Heavy vehicles like semi trucks pose a bigger challenge in electrifying the transportation fleet than smaller, more aerodynamic passenger cars. Michigan now has the first public in-road charging system in the United States to help alleviate this concern. [via Electrek]
Electreon, a company already active in Europe, won the contract to provide for the inductive coil-based charging system at the new Michigan Central Station research campus. Initial runs will be with a Ford E-Transit for testing, but there are plans to actually allow public use along the one mile (1.6 km) route in the near future.
Vehicles using the system need a special receiver, so we hope we’ll be seeing an open standard develop instead of having to have a different receiver for each road you drive on. This seems like it would be a more onerous swap than having to have three different toll road transponders. Unfortunately, the page about wireless standards on the Electreon website currently 404s, but CharIN, the standards body behind the Combined Charging Standard (CCS) did just launch a task force for wireless power delivery in September.
If you’re curious about other efforts at on-road charging, check out this slot car system in Sweden or another using pantographs.
I don’t understand how a complicated system that’s less efficient is better than plugging in or swapping batteries?
Dave “EEVBlog” Jones did a video about this. The reality is a lot less impressive than the sales pitch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sisD61ohzK0
I can’t say I’ve watched the video you linked, so consider what I say in light of that fact.
Any charging system that operates while a vehicle is in motion isn’t likely to give out much power to that vehicle at any point in time. That being said, even regenerative braking doesn’t return much power to a vehicle overall, given how much power it takes to move an EV – but over time, those savings do add up, regardless.
To that end, a wireless charging infrastructure built into roads can help increase that power savings. While no one is going to charge their vehicle by any significant amount of percentage points on a device like this, it’ll help reduce the overall battery usage in any given day of driving, much like the aforementioned regenerative braking does now.
The installation cost and maintenance costs will be huge. Much better to use that money to maintain the existing infrastructure like the roads and bridges themselves instead of boondoggles like this.
Not to mention the inefficiency in a grid that already cannot take the strain
This. Or invest in train infrastructure. We already have a infrastructure to get things around with electric power…
Regenerative braking only gives you back the energy you used to stop… which you then use up when you go again. Since most of the time you’re moving at a fixed speed (fighting drag and friction), the gains are marginal. But it’s better than regularly dumping all your momentum as heat.
Wireless infrastructure in roads is a ridiculous idea – roads are difficult enough to build and maintain as it is without ripping them up to shove this in, and inductive power transfer is woefully inefficient. The pantograph proposal is the most sensible of the lot, to my mind. And it’s not about charging, it’s about powering a vehicle on a primary route so the battery is saved for when they’re on roads that aren’t equipped.
Indeed, pantographs are a well proven technology really. Though how bad the wear would be with shear volume of traffic on those routes has yet to be determined, and the potential for human error or poor maintenance to break a section is much higher than with the tram/railways of the world.
But trying to charge wirelessly over such a long distance (both in ground clearance and road length terms) has to be horribly inefficient – maybe it makes sense in the floors of a robot forklift type warehouse, a highly controlled and relatively small environment where overhead power doesn’t make sense.
I see your Pro Big Pantograph, but yes quite an interesting solution. Now this many years later they even tension the lines for no sag. And when behind a Streetcar the other day they Zig Zag the line as it travels so no one part wears unevenly.
@pelrun said: “Wireless infrastructure in roads is a ridiculous idea – ”
Exactly. There is no legitimate engineering involved. Given the state of technology today, wireless roads are the false fulfillment of a politically driven “GREEN” religeous cult-wish.
It looks to me like the system is intentionally small to cover vehicles with a small fixed route to their use case. It probably makes sense for something like a shuttle system where you know where all the stops are and can make sure charging happens there.
Sure. Except this isn’t power “saving” in any respect.
Equating venting power to atmosphere this way with regenerative breaking, which saves break wear *and* charges the battery, is more than a little disingenuous.
My money would be on it stressing the car’s electrical system as well as the electronics with all that bleed, too.
I love this comment “Wait, they’re going to be putting large amounts of copper wire in the roads, in Detroit? I see no way that could go wrong…”
Sounds like a perfect match for a solar roadway.
Solar roads are absolute bunkum.
You’re better off tunneling roadways and creating sprawling greenspaces if your goal is combating carbon/global warming.
If your goal is to generate electricity it would be better to use covered farming techniques that have a low light crop like lettuces or cabbages. The cover protects the soil and moisture, generates electricity and the crops put a small amount of carbon back into the soil.
The 20th century was selling bridges to fools, in the 21st they sell solar roadways.
Sorry. Poe’s law strikes again.
This is pretty much up there with solar roadways. Efficiency is going to suck. Also small metal bits that land on the road will get heated up due to induction heating. This could pose a nasty hazard to tires.
Not a practical solution especially in Michigan the pothole is their state mascot.
Oh this is way worse than Solar roads, as those at least make sense on paper in the idealised world – lots of land area that is usually exposed to sun, lets make use of all that energy hitting a surface we have already covered – isn’t actually a bad idea in theory. Even making terrible assumptions about just how much of the sunlight you will capture there are lots of roads so even something paltry like 0.5% efficiency in sunlight to electric is going to add up to alot of energy. Its the execution that is very tricky along with the introduction to the real world, as cars want grippy surfaces, solar panels don’t take kindly to force applied on them or work well with dirt coatings etc… But one day that concept might actually be very feasible, cheap enough panels that reduced efficiency for a bit of dirt covering them isn’t a big deal, and better methods of actually creating the roadway so it has grip, drains properly and isn’t a maintenance hog. One day it might just make sense (but solar panel would have to become much cheaper – which they probably will in 50-100 years time as all the current panels are ageing out enough creating a massive surplus of largely prerefined raw materials to recycle).
But this wireless system even in the most idealised world can’t be very efficient at all. Road vehicles need ground clearance and that gap is going to be terrible for charging efficiency no matter how you fiddle the modelling to ignore potentially inconvenient truth an air gap is never good for efficiency. Then you are putting the coils you are energising all the way to the end of who knows how many miles to energise the whole route, so transmission losses are probably going to be pretty poor (I suppose in theory its possible you could match or even exceed the grid transmission efficiency, even become part of the grid backbone – and in fairness you probably need to get close to that efficiency or you will melt the road surface.). Also have to ask just how much drag on the vehicles does this magnetic field produce – are you actually putting more energy back into the battery than the induction braking and extra friction the magnet downforce creates demands? If you are trying to power a fibreglass vehicle I’d say its almost certainly going to be a yes, but a large steel or even Aluminium box I really don’t know, and its very hard to make a real guess without some more details on how this system is supposed to work.
Solar roads are possible, all the problems you list are solved by putting them above the road instead, and that even gets you a few extra benefits.
There’s a road in Korea that has a bicycle lane down the middle, and they put the panels above it.
Even easier is putting the solar panels above parking lots.
I think they’re more similar, except that there’s at least an advantage to the concept of charging while driving because it could let you drive further. There’s no theoretical way that a solar panel works better than default if you put it in your road surface unless you have nowhere else to put them and couldn’t just put them above the road on signposts or whatever.
>There’s no theoretical way that a solar panel works better than default if you put it in your road surface unless you have nowhere else to put them
But that is precisely the point a “Solar Road” might make sense spaceminions, you can’t cover every square inch of land in construction or flatten every area to see the sky – need some natural space and agriculture. But you also need roads to ship everything around on (or at least do the last miles from the railway/ship etc). Making that otherwise useless surface you have to create and maintain anyway more useful could at least in theory make sense in the future with better methods and the excess of solar panel production with nowhere better to go.
This wireless charging on the other hand is just by its very nature a more inefficient way to power the EV, which really doesn’t make sense (at least for general deployment). And also a solution looking for a reason to exist – Pantograph and third rail type systems have been proven time and time again, are really quite efficient, at least in railway contexts last quite well – there is no need to try and reinvent a way to power a vehicle from the grid again (yet anyway – maybe pantograph will prove too tricky to maintain, or dangerous in the inevitable road traffic accidents or something similar – really the only reason I can think of they are not the go to solution for all these trials is that overhead wire is a party line, everyone will be on it so who’s paying for it?!?!)
>you can’t cover every square inch of land in construction or flatten every area to see the sky
Globally, I just can’t see us either needing that much solar or successfully covering so much of the earth’s surface in panels that putting them in the roads would be the best place left. But also, assuming we first tried putting them to the sides and at least partially overhanging the road there’s even less incentive to try and put them inside it where they just get dirty and then broken. I’d rather all our roads be not full of potholes and cracks and bumps and spots that puddle than to have a few that give a slight amount of power for a couple years. Surely the better the road, the less energy wasted on driving on it and replacing worn car parts anyway.
I remember from pear 56 “How many potholes are in Ohio”, was like… more than a million, in the 80s. Not Michigan, but a neighbor :)
If only solar roadways, Electreon and *think hard* hyperdupe^H^H^H^Hloop could have a baby. Taking the worst features of each and mashing them together, where the whole is so much worse than the individual broken parts.
Now, if only we could think of a perfect frontman to sell it…..
Most of rural Michigan has large drainage ditches on either side of the road. That wasted space is precisely where the solar panels belong. It’s also conveniently next to the power lines ready to be grid tied.
Are the panels submergable? Seems like a great place to test a short.
political boon doogle… the efficiency is horrible and Michigan weather will destroy the installation
Why use a single efficient stationary charger when a thousand inefficient ones build into the road can do the job of one for only 10000 times the cost? Some projects are just doomed to fail before they even reach the back of the envelope stage. Chargers build into the road only make sense in parking lots, or maybe in front of traffic lights. There are many ways to charge electric cars: stationary wired charger, stationary wireless charger (I’ve seen concepts with rotating permanent magnets for efficient coupling), a power rail with a trolleybus style current collector, swapping batteries, swapping electrolytes, thin solar panels in roof of car(won’t fully charge the car, but will extend the range), hybrid electric car(self charging car), etc. All these have upsides and downsides, but generally the most simple ones are more reliable and more cost effective and therefore better.
+1 to traffic light charging. The guys who normally offer to clean your windscreen could give you a quick battery top up instead by hacking a cable into the lights themselves.
Better idea: do away with stopping at (most) traffic lights.
Instead of spending the engineering effort in building chargers for cars that stop, invest in designing systems that minimize stopping.
Imagine a road system that monitors where all cars are, and how fast they are going, and a device in every vehicle to tell the driver where and how fast to drive to avoid stopping at intersections! Vehicles who do not opt in are penalized just by hitting stop lights.
Geez. We already have the the technology, in spades. Waze / Google can do this in a heartbeat.
Why hasn’t this been a thing for a decade already?
No thanks.
I prefer to imagine a world where the government monitors us less, not more;)
Oh, that horse has already left the Pandora’s box, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphors.
Google and Waze *already* have most of the information needed, all we need is a phone app that gives route and speed suggestions. Follow the suggestions and you will minimize red lights and transit time. Ignore them and you’ll waste your time stopping at lights.
Sounds Orwellian to me….
As for the under street charging… Another not so good idea. You want to power from the roadway, run street cars on a track….
“We already have the the technology, in spades.”
What the heck are you talking about? Google Maps/Waze/etc. work on *average* data and they’re usually delayed by a fair amount. If you haven’t gotten bit by Google telling you to take a route that is in the process of becoming a dead stop due to an accident but hasn’t gotten there yet, you’re luckier than I am.
Tracking *every single car* and integrating that data would be a ludicrously difficult undertaking and would barely help at all* Even if you know where all the cars currently are, you don’t know *where they’re going*. And the idea that you can just slightly alter speeds and suddenly all the traffic meshes is just crazy. It’s a fluid flow problem. It doesn’t work.
It’s got a better chance of success than this ‘charging from coils in the road’ thing.
You really need self driving cars to properly achieve that. Regular human drivers are too erratic and short sighted.
Many people would prefer to drive fast and stop at the reef light rather than drive at the speed limit (or, heaven forbid, any slower) to avoid the red…
We already have those types of traffic lights in the Netherlands. They are synced up so you should hit a wave of green lights. The problem is that they can be very tightly adjusted so when you are slightly speeding or behind a slow driver you miss out on the green wave. Roundabouts are a better idea if they are kept simple. But somehow some engineers design 4-lane roundabouts with trams crossing in the center and with multiple traffic lights and wonder why there are so many accidents.
Now all they need to do to make this work is harvest over unity energy or figure out cold fusion.
What a load of crap.
I really hope this idea goes away forever, it’s just a ludicrously inefficient scam.
The money would be far better invested in actual grid infrastructure and charging stations, that would be way more energy efficient.
But if they really want an efficient ‘charging on the move’ solution, then I suggest they google Scalextric for ideas…
This is a SCAM. Its only positive aspect is to debunk itself so others don’t fall for this.
Gotta get a taste of that sweet, sweet, research grant!
The problem is you know it is a scam, I know it is a scam, most of the readers here do as well.
But your average Joe/Jane on the street, who know how to use stuff but, have absolutely no idea how most stuff actually works, they will think this is a totally brilliant idea. And the vast majority of politicians around the world, have through funding cuts lost access to in house experts, and rely on information provided by lobbyists (They are able to give me political contributions, so therefore they must know what they are talking about).
Worse than that, every single politician pushing this stuff are cretinous blobs who aren’t even capable of understanding the basics of how this technology works. All they know is that pushing for these taxpayer-funded scams gets them votes from those who are accurately, and unfortunately described as “useful idiots”. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Those good intentions are bankrupting us all.
I’m hoping that’s why they agreed to install this section of test track, to get the numbers to back it all up. To finally be able to say to everyone who keeps thinking it’s a good idea: “stop trying to make wireless road charging happen. It’s never going to happen.”
I live in Michigan about 30 miles north. We’ll have to wait and see what happens when the ground goes through it’s massive thaw and freeze cycle. Michigan has 2 seasons – Winter and road construction.
The author of this piece should be ashamed of themselves.
What’s the efficiency of this? Inductive coupling sounds like a good way to brown an otherwise greenish technology.
Same deals as you phone; okay if it all lines up, not so okay when it doesn’t. Someone in the EEVBlog video comments gives some numbers.
TEVs or Transfer Emission Vehicles are a junk technology. These type of systems cost more than any return on the quality of the environment. How many tons of CO2 is emitted in building this anyway?
I wonder if this could be made somewhat more practical if it A) had triggering systems so it wasn’t keeping the inductor energized at all times, and B) was designed specifically to work with hub motors. Hub motors aren’t great due to unsprung weight, but they’d be close to the surface and could pull the power directly, rather than trying to run it into a charging system. If they made hub-motored tractor-trailers, I could see putting this on uphill grades to reduce the significant losses incurred in the vehicle.
1. It would have to come with a trigger to start with – too dangerous to leave these on without a load on them.
2. You can’t collect power with the motor. There will have to be a collection loop under the car – the closer the better to say good bye to your ground clearance and a hefty repair bill at every pothole.
3. There are going to be serious EMF interference issues with existing and future electronics (including medical devices) at the power levels these would need to output.
Michigan state government is so incompetent they can’t take care of normal roads. One of the slogans of the current regime was “fix the damn roads” and the quality of the roads has decreased significantly since then, despite the number of construction projects apparently skyrocketing. There are highways in the detroit area that were re-done less than 4 years ago which are already seeing catastrophic failure from freezing, and this is not uncommon throughout the state, seeming to indicate that the quality of the work done has also decreased considerably under the current regime.
The *real* question here is just how long it will take this taxpayer-funded green project to go belly up like they all inevitably do? I’d put my money on “right after the next election”. The ruling class are a bunch of village idiots.
Why not combine this with solar frickin roadways?
I mean, if we’re going to waste public money on stupid projects that you can understand don’t work well just by doing the math – the numbers *never* get better when you do a real world installation.
That part is to see *how much worse* they’ll get once you get off the paper.
What kind of RFI would such roadways emit?
HIgher frequency give better efficiency, so whatever they can get that will still penetrate a foot of asphalt without too much absorption.
Wikipedia says ‘high power’ (over 1 kw) inductive charging is done at around 130 khz (long frequency band) while ‘low power’ is done at supply frequency (50/60hz).
I would think the power levels here would be somewhere in between that – it be bad if even 10% of a 1KW ambient power level gets coupled to metal on or in you!
Oh! I know how to make this work!
Just embed frickin’ magnets in the roadway, with alternating polarities: As the car drives over them it will induce AC current under the under-car pickup coil, charging the battery while the car drives along.
Easy. And no wired infrastructure required.
I’m sure you can get a grant to fund this.
(NB: Poe’s law still applies.)
Ooo this! Because roads without magnets are hostile architecture!
That system has a lot of losses in it, better to just learn from our gas engines and have a belt on the electric motor that spins an alternator to charge the batteries.
This is as effective as plugging an outlet strip into itself.
Kind of funny, but except for the rear axle falling off and not being able to turn corners the flintstones had better tech. At least theirs stood a chance of working.
Made me laugh, you could call the product “magnet roadway”. And then be sued by “solar roadway”. Both pay lawyers to battle over trademark and hopefully drain all their funds – a positive outcome for everyone.
Good idea. But neuter the lawyers first. Get too many in a room and they will eventually mate. This is called “inbreeding” and leads to idiot children… and more lawyers.
They should do this in the NE states, in the wintertime the resistive losses will keep the snow and ice melted and when you get some cars going on it, the heat induced into the cars should be able to dry the roads all the way up. No plowing or salt needed. And for long haul drivers you can have a little metal box to hang down and have fresh pizza for dinner.
How long until the junkies and tweakers in Detroit are digging the copper coils out of the road to sell for scrape? 🤣
Jokes on them.
The city road crews hired to install them never showed. Copper is missing. Invoice was paid. It’s Detroit.
Is this the same government that approved billions in funding charger installations and have installed exactly zero of them? The States cant even keep normal roads and bridges repaired. Might be nice if the government worked on a national power grid to power all these mandates. For everyone that loves green energy projects should ask how much power this and all other inductive charging solutions lose compared to plug in charging. There is absolutely zero chance that there will be enough of this system installed to justify equipping vehicles to use it.
Missed this somehow while I was writing the article, but I just found that SAE did adopt the Electreon DIPS system as part of the upcoming SAE J2954 TF standard for wireless power transfer for vehicles.
(https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j2954-DIPS)
Thanks, Autoblog!
(https://www.autoblog.com/press-releases/electreons-proven-wireless-alignment-methodology-has-been-selected-by-sae-to-be-the-global-standard_51275/)