2024-07-23 13:41:12
Cars will charge on the go
A permanent electrified road should be built in Sweden by the end of the year. This is the world’s first highway for
electric cars, vans, trucks and buses that will be able to charge wirelessly while traveling.
The experimental road is located on the European route E20 of the motorway that connects the logistics centers between Halsberg and Jørebro, and
the section is about 27 km long
This highway is located between the three main cities in the country – Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö, and is one of the busiest with heavy trucks.
Sweden has already successfully built one test track in 2018 from Arlanda Airport in Stockholm to the logistics area in a 2 km section. An electric rail is milled into the asphalt, onto which electric trucks lower a moving arm through which they receive power.
This initiative is part of Sweden’s efforts to decarbonize the transport sector and prepare the necessary infrastructure for fossil fuel-free mobility. This is an important step towards sustainable transport, which will allow cars, buses and trucks to recharge on the go, thus being able to travel longer distances with smaller batteries.
The first highway of its kind in the world should
lead to the extension of another 3,000 km of electrified roads in Sweden by 2035.
On an electric road, cars and trucks can recharge while driving in one lane of traffic.
“We believe that the electrification solution is the way forward to decarbonise the transport sector and we are working on a number of solutions,” says Jan Petersson, director of strategic development at Trafikverket, the Swedish transport authority.
The method of charging the E20 has not yet been decided, but there are three types: with a contact network, with a wire or an inductive system.
The catenary uses overhead wires to provide electricity to a special type of bus and therefore
can only be used for heavy duty vehicles
Wire charging, on the other hand, works for both heavy-duty vehicles and cars as long as there is a special system such as a rail that is dug into the asphalt. Vehicles are charged via a stick that touches the rail.
The inductive charging system uses special equipment buried under the road that sends electricity to a coil in electric vehicles. The coil in the car then uses this electricity to charge the battery.
According to some experts, the best solution for the development of electric cars
is the installation of a cable induction power supply
in the built road network and reducing the size of the batteries of future cars to a capacity of 50 km. If the highways and premium roads are wired, in practice
full access to the entire territory for the movement of current will be provided,
the Swedes think. The advantages will be reducing the weight of electric cars by about 50%, reducing the price of the cars themselves by half and simplifying autonomous movement on such roads. The minus is the larger initial investment, which can be reduced significantly when laying the network on newly constructed road surfaces, and which will pay off quickly through the usage fee and.
An additional plus is the possibility that all cars with internal combustion engines can be adapted to use such networks,
by replacing existing internal combustion engines with electric motors,
without changing anything else in their construction.
Sweden is partnering with Germany and France to exchange experience in researching future electric roads. Germany and Sweden have had demonstration facilities on public roads for several years, and France plans to build a pilot section with an electrified road soon.
High prices
Wide use of such projects is hindered by their high cost. For example, Israel’s technology of rolling inductors into asphalt and concrete to wirelessly charge EV batteries costs $650,000 per kilometer, and Sweden’s Scania AB system is even more expensive, up to $2.5 million per kilometer of electrified highway.