Posted on 12/01/2024 12:44:10 AM PST by Libloather
California is about to become home to the nation’s second electric vehicle-charging roadway — with construction due to be completed ahead of the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
The multimillion dollar UCLA project, funded with state grant moneys, will concentrate on a half-mile stretch of road in Westwood, according to the Los Angeles Times.
And it will come as the university prepares to host the Olympic Village — where all of the competing athletes stay during the games.
“A wireless inductive option is a game changer,” Clinton Bench, director of the UCLA Fleet and Transit, told the Times.
“When a vehicle is driving over [a charger], the vehicle can collect charge while it’s moving.”
Close to $20 million in grant money will be used to upgrade UCLA‘s bus fleet, replacing gas-powered vehicles with electric buses.
The EV-charging roadway will eliminate the need to connect any of the buses to electric charging coils.
Any electric vehicle that utilizes the roadway will be able to pick up a charge, thanks to several underground charging stations.
The buses would pick up charge while driving throughout the day or when parked at a stationary wireless charger.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
...
The buses would pick up charge while driving throughout the day or when parked at a stationary wireless charger.
OK, so does it have to plug in or not? ANSWER: Yes, because the street charger will never work as advertised.
It’s important to understand that the claims made by the Electreon company in text and the slick, professionally produced video are commercials meant to sell their product to non-technical people. In other words, people who dole out tax money to companies promising unattainable results.
They want you to believe that their system will replace plug-in charging. It won’t.
At best, it adds incremental charging while in operation which will only delay the inevitable plug-in charge sessions, or a facility where a vehicle could be parked on top of a charging coil when not in use.
Their promotional video claims to show a vehicle circling an oval test track for 100 hours for a total of about 1200 miles. That comes out to 12 mph. They show a transfer of 241 kWh in that time period, but they don’t mention how much of that energy actually ends up in the battery. There is no question that the efficiency of a wireless charging process is lower than with a direct connection.
Exactly. From a purely practical standpoint, as an owner, what happens to the vehicle warranty if you add an aftermarket charge coil? You can kiss the warranty goodbye unless the car maker engineers the modification and installs it through a dealership. That includes the warranty on the battery itself, a hugely expensive replacement item. Regardless of the cause of a problem, any aftermarket modification will be blamed, and you, the owner, will be expected to pay.
Gee, I kinda remember a few years ago when California couldn’t produce enough electricity so they asked people to avoid charging their EVs during peak usage hours to keep grid from collapsing. I’m sure that will never happen again even when they make all new vehicles sold be EVs.
They want a street induction charging system because the plug in charging system doesn't work as advertised..
Electric vehicle-charging roadway
Be a good time to invest in dump trucks somebody scores on the body pick-up contracts.
“will concentrate on a half-mile stretch of road in Westwood”
WOW, HALF A MILE! And are there any cars with induction charging? And going 30mph would give you one minute of charging time which would charge the battery by about 1/500 percent - probably much less.
Truly stupid - California stupid! What a waste of money it doesn’t have!
With 8 year or 100K mile battery warranty, I wouldn’t want to tinker..
If you drive the other way, does your electric bus re-charge the road?
After the Olympics, they can re-purpose that section of road for the Bullet Train.
Soon the Bullet Train, due to new science, will be converted to induction charging as more efficient, and as noted, that electric road gives free charging.
THE NEXT EARTHQUAKE WILL BE A GAME CHANGER!!!
You are thinking 1900s level technology. MIT and a number of other’s have come up with RF induction vs magnetic the two are apple to oranges. RF induction works over several tens of centimeters and in MIT’s case several meters indoors.
Tesla has licenced a patented RF version for it’s CYBERCAB they tested it at over 90% eff. Welcome to the 21st century.
That said half a mile at 30 mph which would be around avg bus speed on a city street. Would give 1 min over a half mile run. RF induction can do 500kw of power transfer met with 90+% eff using only the coil ddirectly under the bus coils really but only the ones directly under the receiver are turned on with microsecond precision there is no stray fields along the roadway and the receiver being in tight coupling would shield the bus above it. People with pace makers would be safe in it. That and RF induction is in the tens to hundreds of thousands of hertz the wavelength is too long to couple with a pacemakers small metal case.
So one min at 500kw is 500000 joules over 60 seconds. That’s 30 million joules, there is 3.6 MJ in a kWh so 8.33 kWh would be transferred each time a bus ran over it. The Tesla Semi hauling a 82,000lb load averages 1.7 kWh to the mile a bus is 30,000lb and not moving at freeway speeds where air drag is the primary drag source at 30 mph a bus would use 800 ish watt hours per mile. This would mean a bus would grab 10 miles worth of range while passing over that road section. Since this is for busses running shuttle services to and from that Olympic venue that makes sense as each time a bus arrives it gets 10 miles of charge of the other end of the run is 5 mile radius or less when it returns it picks up the round trip for the next run.
Bus drivers have to take mandatory breaks at the end of a period of time and also at each end of a run for time phasing. Having a charger at these end of run or break points would allow for 15 minute charges or what ever the phasing pause time is usually 5 min. In those cases you can put in 150 to 450 MJ @500kw RF induction. Or 41-125 kWh for the 5 min case it’s 51 miles of range well past what a bus will do between mandatory break stops or phasing stops the 15 break stop would add a days worth of range @188 miles well past what an urban bus would run on a route in a day. Only regional or maybe outer suburban busses would exceed 100 miles of total travel in a day.
So yeah a half mile section on a feeder route to a major event space where every bus entering and probably leaving would cross could make the whole thing differed emissions since you shifted the diesel particulate matter emissions ,NOX,SOX to gas turbines far outside the city not a bad switch since gas turbines are 60+% efficient in combined cycle plants, and they make zero SOX, near nero NOX, and zero particulate matter emissions. Even taking into account grid losses at 5% for 200 ish miles of HVAC and the transformers plus 10% for the induction loss and 8% more for the round trip pack loss. That still beats a diesel at 30% avg efficiency in commercial duty usually the BSFC of a bus is under 20% they get single digit mpg on diesel. All that stop go stop go is energy lost to heat via the brakes and running the diesel to accelerate inertial mads from a stop every stop is horribly inefficient. Electric motors have max torque at zero RPM and can recover deceleration energy as electrons back to the pack vs heat in brake pads this regen alone cuts in half the energy needed it’s why hybrids double the mpg of their ice cousins of the same size vehicle. A Corolla vs a Prius perfect example Corolla 30 mpg city , Prius I have seen 80mpg or more over ten miles of city traffic driving.
Here is Tesla wireless
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-wireless-charging-efficiency-above-90/
You’re right, I retired from the auto industry in 2000 so any work I did on this came in the last century. Thanks for the update. I did work on the 2000 GMEV regenerative braking system, but not on its inductive chargers.
High frequency magnetic resonant technology is certainly a step in the right direction, but not yet a panacea. It still involves k, the magnetic coupling efficiency, and also the limitation on the battery charging rate limits. Super caps might help that but would then involve ANOTHER large set of hardware and circuits with efficiency losses. On the road, it would also require tunable resonators to match whatever is driving over them. The required high Q values for the circuits increases the difficulty of doing this.
Agree. My comment wasn't so much about the external: whether you have to plug it in or whether it does wireless charging. My comment was on the charge controller built inside the EV. In other words, the charge controller can't be accepting a charge to charge the EV while the EV is on and taking out power from the battery.
“This means that only a tiny fraction of the electricity from the road actually goes into the vehicle driving over it. The rest of the electricity is simply lost as heat, adding to global warming.”
Go get the facts and then retract your post.
“Never mind the effect of the large-size magnetic field on the metal carried by, carried within, people and several types of devices.”
What effects? Non reported to date.
“What could possibly go wrong?”
I don’t know. What could possibly go wrong?
Electreon sells stationary induction stations.
False
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