilowatts" is absolutely meaningless. Rates involve Time. 6.9 Kilowatts per _what_ exactly?

You might want to look up the definition of a kilowatt.

zzzt

[sociocapitalist]

For those of you attacking the technical viability of this, I suggest that reality is beside the point.

The summary already has the real reason:
"Partially funded by a multi-million dollar DOE grant"

Re:zzzt

[rgbatduke]

Precisely. This is just WPA for scientists, if this is the claimed target of the research.

rgb

Re:Don't we know how to do this now?

[bobbied]

Great, but it still doesn't fix the EV's problem of limited range and long recharge times for me. I commute more than 100 miles a day and don't frequent places which are likely going to be configured with the infrastructure anytime soon.

So feel free to dream about how all this will be done someday. Call me when it is, but until then, I don't have much choice but to drive my fossil fueled Honda Accord...

Re:Linear motors?

[rgbatduke]

Sorry, blew my mod points commenting myself or I'd mod you up, AC! There are probably more than two alternatives, though. For instance, just building better batteries, growing GMO biodiesel, perfecting fusion and just using plug chargers or stationary induction chargers once the grid is so ridiculously power rich that we can afford to drop 50+ kW power points all over the place.

Re:Don't we know how to do this now?

[rtb61]

Which is of course exactly why, choice will be eventually removed.