The Milwaukee Road had a long electrified run through W. Montana and Ideeho. Even used regenerative braking. 3000V DC.
Why go through all that trouble? Why not create a hybrid-like setup like diesel-electric locomotives? That’d be much more realistic than stringing live, high-power lines directly above traffic. Lines that could be cut easily, or taken out by a wreck.
Any time you have to build brand new infrastructure to supply power to an industry that’s been doing fine without it, you have to wonder. Like self driving cars, there’s a place for technology and places it’s not going to work. Lots of places.
Where are they going to get the electricity to poser those trucks? Certainly not solar or wind, and the envirowhackos have made building new nuclear power plants practically impossible. That leaves coal, gas, and hydroelectric and there are only so many places to build dams.
The Stars Trek acme teleporter will...
I could see that in limited applications, but to build that much infrastructure across all of the US (~5 million miles of Road, ~50,000 miles of Interstate Highway), would require a long payoff period to recoup the investment.
Technology would probably overtake this solution before you could even get it built.
I remember the trolley buses in Atlanta when I was a child. We liked to watch the sparks fly when they went through an intersection. The poles were long enough that the buses could change lanes to get around traffic, and they had switches so one bus could pass another. Sounds like they are trying to make the new equipment more complex and expensive.
But here’s a better solution - make all long haul use railroad tracks, and take the traffic off the highways.
Yeah, and when the power goes out, traffic comes to a standstill.
Wireless power could revolutionize highway transportation, Stanford researchers say
??? Thought with DEF diesel engines were cleaner than gas engines?
Wireless charging tech is available, wires under the road would be smarter.
The energy fairy?
You would need to build a few hundred new power plants and even then the fact that the electricity would have to travel over long distances in certain areas would lower the power to the point that the trucks would just stop.
Either that or you would have to build new power plants out in the middle of nowhere.
Where are you going to get the staff to run those plants?
Where are you going to get the water?
Where are you going to get the metal to put up all those high power wire towers plus the wire it's self?
And all this new huge multi-megawatt power demand will come from wind and solar?
Dream on ...