Bring it on
With small induction loops, I am sure we could all charge our mobile phones and iThingies for free, well at least until we got run over by a tram.
Forget wireless power for phones - Korea's doing it for buses
From July, two electric buses will travel back and forth along the 24km road from Gumi station, but they won't need to recharge as induction loops along the route will top up the battery as they roll. The technology is coming from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and is little more than an extensive field …
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Friday 15th February 2013 13:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Reality check
The power will have to be paid for by someone. At first there might be incentives but ultimately the only fair way is for people to pay for their own usage.
In order to energise the coils there will probably be some sort of authentication method which will feed into a billing system. This will also help to reduce energy wasted when there are no vehicles on particular sections of road.
A thought: with such technology it would likely be trivial to monitor/record location and speed of applicable vehicles. Let's hope the privacy implications are well thought out (fat chance)?
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Thursday 14th February 2013 09:15 GMT frank ly
Wet blanket time
"...embed charging into the M25 and you could be sure of everyone in London getting a couple of hours charging daily."
Not everyone in London drives around the M25, or even drives a car. Who is going to pay for the massive infrastructure costs and associated installation disruption costs; and how will the cost be recovered?
What is the running energy efficiency of this system compared to parked charging of electric vehicles and what is the energy cost of the installation?
I'm a cynical and miserable old git and I ask awkward questions, but they must be asked and answered. I have a feeling that the answers will not be satisfactory.
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Thursday 14th February 2013 10:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Wet blanket time
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_Excise_Duty
"This excise duty was ring-fenced for road construction and was paid directly into a special Road Fund from 1920 until 1937 after which it was treated as general taxation"
It's not been used to fund the roads since 1937.
There are cars which output very low CO2 that pay nothing to get their tax disc, should they be banned from the roads for paying nothing?
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Thursday 14th February 2013 10:27 GMT Mad Mike
Re: AC @ 10:05 -Wet blanket time
Unfortunately, this won't work in the UK. Firstly, the cost would be simply horrific. Secondly, electric cars are only commercially viable against fossil fuel cars (on a cost per mile not including infrastructure basis) because they charge predominantly using off-peak electricity. If they charge as they're being driven, it would be predominantly peak eletricity, which would be something like 3-4 times as expensive (depends on whether you include connection charges etc.). So, whilst it makes electric cars actually work and viable in more circumstances, it actually makes them financially far less viable due to 'fuel' cost.
Sad, but true. The big issue we have in this country (and most countries around the world), is we have plenty of spare electricity overnight (and generating capacity etc.) and we need to time shift it to even the load out. So, some form of storage (whether battery, hydrogen or whatever) is pretty much a requirement.
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Thursday 14th February 2013 12:34 GMT Mad Mike
Re: AC @ 10:05 -Wet blanket time
"Errm - the article talks about topping up the battery as the buses roll. So those batteries could have been charged overnight while the buses are garaged."
Agreed you can take the first charge overnight, but it must be drawing a considerable amount during peak day to make it worthwhile. If it could last all day on batteries, you wouldn't need any of this. So, the problem still exists. It's drawing a considerable amount of extra power during peak day usage and therefore increasing the differential between high and low usage on the network. This is exactly what they're trying to remove. That's part of the reason for Smart metering. Give everyone time of day tarrifs to persuade them to take electricity during the cheaper (and therefore relatively low usage times) on the network.
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Friday 15th February 2013 17:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: AC @ 10:05 -Wet blanket time
No the only reason for SMART metering is that the companies can increase tariffs while pretending it's for the customers own good. Most people use electricity when they need it or do you suggest that some people should move to being awake in the night and asleep in the day? Perhaps the unemployed and elderly??
There used to be economy 7 so you could do all your clothes washing storage heaters, during the night ... but as most storage heaters are inefficient and most washing machines only capable of doing one load without human intervention it's pretty pointless for the average consumer.
Ironically if people bought charge at home EV's it would make sense to get econ7 and perhaps they'd change their behaviours to make better use of other potential savings ... but I kind of doubt it.
Induction has a number of potential advantages ... battery substations charged overnight could power it ... the cars, lorries and buses would be lighter as they don't need to carry around batteries or fuel, thus making lorries/buses more efficient in terms of carrying capacity and cars potentially smaller, faster and requiring less energy to move ... alternatively you could just use it on long motorways, thus killing most peoples complaints that EV cars are no good for long journeys.
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Thursday 14th February 2013 17:16 GMT Suricou Raven
Re: AC @ 10:05 -Wet blanket time
I like China's solution more. Pantographs at bus stops only. Busses have ultracaps. They'll only go for a few minutes on a charge, but that's enough to get from one stop to the next - and they charge so fast, they can get back up to full capacity in the time the bus is parked there.
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Thursday 14th February 2013 10:03 GMT James12345
Re: Wet blanket time
I would think that most people who live in London don't go any way near the M25 because it is after all a road for people who don't live in London. I would have thought that this would be a much better solution to replace overhead electrics on the rail network - no more disruption due to cables falling\being nicked and the exact path of the train and therefore the most efficient transfer point is a known, unlike for drivers, most of whom find it impossible to drive any distance in a straight line.
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Thursday 14th February 2013 09:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
I foresee a complication
A lot of power will be "lost" as soon as commuters figure out that $50 worth of Litz wire, a few components and a length of cable spliced into the wiring loom can charge up their electric cars.
So what if it is 18% efficient, free power is still free and blows a solar panel completely to hell as far as power to weight ratio.
Possible fixes include a "challenge-response" crypto, heavy fines for anyone caught and/or road mounted EMPs to punish those caught stealing power more than once.
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Thursday 14th February 2013 12:42 GMT Wize
Re: I foresee a complication
You could enable sections of the road based on a radio identification unit in the bus. Some sort of changing encryption, like the securID tags. Only someone tailgating the bus will get something.
What I'm thinking about is the next time some idiot decides to dig the road up. Some people take care and check for power and pipework before digging, and work round them. Others find cables when their JCB brings them to the surface.
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Thursday 14th February 2013 09:51 GMT Jon Press
How well insulated are steel toecaps?
Or indeed the copper insoles I've seen advertised to "cure" arthritis.
I'd imagine the induction current from something with enough power to charge a bus battery could at least result in a toasty warm glow in your tootsies, even if you don't have lightning shooting from your shoes.
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Thursday 14th February 2013 13:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: How well insulated are steel toecaps?
"The material needs to be ferrous AFAIK."
It's a long time since I did Physics but my recollection is that non-ferrous metals have electromagnetic properties. If they are a good conductor then eddy currents warm them up nicely. Even if the transfer mechanism depends on resonance for maximum efficiency - then some energy will be absorbed.
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Thursday 14th February 2013 09:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Why under?
Just wondering if it's necessary for the infrastructure to be under the road. Would it work in some form alongside the road, replacing the ubiquitous armco, or something like that? Don't really understand the technology, or at what point distance becomes too much of an issue.
Also, I can't help getting the mental image of Captain Shakespeare's vessel in "Stardust," deploying a net to catch the electricity.
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Thursday 14th February 2013 11:59 GMT TeeCee
Re: Why under?
According to a bloke I met who was around at the time, it's looking after the wires that's the problem.
He told me about one that "lost it" on ice one winter on a one-way system where half-a dozen routes converged. Above it at the time was a rat's nest of intersecting and crossing cables. Once it had stopped spinning, the whole lot was wound around its trolley pole like a giant, metallic candyfloss.
Apparently North London was damn near paralysed for weeks while they restrung that lot.
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Thursday 14th February 2013 10:10 GMT MrXavia
Brilliant, I was in China many years ago while they still had the overhead wires powering their buses, I always thought it was a shame they stopped using them..
This technology will hopefully allow countries to get their buses back onto electric, and if we can charge on every motorway, then suddenly electric cars become practical!
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Thursday 14th February 2013 10:34 GMT Nuke
@MrXavia
Wrote :- "I was in China many years ago while they still had the overhead wires powering their buses, I always thought it was a shame they stopped using them.."
I remember them in London (up until ~1965?). Three problems -
(1) Pointwork - most routes were radially in the suburbs so that they did not need to cross other routes. Points were possible - such as for the branch to the depot, where the driver got out and pulled a lever on the post.
(2) Roadworks and other diversions, and even large parked vehicles could bring things to a halt.
(3) The maintenance and ugliness of those overhead wires.
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Thursday 14th February 2013 10:27 GMT Da Weezil
another pipe dream
Given the number of dire warnings about an ageing UK generation infrastructure - and thew potential for "gray outs" due to a lack of capacity in the UK at peak times.. where is all the power for this going to come from? And how is this *green* power going to be produced in enough quantity to power the additional requirement?
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Thursday 14th February 2013 12:38 GMT Mad Mike
Re: another pipe dream
"And how is this *green* power going to be produced in enough quantity to power the additional requirement?"
That is indeed a big issue. During the last winter freezes (snow for a week etc.), wind generation was almost zero. Absolutely tiny. The reason is that cold freezes like this are associated with calm conditions over the UK. Do you really want all transport to stop because the windmills aren't turning?
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Thursday 14th February 2013 11:47 GMT Lee D
- Inefficient charging.
- Miles of roads ripped up (again)
- High-cost metal loops put into the roads.
- Knock-on effects of huge inductive loops on car radios, satellite equipment, and everything else you get in a moving box of metal controlled by electronics when you induce a huge current in it.
- "free" electricity (so someone, somewhere pays for you to charge your car, and assumes you'll ONLY charge your car on it).
- Differing standards / compatibility already.
- And, at the end of the day, no worse than having a free plug-in point where you park and at home (or for buses, at the DAMN BUS STOP!). In fact, that makes infinitely more sense to do that than to have this junk underneath the road.
I love the way we talk about just ripping up miles of road, slapping in some humongous, inefficient inductive coils into both the bus and road (yeah, because nobody would steal metal while it's got power running through it, right?!) and it all just working better than plugging the bus in for an hour at the beginning / end of a journey instead.
How would it work on motorways? At 70mph, I would be "in range" of a 30m inductive coil for less than a second. To get an hour's worth of inductive charging I would have to drive over 108km of coils with no gaps. Not only is that a HUGE amount of metal, that's a huge amount of digging up the roads, and a very unusual driving pattern. Multiply it up by lots and lots of cars, lane, buses, and everything else and it's a stupendous waste of resources to do what a battery and a plug socket can do.
Even assuming that plugging it in is only twice as efficient as inducing the same current, I could get the same power in 30 mins of being parked (and even buses spend more time parked, over a day, than they do moving). I think an extra electric bus taking it in turns to park for 30mins or go for a 30mins circuit of the route is going to be cheaper than ripping up even 1km of roads. Take into account peak periods (more expensive electric) and system-gaming (drive car along road, take it home, swap battery - or use car to power something - drive car back along road whenever you run out of juice, hey presto free electricity without even having to modify the car or charging systems).
I've heard some utterly ridiculous ideas, but induction charging vehicles by in-road chargers? Please. If you want to do that, just save the effort and change the roads for mag-lev tracks and have done with it. More efficient, same power source, same number of changes required to vehicles and much, much, much less electricity wasted inducing currents in passing trucks full of metal.
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Thursday 14th February 2013 15:30 GMT D@v3
Motorways
"How would it work on motorways? At 70mph, I would be "in range" of a 30m inductive coil for less than a second"
Unless it's the M25 at peak times, where it can take 10-15 minutes to go over that 30m section of road, so all the time you are effectively stationary, but still using power (radio, air con etc..) you wouldn't be using the (or at least, much of the) charge from your batteries.
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Thursday 14th February 2013 11:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
One problem hopefully solved
This sounds like a good idea getting past the battery issue of current electric cars. However there is an excessive drive to reduce our energy consumption and worse we have replaced energy generating power stations with wind farms and solar panels. The push for less co2 destroys any hope of rolling out this technology very far.
Considering how great the last gov was at securing our energy supply could we trust them to deploy this technology and deploy the required energy sources regardless of the nutters?
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Friday 15th February 2013 02:09 GMT Steven Roper
Re: One problem hopefully solved
As Mr. Orwell so rightly pointed out in 1984:
"...and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was all part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week."
Of course, the real reason the power was cut off was precisely to reduce the quality of life; part of the underlying principle that power is asserted by making people suffer.
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Thursday 14th February 2013 12:15 GMT Peter Ford
Didn't Oxford do something like this?
Years ago, they put some buses on a limited route with a charging point at the railway station. Those buses I think used a big flywheel to store the power, which was spun up by induction while it waited at the stop.
To me, the bus application is a realistic use of something like this: the stops are fairly predictable and at the ends of the route are often a couple of minutes idle time to spend charging. Add in the fact that bus engines are not the cleanest things on the road, and that electric drive gives you the sort of low speed acceleration that works well on a bus, and you're sorted.
HGV's could probably get some use from this sort of thing, although it would be simple just to plug them in at service stations while the drivers take their requisite tacho breaks...
If we could remove stinky diesel engines from public transport and freight that would cut a big chunk of the pollution and emissions problems, even if the cars all stick to internal comustion engines...
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Thursday 14th February 2013 18:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Lateral thinking
We could either continue our search for solutions using the expensive technological options at our disposal, or take advantage of Nature's head start provided by many millions of years of variation and natural selection. What I am suggesting is that we look to nature for some kind of biological transport mechanism - one that has evolved over time to do the very thing that we require. One with sufficiently predictable behaviour, that is able to be programmed for the desired task. One that consumes renewable resources, and produced bio-degradable waste products. Perhaps several units that fit this description could be harnessed together, to provide an engine that can be attached to some kind of carriage unit.
I realise that this is a radical proposal, and has obviously never been tried before, but I believe that it could work. I suggest that we start with limited trials. Naturally public safety is a primary concern, and therefore I suggest that a suitable attired safety officer could walk in front of these experimental vehicles carrying a red flag.
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Thursday 14th February 2013 18:35 GMT Nigel 11
Bus stops?
I'm surprised that the obvious seems to have been missed. Busses spend a lot of time stopped at predefined locations - bus stops. Put the induction chargers at the stops (only). Give the busses some sort of secure-ID so that the charging turns on only when there's a bus at the stop. Installation cost greatly reduced, freeloader problem greatly recuced. Add yellow lines and discharge monitoring and cameras for further defense against freeloaders.
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Thursday 14th February 2013 21:13 GMT mark l 2
Bratislava in Slovakia still has the electric trolley buses so they are still in use in other places of the world. Unfortunately in the UK we ripped up most of our tram and trolley bus infrastructure when we thought the car was going to be the bees knees and no one would need public transport anymore
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Thursday 14th February 2013 21:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
This is hardly new technology or application - Inductive Power Transfer (IPT) has been around for years and keeps getting a prod every 5 years or so. The company I used to work for installed a light rail system about 10 years ago for a tourist spot. The gear was amazingly expensive, was expensive to install and does emit a reasonable amount of RF which can cause more than a few issues if you need to use any other sort of cellular or HF device... It did work though, and for the short length of rail was a good choice of technology.
The cost benefit ratio for regular roading (with all the logistical issues of getting high voltage power along miles and miles of roads) is not going to ever make this a viable option. I think a good example of this are the IPT "Cateye" reflectors (Centre line delineators) which use a radio based IPT system. Despite being a viable and very neat product they are still not popular due to the cost of installing and maintaining the system in the harsh roading environment. They are a specialty device used for specialty applications where a cost benefit can be proven (like tunnels or motorways).
That being said, I still think the original concepts of IPT / near field charging systems were brilliant for smart phones - less tangle on my desk..
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Friday 15th February 2013 07:32 GMT baguar
More lateral thinking - generating electricity
I always wondered about doing this in reverse - use the movement of vehicles over induction loops in the road to generate electricity.
Nor sure about the practicalities of this, no doubt some brighter spark (*ahem*) than me can point out the many and obvious flaws in this cunning plan.
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Friday 15th February 2013 17:59 GMT This Side Up
Pantographs
"pantographs (a wonderful word, referring to the sprung connector usually seen atop a tram or train that collects power from an overhead cantenary wire) "
No, it collects power from the contact wire. The contact wire is suspended from the catenary by means of droppers. A catenary is the shape of a chain with finite mass suspended between two points. For obvious reasons the contact wire needs to be as flat as possible although it zig-zags from side to side to avoid wearing a groove in the carbon contact strip on the pantograph.
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