Posted on 07/14/2016 3:03:07 PM PDT by bananaman22
There are millions of trucks on the worlds highways at any given time, carrying cargo from one place to another and spewing diesel exhaust fumes. Thats how its been since the dawn of trucking, thats how it still is. But thats not necessarily how it will be in the future.
Electric trucks are a fact, though not a very popular one, which is undeserved to a certain degree. While short-haul deliveries are perfect for utilizing electric freight carriers, a long-haul electric truck would need a battery weighing 23 tons to be able to make a 500-mile journey in one go. Thats a lot of battery basically half of the trucks own weight.
Yet Siemens and Scania have recently unveiled an alternative to these monstrous hypothetical batteries: a truck that uses a pantograph feeding it power from wires running above it. Just like a trolley or an electric train. Unlike trolleys and electric trains, however, these Scania trucks (two test ones for now) can detach from the wires to overtake another vehicle or switch lanes for any other reason, and then smoothly return to the electrified lane because they also have internal combustion engines (that run on biodiesel), as well as battery-powered electric motors. These two motors allow the truck to hop from one electrified portion of a highway to another.
(Excerpt) Read more at oilprice.com ...
Wireless power could revolutionize highway transportation, Stanford researchers say
Yep, it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure.
??? Thought with DEF diesel engines were cleaner than gas engines?
Wireless charging tech is available, wires under the road would be smarter.
Thanks for the references. I’ll look at them tomorrow.
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?
Tesla Veteran Helps Mack Create an Electric Garbage Truck
https://www.trucks.com/2016/06/07/mack-trucks-shows-electric-garbage-truck/
“Power plant efficiency”
I looked at your references. I’d like to see a practical large-scale implementation of any of those schemes. Ways of getting the heat energy out of coal have been researched for many, many years. Maybe we’ll get a payoff sometime.
. . . or else, to give the concept its due, by nuclear power or natural gas.But certainly, electric power is not an environmental free lunch.
My wife showed me a science test, which I took. there were only a dozen questions, none of which was hard (tho one was ambiguous). I somehow managed to fail to get 100%, still dont understand how as they didnt supply feedback. Even at that, I ranked in the top 12%. And the people in the bottom 50% vote just like you and I. If they can find their way to the polling place, somehow . . .
And all this new huge multi-megawatt power demand will come from wind and solar?
Dream on ...
In the U.S., electric cars are mostly powered by coal, with natural gas a distant second and nuclear a distant third. Wind power and solar power fall somewhere right above rainbows and unicorn farts.
The should be called coal powered cars.
Most of the "Renewable Energy Total" is hydro-electric.
Building a national infrastructure for NG powered cars (basically, adding NG tanks and compressed NG refueling dispensers to gas stations) would be a hell of a lot cheaper and better for the environment than building the electric highway infrastructure envisioned by the article or even pushing everyone to electric cars.
I am all for NG taking over coal, particularly since I live in a part of country that produces NG and not coal. But it should occur because of supply and demand and not because Obama has decided to bankrupt the coal industry in the name of the Global Warming scam.
All true, except if the the electrification abetted the institution of automatic cruising to increase the carrying capacity of the interstate system.
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