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.

Comments

Congratulations

[Bloke down the pub]

Congratulations. You have invented the train.

Re:Congratulations

[M8e]

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.

Re:Congratulations

[AndrewBuck]

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.

In addition to this you could do regenerative breaking on these same stretches of tracks to feed power back into the grid when slowing down. Many locomotives already use electrical generators in the wheels (basically just using the motors as generators) as this avoids wear on the wheels and brakes by avoiding the older mechanical brakes. However on long down grades they still have to use the mechanical brakes since they have no way to get rid of the excess energy; the electrical generator brakes just heat up an onboard tank of water which can only take so much heating before they have to fall back to the mechanical brakes.

So basically all of the things you need to do a hybrid system like this are already onboard a modern locomotive, the only thing missing is the wires above the tracks and the thing on top of the locomotive to connect to them. The thing on top would be a very small cost to add, the wires would be a lot more expensive per mile, however you can choose which sections of rail to electrify since you are going for a hybrid approach which lets you only electrify the most beneficial parts of the rail network.

Overall I think it is a very good idea and I am surprised I have not seen it implemented or at least discussed. Maybe I am missing something but it seems like it would work well. I guess the main issue would be the large power surge to the grid from regenerative braking and the huge temporary draw when getting up to speed but it seems like this would be addressable without too much difficulty.

Re:Congratulations

[Mashiki]

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.

Re:Congratulations

[rasmusbr]

Congratulations. You have invented the train.

Yeah. Why reinvent something that works? It seems like it might be good way to power large trucks. A good use case would be a road between a mine and a port. Roads are a lot cheaper to build than railways and can be built more rapidly.

The other obvious way of building an electric road is to put conductors in the road itself. This could work for regular cars as well as trucks and buses. These people are working on that: http://elways.se/?lang=en

Re:Congratulations

[vtcodger]

"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."

I could be wrong, but I believe that Amtrak, LIRR, MetroRail do that for traffic in and out of NYC using diesel where electricity isn't available and switching to electric under Manhattan. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Congratulations

[rasmusbr]

Congratulations. You have invented the train.

What I find really interesting is not the linked article itself, but the one right below it on Scania's new inductively-charged bus.If we can inductively supply power to buses, why can't we supply power to trains in the same way, even if just for urban light rail? Getting rid of the pantographs and that nineteenth-century tangle of overhead wires would make mass transit cheaper and more esthetically acceptable.

The cost per km of track would be prohibitively high. It's cheaper to just use conductive propulsion with a third rail divided into isolated sections that power up when a rail vehicle passes over them.

Google "catenary free tram" for examples.

Re:Great news for a fossil fuel free Sweden...

[thesupraman]

Actually, no they are not, you are forgetting about a few factors including:
transmission losses
infrastructure loads required to delivery that much power to a significant percentage of the roading system
infrastructure loads required to add enough generation capacity to power the additional power draw

I refer to infrastructure loads here specifically because too often people hide behind infrastructure 'costs', but the cost is not pixie dust, it is much much more than that, it is its own mountain of pollution, waste, environmental damage, financial hurt, and bureaucracy that any such transformational change requires - your gains have to exceed that before you even gain anything.

I also wonder why you think the cost of wind generation is dropping - it is not as if building large structures is magically getting cheaper, and generators have been a well known science running at close to maximum efficiency for a long, long time. Base costs of wind generation stabilized quite a lot time ago.
Direct solar electric is dropping due to both efficiency gains and manufacturing scaling, but it needs to, it is still quite high.

If you want any significant growth in electric transportation, the ONLY viable power source is nuclear - is that a pill you are willing to swallow?
I am , but I seem to be in a very clear minority on that.

Sorry to shoot down your rainbow unicorns, but the real world needs real solutions, not simplistic hand waving magic solutions.

Re:Great news for a fossil fuel free Sweden...

[Mashiki]

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.

Re:Great news for a fossil fuel free Sweden...

[angel'o'sphere]

Actually, no they are not, you are forgetting about a few factors including:
transmission losses
Transmission losses are neglectible. Every advanced nation has an electric grid for its trains, except ....... the USA. I suggest to read up on transmission losses, DC versus AC and voltage versus amperes to get a clue how power transportation works.

If you want any significant growth in electric transportation, the ONLY viable power source is nuclear - is that a pill you are willing to swallow?

Wind and solar are cheaper ... so your argument is moot.

I also wonder why you think the cost of wind generation is dropping
Because it is?