I'm sorry but this sounds stupid energy wasteful and expensive for something that should be a maglev bullet train, which would also have a much higher throughput of passengers per hour. Inductive charging will always have a huge amount of energy waste overhead.
It seems like the US will do anything to avoid building public transit infrastructure. I can't imagine how expensive just the copper for an inductive charging road will be.
Not that I am a fan of Churchill but I saw this quote yesterday so it is fresh on my mind
> Winston Churchill once said, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.” [Laughter.]
I hope we will do the right thing soon and begin working on a robust public transit infrastructure.
I think the problem, as always, is money. The US housing market is supposedly worth USD 30T+ What will happen to all "money" currently in the suburban ticky tacky [wiktionary] houses? If we have high density housing with maglev trains in major city centers, will that "suck" more money from the rest of the United States?
It looks like about 7% of the US housing market "worth" is in New York (City) while about 6% of the US lives here.
Seems reasonable.
However, what if there was some constellation of "high density" city centers all connected together by reliable high-speed trains?
Will it cause the suburbia to lose value?
I am just thinking out loud. I don't own a house so I don't have a horse in this race. Maglev supposedly costs up to a hundred million dollars per mile, which looks very attractive considering a road cost one to two million dollars per mile lane, so four to eight million dollars for a mile of a standard US four-lane street/road.
[wiktionary] (US) Cheap, low-quality building material, especially as that used to make conventional suburban housing of a uniform design. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ticky-tacky
[New York housing worth] Among metropolitan areas, the New York City metro remains the country’s largest real estate market by value, but by a narrowing margin. The NYC-area housing market is valued at $3.51 trillion, with the Los Angeles metro right behind at $3.27 trillion. (zillow, https://www.zillow.com/research/us-housing-market-total-valu.... )
There's a potential depending on how far out the it extends.
Using property as an investment vehicle is a major problem in the US. It compels property owners to support policies that retain or increase their property values (e.g. NIMBY).
There's a symbiotic relationship between commercial and residential property. Locality to commercial real-estate creates demand for residential property and scarcity of residential property increases the value of residential property.
The pandemic closed commercial real-estate and made a lot of people and organizations realize they don't need to be present in the office. This is disruptive to the market as whole because the value of both commercial and residential property is tied to demand for both. That is why there has been such a push towards getting people back into the office.
If people do not need to be in the office, then commercial real-estate loses all value. If people don't need to live near the office then residential property loses some of it's value.
This could have an impact on the demand for transit as well.
Florida recently completed a high speed rail project (The same cannot he said for CA HSR). It’s no bullet train but pretty comparable to Acela. Everyone throwing shade on FL might be surprised that they are actually ahead of the game on a lot of infrastructure.
But to be fair to the Brightline, the half of the ass that they do have is actually moving passengers today.
Track upgrades and locomotive upgrades are also being done to the Pacific Surfliner which in theory could get it above 120 MPH at some points, putting it semi-officially in "high speed rail" territory.
But to be completely fair Brightline is only running passengers on a portion of this route (yet) between Miami and West Palm Beach, but so is the state of California, which is actually moving passengers today on both the Caltrain corridor between SF and Gilroy and the LOSSAN corridor between LA union station and Anaheim.
It’s not necessarily the worst idea ever to launch a Bakersfield to Fresno high speed line and to have your train traverse the Bay Area and LA corridors at a lower speed until work on those are complete.
But my understanding is that they were feting a plan which left passengers with a 20 mile bus bridge to Bakersfield, and that’s just deranged
There is no existing rail corridor acceptable for passenger travel between Bakersfield and Lancaster/Palmdale (let alone to LA). There is one rail line that traverses the Tehachapi pass (famous for the Tehachapi loop https://www.railfanguides.us/ca/tehachapi/index.htm) however that corridor is not fit for passenger service barring major and expensive upgrades.
Personally if it were up to me I would have started the CAHSR between Bakersfield and LA simply because of the lack of any current rail connection. However this is by far the most expensive portion of the phase 1 plan, and given the lack of funding it is no surprise they started with the cheapest portion.
The risk of starting it in Fresno is that if you don't finish (which I think is likely), you are left with something of very little value srving few people with low need for rail.
If you start in SF or LA, you at least have a fast train serving an area with terrible traffic and a population of millions.
California’s bullet train delays have basically nothing to do with fundamental challenges like seismic engineering, and everything to do with planning permission issues / NIMBYs and California specific regulations on one hand, and with bad management on the other.
Earthquakes have little to do with it. They are simply an excuse for horrible policy. Go explain to Japan why earthquakes should prevent them from building effective infrastructure.
Funny enough, the same company that built the high speed rail in Florida is now going to build a high speed rail line from Southern California to Las Vegas. It appears that this project will start construction soon.
Still doesn't change the fact that highway driving and automobile based transportation is not going anywhere. High speed rail won't ever replace cars. It's a nice supplemental form of transport, and works fine for point to point transport between major hubs, but it doesn't work at a distributed scale.
Well, but cars don't work very well as soon as you concentrate parts of your population in urban centres. Both are needed and both are optional depending on where you live. At least individual ownership, because you will always need trucks, but you will also always need freight trains.
>* FL makes no pretense about being primarily a based car-culture, but successfully implements mass transit where it makes sense
Effectively no FL city has mass transit, unless you want to count South Florida which has a commuter train (Trirail) and the Metro, which are both essentially north-south only. It makes sense to do everywhere, but has been done nowhere.
How many people daily take the ferry that runs between the entrance of Small World and the exit? By expanding the definition of "mass transit" into meaninglessness, we might find that Florida really is a leader!
The sad thing is, I think if Walt Disney hadn't died when he did, the monorail system would have expanded throughout the city of Orlando and probably to other parts of the state.
The Disney world ridership numbers are from 2012, back then the daily ridership numbers for BART was well over 300,000 or more than twice that of Disney’s Monorail.
Your BART number is also in the middle of the Pandemic, back then the daily ridership of the Disney’s monorail was 0, as the park was closed.
Was it a FL public project? That Disney, famously in "battle" with the FL government right now, did something commendable says little about what FL would do.
It say that Florida had regulations and land-use policies that allowed private enterprises to set up effective mass transit! That's a good thing that most states didn't do!
Not really. Florida effectively gave a large chunk of land to Disney. This has famously been covered in recent litigation and they tried to claw it back. Such that, no, I don't think you can take Disney's situation as at all indicative of something from the Florida land-use policies. Would be akin to financial advice from a lottery winner.
Unless you are saying maybe we should pursue more local governments run by a corporation? That also feels wrong, all told. Though, I would grant I don't have enough perspective there to know.
FL didn't give land to Disney. Disney bought all of its own land via W.E.D. Enterprises and other dummy companies they used to discretely make the purchases in 1964 [2]. Later, after Walt's death in 1965, in 1967, Roy O. Disney made the case for the Reedy Creek Improvement Act [1], which gave Disney an exclusive zone in the state independent of county/city/state zoning laws, building codes, school districts, etc.
Part of the pitch to getting the Reedy Creek Act passed, was the plans for E.P.C.O.T. (Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow) and the plan to build a new urban development. Those plans were complicated after Walt's death and permanently shelved after his brother Roy's retirement in 1968, but Disney retained its exemptions in spite of never truly undertaking the original plan and simply operated a tax-reduced, virtually regulation-free amusement park, until this year.
Right. "Give land" was used in a way that is a clearly meant more colloquially than any specific form. To the point of this thread, I am asserting that Disney acted far more independently in all things that they did than not. Such that counting it as a thing that the Florida government did well feels like a stretch.
At the least, it is far more complicated than makes sense, and can't really be used as evidence one way or the other for Florida making good choices.
The pandemic proved that pollution is primarily caused by trucks and not cars. Most of the highest polluted cities in the world that were clear during the global lockdown regained their pollution once trucks went back on the road.
Genuine question: How do you know this? (Maybe a source or something)?
I know the supply chain got messed up, but given that trucks are so crucial to transporting goods (at least here in the US) I would think that trucks remained on the road during the pandemic while individuals driving cars all stayed home during quarantine.
I'm really curious how this conclusion ('trucks are the primary cause of pollution') was reached
> In the most recent year for which data are available, combination trucks made up only 1% of the vehicle population but were responsible for 6% of all vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and 17% of vehicle fuel use.
Given that diesel is often considered "more polluting" you can probably make it work out given a bunch of assumptions that may or may not apply. Trucks are the primary cause of road wear, for example.
Trucks also produce the lions' share of the noise pollution. Don't laugh, noise pollution is very serious; it causes cognitive damage to people who live near busy roads which in turn has innumerable deleterious social effects.
There’s a number of climate fights that I think would be better argued with noise pollution reduction instead of carbon reduction, and vehicles especially trucks is one of them.
The Pacific Surfliner can go faster than Brightline currently. It's also longer and has been in service for ages now. Florida isn't ahead of the game, they're playing catch up.
The Brightline vision is finally arriving, partially, after three decades of failures in funding and planning. To call that “ahead of the game” is disingenuous.
Brightline is operational and wildly successful between Miami and Palm Beach, expanding soon to Orlando, and it's literally the only higher-speed passenger railway actually built in the US since the Acela. So, yes, it is very much ahead of the game.
It's worth pointing out that higher-speed rail is technical jargon used to describe rail services that are not high speed, but aren't slow. Brightline is also apparently only planned to be higher-speed at some point, but currently has an operating speed of 130 km/h, slower than most definitions of higher-speed. There were regularly-scheduled services with comparable or faster speeds in the early 20th century in both Europe and the US; there were faster US services in the 1930 pulled by steam locomotives. Brightline is far slower than high-speed services elsewhere in the world today, going less than half the speed of many TGV services, for example.
With that said, as you point out, it's a new intercity service that is actually operational, popular, and being used today, which for the US is an enormously rare feat.
The Amtrak Wolverine service (Chicago to Detroit) begs to differ. And just last week the Lincoln service (Chicago to St. Louis) and the Texas Eagle service (Chicago to Dallas/San Antonio) got approval for higher-speed operation.
Brightline is very successful, part of which is due to having so few stops, something that a public railroad could never get away with politically. The Amtrak trains stop so often that they spend very little time at their top speed.
I don't have access to stats, but is it really particularly successful? I just checked and the Boca - Downtown Miami route takes 51 minutes, compared to (not quite comparable) Boca - MIA on the Trirail in 61 minutes. This, with way fewer stops in between. I can't believe too many commuters are paying a premium price unless they're specifically wanting to go downtown for work.
They had 1.2 million rides in 2022, that's good by any measurement. Pacific Surfliner in Southern California is a wildly successful intercity rail and only had 1.6m rides in 2022.
Some people may use them to commute but it's not primarily commuter rail, would be my guess.
The Pacific Surfliner in 2022 may not be a great comparison, as what I believe is the most popular and frequent segment (between San Diego and LA) was out of service for the entirety of Q4, and apparently has been out of service since then, with the exception of 10 days in April.
Compare to Trirail which now covers largely the same region, opened in 1995 with around twice as many riders (2.5 million). Last stats on the wiki are 4.5 million in 2019.
Tri-Rail seems comparable to Metrolink or the Coaster - that's commuter rail and often has lower costs and higher ridership, because the average ride is shorter.
The San Diego trolley has 63 miles of track and 34 million riders in 2022; but that's an entirely different type of rail that serves a different purpose. Even if it eventually reached all the way to Los Angeles there would still be uses for commuter and intercity rail.
Many places in Europe have the various types of rail all sharing the same "lines" or stations, but the ICE is a completely different beast than the Regionalbahn or Regional-Express.
Trains provide a different service, which is to move people from one hub to another. Cars take you from a precise location to another precise location. Some people who use cars can easily switch to trains (if their travel locations are close enough to train stops, and they are able-bodied enough to be able to get themselves the last mile). But for many people, especially in spread out areas, trains are not an especially good substitute for cars in the short or medium run.
Maybe the point that isn't stated is the desire for you and everyone else to be relocated into hubs in order to support this transportation paradigm. Anything outside of the hubs is reversed for our betters, who of course will have access to other means of transportation.
There will always be overhead, but that doesn't mean it will always be a huge amount of overhead. I believe the state of the art is 97% efficiency (https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1495980) which is better than a lot of wired chargers. Real world systems will be less efficient, and it may be too expensive, but a maglev system would be even more expensive.
"This is within the expected range of the thermal limits of the envisaged mechanical design of the coils and also indicates a minimum of 98% coil-to-coil power transfer efficiency."
Key here is coil-to-coil, NOT total charging efficiency, let alone "better than wired." Worse, it was a stationary setup with a distance of 5 inches between coils, so adding asphalt, protection for the car's coil, etc. is just going to make it worse.
There is absolutely zero chance a maglev bullet train is cost effective in any part of Florida. I want it to happen too, but that’s not going to change the economics.
I used to share your gut feeling that this is stupid, but I’ve done a lot of calculations on this now and it (dynamic charging, not necessarily inductive) starts making a lot of economic sense on major roads when most traffic is electric. The technology has very high base cost and very low marginal cost per additional user. The cost of stationary charging scales fairly linearly with the number of users, with surprisingly minimal scale benefits.
Pros of dynamic charging:
- Substantially reduced need for large batteries, which reduces vehicle cost and contributes to overall lower cost of electric road transportation;
- Easier logistics planning, no queuing for charging, and reduced downtime for commercial vehicles;
- Cost of public daytime charging on par with private night-time stationary charging;
- Same access to charging for all, at the same time, at the same cost;
- Well adapted to high vehicle utilization (e.g., 24h operation, autonomous trucks and car sharing services);
- Greatly reduced need for high power fast charging, which wears out batteries;
- Greatly reduced need to build out infrastructure for stationary charging, which is not easy to do quickly and at scale;
- Potentially easier to connect to the power grid than static charging of equivalent capacity.
Challenges to overcome include:
- The transition phase from zero to many users;
- The transition phase from zero miles to coverage of most major highways;
- Electromagnetic emissions;
- Not in line with how the public and industry perceives that electric cars and trucks should work;
- Initial funding (requires public sector support, but not subsidies);
- Primarily benefits vehicle owners and transport buyers, not vehicle manufacturers and energy companies.
- Unclear if dynamic charging is cheaper beyond ~2045, due to declining levelized battery costs.
As for the argument that it is better to electrify rail - both should be electrified. Europe and Asia wonder why North America hasn’t electrified its rail network already.
Assuming perfect efficiency and that people are doing the speed limit, 1 mile of 200kw charging at 70 mph gives you a grand total of 2.8 kWh of juice.
Of course, there will be losses in power transfer, and nobody in the US actually does the speed limit, so in reality the actual amount of charge you'll be able to pick up off this thing will be significantly less than that.
What a complete boondoggle. Embarrassing for everyone involved.
This is obviously hilariously cost inefficient and a bad idea for other reasons, but it's unclear to me why you think that 2.8kWh in a mile is a bad result here.
Most EVs use something like 0.2-0.4kWh/mile. So in fact even at 10% efficiency you could drive forever if this stuff was scaled out.
This is't 2.8kWh per mile. There's only 1 mile being built. So you maybe get 2kW for driving that stretch - assuming you have the inductive capabilities in your car.
Does any car support this yet?
A nice theoretical boondoggle when we could be building out rail or funding deployment of actual charging stations.
Inefficient use of copper, too. But inductive charging in parking grounds could have some potential, especially if cars could put the receiver on the ground while parkcharging.
More efficient for sure, but it would be very convenient, and could drive acceptance of EVs. As a bonus, you don‘t need to allocate space to charging stations.
100% agree. Efficiency will be far from perfect. The minimum ground clearance, the maximum loop sizes, and the added weight/drag from the power conversion systems will add to the inefficiency. Not to mention (although I'm about to) the enormous RFI such a system would generate.
You haven't explained why its a boondoggle? Seems like Florida is taking a first step in realizing a technology that hasn't been scaled out anywhere yet.
The point of an electrified road is not to magically charge your vehicle to capacity in seconds, but to sustain and extend the travel distance of EVs.
> What a complete boondoggle. Embarrassing for everyone involved.
I'm still stuck on this line, it seems so out of place. What is embarrassing about this project? When did building out infrastructure become embarrassing? Would you say the same if it was a different state?
The embarrassing part is the “2.8 KWh” figure. For comparison, since the number doesn’t seem to resonate with you, that generous estimate of the energy involved is comparable to about 0.1 gallons of gas, maybe a little lower.
It’s an expensive and highly ineffective way to charge cars a very small amount, and is fundamentally a poor use of society’s limited resources.
The entirely infeasibility and the incompetence or malice in the whole chain of people that pushed and approved this project qualifies it as a boondoggle.
In our local universe entropy must be preserved, and energy comes at a premium. That is the reason nobody have flying cars since they were envisioned in the 60s.
Same for hydrogen fuel cells, more realistic but still overhyped as it is not more efficient than simple battery, it has worse logistics and delivers less. The tech in terms of auto is now dying as reality is slamming into its face. And for the same reason (energy inefficiency and costs) this project will also die.
There is nothing today that can overcome the LAW (not theory) of 1/r^2. Can you wirelessly charge a car? Yes. Should you? No. Even Tesla (the scientist and I guess the car company since they went with the weird snake arm route) could not over this limitation.
While it's unlikely to be adopted for cars, it seems a cheaper and more reasonable first step at electrification (though the USA can't even electrify its rail and that sits there and goes nowhere and is a minimal cost). Electrification of rail is something like $5m a track/mile - electrification of all rail in Los Angeles could be done for something in the low few billions. Add electric trucks for $20-50b more, and suddenly LA is much cleaner, and you've not touched a single car.
This works better for buses, since you can get a lot of utility out of fairly little infrastructure since buses are most useful in the small regions where population density is the greatest.
To electrify freight, we should start with trains. Those are the low hanging fruit; Europe has a lot of electrified freight rail but the US has virtually none. We could also start taxing the hell out of long haul trucking; the US already has a great deal of freight rail (unlike passenger rail) and it could get even more use if we invested in upgrading those lines and discouraged long-haul trucking. But the hard part, getting the right of ways for rail, is already done.
Yeah rail is exceptionally low hanging fruit especially since there are any number of diesel motive commuter and intercity trains that could be upgraded today for reasonable amounts of cash (depending on where in the climate fight they fall). They’re nice because the total track miles are low and they don’t leave their area, nor need to worry about loading and unloading containers, etc.
Especially with a little bit of battery in the locomotive. A huge chunk of the expensive to string overhead wires for pantographs is bridges, tunnels, and other obstructions not sized for the space needed for the wires. If the train can supply some power to hop between some relatively small gaps suddenly the whole project is pretty affordable.
Same thinking applies to trolly buses. If the bus can supply its own power through intersections and when moving between routes or just around the bus depot suddenly nearly all the logistical headaches of trolly buses go away and the same amount of battery that would get you 1 BEV bus gets you a whole fleet of trolley buses going all over the city.
Inductive highway charging is entirely feasible and there have been various experiments around the world for years now. The main issue is how to fund outfitting cars to make use of it.
Experiments are evidence of feasibility studies, not feasibility itself. From the article, the main deployments of induction in roadbeds have been a small pilot program[1] in South Korea and an unrealized plan in Sweden. The South Korean deployment has apparently (partially?) shut down since.
Given that it doesn't exist yet (and that the only comparable example was partially decommissioned), I don't think we're in a position to claim that the technology is ready.
We've barely had the "easy" wireless charging scenario (small, stationary devices, low power draws) for a decade; it isn't even remotely clear that vehicles sizes and speeds, clearances, road conditions, etc. have received adequate consideration yet.
In Germany they installed the inductive charger at the last bus station. The bus spends less than fifteen minutes charging. This isn't enough for the whole trip but if you start from a full charge you can last a while day.
I don't see reason to criticize investing billions of dollars in innovative projects with a high probability of failure. All these projects generate massive amounts of knowledge which might be allied in the future if not now. As these projects fail, the researchers and employees moving might not have an idea how to accomplish something but rather will know several ways not to accomplish something which is valuable too.
We can't even keep normal roads free of potholes, how would we ever maintain electrified highways.
Also the waste inherent to inductive charging would eat in to the carbon emissions benefits we're hoping to get from electric cars pretty significantly.
"The United States can always be relied upon to do the right thing — having first exhausted all possible alternatives." -- Unknown
Here we will expend a bit of money to find out why it is (or isn't) possible to actually recharge untracked vehicles on the fly (inductively/wirelessly). I look forward to seeing what is learned from this effort.
You need long enough that you reach steady state at speed, the choice of a mile is a bit arbitrary, but seems reasonable in that regard.
You also need to test your power distribution strategy, and cut over between sections, etc... those require a longer run, and again, a reasonable choice.
This is solving a non-problem. We can drive from the bay area to LA with one stop for charging, 9 minutes. Hardly enough time to grab a bite and use the restroom. Non-problem.
And if that's too much of a hassle, develop front bumpers with large power contact pads that you literally press up against when parking - or put the inductive charger in the parking spaces instead of all the roads.
Not a hassle, lift the cord, press the button, stick the cord in the hole, done. Parking space idea sounds nice, as does all vaporware. As long as I can back in.
My use case is specific, but a week with an e-car just taught me that I need to wait another decade for them to either mature, both as cars and an ecosystem, or be replaced by the next great thing, likely a hybrid approach.
It could have been a bad EV, or it could have been user error, or you could truly live in a location or have a situation where they are not viable yet. Not ruling out the third, to be sure.
That's only true for non-Teslas. You can find pictures online of some rare events where Teslas were waiting because 1) the network was not as built out yet; 2) a major highway was blocked rerouting all traffic to a minor highway; 3) it was the busiest driving day of the year. Unlikely confluence of events that will not repeat since the network is being built out with ever increasing massive upgrades. However, again, if you are driving a non-Tesla, you are right.
Don't ask why but I had a fantasy of building a road in a developing country and your best options are dirt, sealed gravel and asphalt.
Everything else is not cost effective at all.
At least this, unlike solar freakin' roadways, isn't a completely crazy and nonsensical idea. But it's still a terrible idea, if only because it wastes so much electricity.
'“When you can charge while driving, range anxiety and frequent charging stops will be a thing of the past,” says ENRX CEO Bjørn Eldar Petersen.
“Our unparalleled expertise in induction technology allows us to deliver charging at 200 kW even at high speeds. No one else has the technology to offer anything similar.”
Further, he explains how this would change requirements for electric vehicle construction: “Dynamic charging can reduce the need for large battery capacities, allowing cars to be equipped with lighter and more affordable battery packs.”'
If this technology is as good as stated, it could be a game changer for EVs.
How much energy would a section of inductive-charging road require?
What kind of capacity limits does it have? If one EV is following another EV, it the second EV's charging decreased?
- Cost of placing under the highway (mitigated by only doing so on full reconstruction/maintenance works)
- Cost of materials (massive induction coils, over a very large distance to get meaningfull charging....
- Cost of electricity (Induction would be much less efficient than direct charging - rather than 100%, you'll get a fraction of that (heavily dependent on the distance from the body to the roadway - good luck Electric F150s..)
Roads are designed to be as cheap as possible while fulfilling their purpose. It's difficult to imagine you could cost-effectively spread that charging infrastructure out. It would be more expensive than pantograph electric lines, which would be much more efficient at actually transferring energy.
EVs are still only a few percent of all cars, so this infrastructure would be unused most of the time. Cars with inductive chargers underneath will be even less common, and people willing to pay the premium to use them less common again.
This seems like a pipe dream like solar roadways, sounds good but beaten out by the normal, sensible solution of just charging at stationary car park where cars spend 95% of their time. Batteries are only getting cheaper as well, which hurts the business case too.
Also cost of maintenance. In much of the US they can barely keep the paint lines clear and the pavement un-potholed, and now we want to put electric infrastructure into the mix?
Indeed. This idea seems ridiculous on its face when you consider the state of existing road infrastructure. The only way it could work is if it made maintenance cheaper or was a driver of significant revenue.
If you look at a map of Florida you’ll see that Orlando is pretty much near the center of the state rendering a _saltwater storm surge_ a very very very very rare event.
But hey keep assuming things about Florida. Your imagination is wild.
If this technology is as good as stated, it could be a game changer for EVs.
That's basically saying "big if true". Inductive charging is barely fast enough to charge a phone laying directly on top of the charger in a reasonable amount of time, do you honestly think electric roads that inductively charge fleets of EVs are going to be ubiquitous?
> Inductive charging is barely fast enough to charge a phone laying directly on top of the charger in a reasonable amount of time
A phone uses 1-2 watts under active use, and models designed for fast wireless charging can receive more than 10 watts. It's fine. Even slow wireless charging can fill up a phone pretty well and can easily keep a phone running indefinitely.
And the underside of a car is about five thousand times as big as the charging coil on a phone.
> And the underside of a car is about five thousand times as big as the charging coil on a phone.
Now compare the distance between a phone and charging pad to the distance between the bottom of a car and the wires that are going to be buried under concrete. And forget about listening to Spotify while driving on these roads, the massive EMI those electromagnets will produce is going to take your reception to 0 bars.
Unless Florida isn’t telling us something, and is about to become the Imperial Kingdom of DeSantis and funnel all the world’s resources into Florida, I think this will come to fruition around the same time the Saudis finish construction of Neom.
I thought about this for a while but towing cables (tho high maintenance) are so much simpler. Have some wind propellers and/or solar by the side of the road with very little conversion and transport. Hook up any vehicle. It works when it works, when it doesn't it isn't a big deal. If someone hits the breaks everyone slows down. Make it big for trucks, small for few vehicles or even smaller for bicycles, roller skates, soap boxes, robot taxi's, etc walking dogs, making sure employees arrive at work on time. and so on
This feels like an idea that barely made sense before widespread charging and long-running batteries that makes no sense now. How much of a charge could you realistically get at highway speeds on a ~1 mile stretch of road? Would it even out-do a solar panel placed on the dashboard while you're parked at either end of a trip?
Now, inductive charging at parking lots might make sense. That could resolve a lot of the issues that are starting to crop up with charging stations that look a lot like gas pumps.
What if we did this only at stop lights? Like, have a small section of maybe 3-4 car lengths made. Whenever you stop, you charge a bit. Not sure if that would help much though.
A heavy truck uses in the order of magnitude of 100 kW of continuous power for propulsion at highway speeds. Solar panels on the truck can extend range by around 10%, but increase weight, capital and maintenance cost. When trucks are parked, it’s often dark outside.
Think of it - renewable power is effectively "free" so even if giant Tesla coil lightning bolts arcing across the roadway lose half the energy they contain, using them to recharge capacitors in cars would look damn cool and therefore is obviously the correct solution.
everyone is complaining about this but I'm just really impressed that it's realistic to expect 200kw from inductive charging on a highway! That's cool! I don't care if it's practical.
I have major issues with inductive charging in the road but truly in a snowy area the waste heat from it would automatically clear the roads which in a place like Florida has no use for but in Canada it would be great.
