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Sweden Tests World's First Electric Road For Trucks (inhabitat.com)
Kristine Lofgren writes: Electric vehicles are cool, but for industrial vehicles it can be a challenge to get very far on just electric power. That's why Sweden is testing out an electric road where e-vehicles can jump on, get juiced while they travel, and get back on the road. The country just opened a two kilometer test stretch in Sandviken on the E16 where electric vehicles can connect to an overhead system that is very similar to light rail. It's another exciting step towards a fossil fuel-free Sweden. Trucks can use the electric power while riding on the special electric road system -- on regular roads they operate as hybrid vehicles. The testing is scheduled to take place until 2018, which should give the country enough time to see how the technology functions in the real world. Sweden's energy and sustainable growth agencies will fund the project in addition to the transport administration.
Trains need rails. This is just a trolleybus(or trolleytruck)/battery hybrid.
It's just like a plug-in hybrid, but instead of having to stop and plug into a socket these trucks can just drive through these special stretches of road.
You get about 1 minute of "fast-charge" per mile.
Actually I have been wondering for a long time why trains don't do exactly what these trucks are doing. Many (most?) trains now (at least around here in the US) are deisel-electric with a deisel engine running an on-board generator to make electricity for the wheels. If you had retractable electrical things on the top of the engine to connect to overhead wires you could use grid electricity for the steep grades and other fuel demanding portions of the trip (like the first couple miles out of major rail yards where you are still getting up to speed) and then spin up the diesel as you get into the long stretches of mainline where you only need to overcome air and rolling resistance which are both minimal for a train.
It's more expensive then the current system and there's no incentive to do so because of other issues. You're talking about laying thousands of miles of electric lines and in some cases you then run into issues requiring environmental impact studies, complaints from NIMBY's and so on. This has actually been tested in the past and was found infeasible. On top of that most diesel engines in use today are DC output only, and unless you're then dumping more equipment onto the engine to make a conversion from DC to AC it becomes another problem. You'll see those odd cases where they bring in train engines to provide power somewhere right? They'll hook them up to a convertor before hooking them into the grid and those suckers aren't small, some of them are the size of a boxcar and pulling one of those along just to dump energy back in is a waste when it can be used for cargo. And you'll want them on the train don't think otherwise. Otherwise you have potentially hundreds of points of failure where these live lines could suddenly be dumping DC power onto an AC grid or the other way around. Then there's the problem of getting the utilities and governments on board with something like this.
As well, the cost for hauling by train is dirt cheap. So dirt cheap that no one really cares to do something like this.
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Unless wind/solar/etc work when it's cloudy or windy like in other parts of the world nearly all the time it'll never replace other sources like hydro-electric or nuclear. And unless the cost is pennies people won't like their electric rates going through the roof like what we've seen in other countries or here in Canada either. Ontario has had a big push for green energy and as of today at peak you're paying just a bit above $0.17kWh for electricity for your home and double that for industrial uses. It's around $0.07kWh at peak just across the border in Michigan and half that for industrial rates. When nuclear costs under $0.05kWh to sell, when hydro-electric is $0.025, when coal and NG are $0.01-0.068kWh those green sources have to come a long way still.
And that's because in Ontario they decided to pay $0.80kWh for various forms of green energy. On the upside, it hasn't gotten as bad as Germany when it hit $0.43kWh for home use. Cheap energy is one of the greatest equalizers of civilization and one of the best providers in increasing the standards of living across the globe. Drive the price up too high and you see what happened in the UK a few years ago with the elderly on pensions dying because they froze to death during the winter.
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