Siemens eHighway

[handymanshandle]

3 hours ago, HarryNyquist said:

This is kinda neat. Though I have to wonder what the voltage is. Unlike power lines alongside a road, overhead lines have to be bare to make contact with the pantograph itself.

 

I hope the system is robust enough to have GFCI circuitry somewhere to cut power in the case of a storm or something similarly catastrophic..

WOOOO TALK ABOUT GFCI

there's a youtuber I watch sometimes who just did a video on it...

 

[Bcat00]

Don't get your hopes up, we have this in Canada and I can tell you it's a nightmare for traffic

[Coaxialgamer]

6 hours ago, TigerHawk said:

I mean I am all for this idea but this is just transferring the pollution from the truck to the power station, so unless the power station supplying the lines is super clean, its not as great as the advertisements make it out to be. I am pretty cynical, though. I also don't know what kind of power stations Germany is using these days(fossil fuels, solar, nuclear, etc)

I feel like if there was as much money pushing the oil industry as their was pushing the renewable resources industry, things would be way better than they are right now.

Wind farms take up way too much land area and come with their own problems(destructive to wild life)
Solar farms are incredibly inefficient even in the best of conditions(IIRC only 3% of sunlight is converted to usable energy, the rest is lost as heat? maybe its 30% not 3 but silicon panels are horribly inefficient)
Nuclear seems to be pretty efficient and environment friendly, until it comes time to dispose of the spent fuel rods or an incident happens.
Any progress harnessing tidal energy? Would that harm sealife?
Fusion always seems to be "10-15 years away" to the point that I feel like its not gonna happen in this century anymore.

So unless you have access to a really nice hydroelectric plant, you are SOL on "green energy" really.

Even in a case where the CO2 footprint is the same , having a centralized location for power generation is still a big advantage because it enables you to move the pollution away from population centers .

But in this case we'd also have a reduced footprint : turns out having thousand of little oil burners driving around isn't the most efficient ; and diesel engines have an efficiency of around 30-35% ( regular petrol is even worse ), while electric engines can actually be quite a bit more efficient , with an efficiency of well above 90% . Plus , if the majority of the power will be provided by the infrastructure and doesn't need to be transported as fuel or batteries on the truck itself , then that could drastically reduce the vehicle's weight

[mr moose]

3 hours ago, Bcat00 said:

Don't get your hopes up, we have this in Canada and I can tell you it's a nightmare for traffic

what happens?

 

[Bcat00]

41 minutes ago, mr moose said:

what happens?

 

Its nice when its moving, but the second the car stops and allow the passengers to get off, that's when the trouble starts. 

 

Then there's the issue with the wire maintenance and track upkeep, its far worse than simply using a bus.

[dizmo]

Works for smaller countries, but not really for larger ones.

[alextulu]

4 hours ago, Bcat00 said:

Its nice when its moving, but the second the car stops and allow the passengers to get off, that's when the trouble starts.

Passangers? You must be talking about trolleybuses. This is different.

 

Trolleybuses can't disconnect from the overhead lines, and can't overtake each other.

 

These trucks were designed to dynamically connect and disconnect from the lines.

[Trixanity]

35 minutes ago, alextulu said:

Passangers? You must be talking about trolleybuses. This is different.

 

Trolleybuses can't disconnect from the overhead lines, and can't overtake each other.

 

These trucks were designed to dynamically connect and disconnect from the lines.

Yeah, I can't see it being safe to stop in the middle of the Autobahn either. Rip the guy tailgating you when you slam the brakes on your truck/bus to unload.

[Sauron]

Cool, it actually makes a lot of sense from a practical point of view. You can use regular fuel (or run on battery) in urban areas and not worry about range or refueling on the highway. It shouldn't be that expensive either. I only wonder what happens if a car (or worse, a truck) smashes into one of the poles - does every truck on the highway suddenly lose power?

[Trixanity]

21 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Cool, it actually makes a lot of sense from a practical point of view. You can use regular fuel (or run on battery) in urban areas and not worry about range or refueling on the highway. It shouldn't be that expensive either. I only wonder what happens if a car (or worse, a truck) smashes into one of the poles - does every truck on the highway suddenly lose power?

I would imagine the highway (unlike the concept art) will have barriers to prevent collisions and the cables themselves should be up high enough that only the vehicles with the hardware on top can touch it.

[GoldenLag]

Very nice concept on long stretches of road that would have emptied the battery.

 

Range is not too big of an issue when you have to have rest periods, but this should help on situations where the road is long and sometimes steep. 

 

Could also je something that can be installed in Tunnels in more mountainus countries like Norway and Switzerland. A lot of tunnels are straight  and a couple of KM charge helps

[IhazHedont]

16 hours ago, Natsoup said:

I thought like this for a while, like electric cars were stupid because then the emissions would just be from the power plant. But someone pointed out to me that just about any modern power station is going to be significantly more efficient than a tiny car motor, or relatively tiny truck motor in this case.

Well:

 

 

And most important:

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy

 

Electric transport is, for the moment, coal/gas transportation. It is not clean, it is called green washing.

 

And we are not talking about the extra storage capacity + infrastructure that you need to build this lines, lines support and pantographes.

 

For the industry and the people working ? That is an excellent new. For the environment ? A bad one.

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, Trixanity said:

I would imagine the highway (unlike the concept art) will have barriers to prevent collisions and the cables themselves should be up high enough that only the vehicles with the hardware on top can touch it.

Sure, but traffic accidents can get pretty gnarly and a barrier isn't always enough.

[cluelessgenius]

i love this promotional material

 

also driving and texting will be all but eliminated thanks to electromagnetic fields on that thing

 

but seriously what happens when a hooked up truck crashes and takes down hundreds of meters of this power line preferably right into the end of a traffic jam

 

could they not integrate it into the road somehow? i fear of a future were well live eco friendly zero emissioons and saved the planet but too bad we cant see any of it anymore cause theirs wind turbines and solar panels and power lines everywhere

[Trixanity]

20 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Sure, but traffic accidents can get pretty gnarly and a barrier isn't always enough.

It would have to be pretty bad to break through a reinforced barrier and still have enough power to break a (probably) reinforced pole. I'm sure they've thought of it and it's probably a very small chance of devolving into a catastrophe. I mean of course a truck has the mass and the power to break through if the conditions line up but it must have been accounted for.

[Trixanity]

59 minutes ago, IhazHedont said:

Well:

 

 

And most important:

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy

 

Electric transport is, for the moment, coal/gas transportation. It is not clean, it is called green washing.

 

And we are not talking about the extra storage capacity + infrastructure that you need to build this lines, lines support and pantographes.

 

For the industry and the people working ? That is an excellent new. For the environment ? A bad one.

That's a pretty awful data source to use. You can't say Germany data = global data.

 

The point was that it's more efficient to produce power at a power plant than it was in an ICE. Your data does not disprove that. This should reduce emissions by shifting the burden to a more efficient source even if it wasn't a green energy source necessarily although there should be plenty of that as 33% of current energy comes from green sources. However that may shift with the added burden on the power grid from increased electrification of transportation. And even if it was the same amount of emissions it would still be a net gain locally for people. And by the time this gains any significant ground the percentage of renewable energy sources should have increased.

[Tech Enthusiast]

17 hours ago, RorzNZ said:

Not really the point. Electric vehicles to be presented as the future must be a more attractive option, not worse. To get people to like it, it must be more transportable and more powerful than combustion. Tesla has got it right for their haulers. There needs to be more incentive to use them, this is just current technology, not the future. Lazy ideas.

The lines only allow charging while driving. 

It is a bonus. Even Tesla trucks could add those and just charge on the highway while driving.

 

Also, 90km/h is more than allowed in Germany. 

Only cars have no limit, but trucks have. Don't trucks have speed limits in the US?

[IhazHedont]

59 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

That's a pretty awful data source to use. You can't say Germany data = global data.

 

The point was that it's more efficient to produce power at a power plant than it was in an ICE. Your data does not disprove that. This should reduce emissions by shifting the burden to a more efficient source even if it wasn't a green energy source necessarily although there should be plenty of that as 33% of current energy comes from green sources. However that may shift with the added burden on the power grid from increased electrification of transportation. And even if it was the same amount of emissions it would still be a net gain locally for people. And by the time this gains any significant ground the percentage of renewable energy sources should have increased.

It is world datas, not only Germany, I was not trying to extrapolate from it/to it: my point was oriented this way because the comment I was replying to was about electric cars in general, and Germany is a very small market compared to the US/China/India.

Then I came back to the topic, the infrastructure/energy needed for such project being clearly not negligible.

 

Also, Germany is not an isolated country, it is interconnected all over European countries, hence it is extremely difficult to define each proportion of electricity production source: fossil ( still massively used in EU and in Germany* itself), Nuclear or renewable (all sorts included) ?

 

*: https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&year=2018&month=2
I selected February because I think it was a very stressful month due to the cold wave we had all over EU.

[Tech Enthusiast]

The point people like to ignore about electrical vehicles:

 

Yes, they get charged by coal and other stuff.

Yes, they are not 100% clean, yet.

 

But every single coal plant replaced by whatever else that is not polluting, instantly makes every single electrical vehicle less polluting.

That is far easier to handle, than having to replace every single car and truck whenever something slightly cleaner comes around. It is like a joker card that just gets better and better on its own, without any adjustments. 

 

Claiming we should not use electrical, just because they don't eliminate 100% of the pollution NOW, is silly. Even if they are 10% cleaner only, it is still 10% cleaner. And it is going up without replacing the car in question.

Just like saying: "I don't have a million for a house now, so i better don't start saving for it either!"

[dalekphalm]

15 hours ago, Bcat00 said:

Don't get your hopes up, we have this in Canada and I can tell you it's a nightmare for traffic

I think you're confused about what this is.

 

This is a Hybrid-Electric Transport Truck, that also has an Active Phantograph system, with live wires hung above the highway, so that it can access and power the vehicle while using the wires.

 

The wires are totally optional. Once the truck is out of range of the wires (Eg: goes onto a side road) it uses a pretty standard Hybrid Electric drive system.

 

There are no tracks. There are no passengers. This is for delivery trucks, not trams or buses.

[yian88]

Why arent all the buses in cities replaced with trolley buses by now, you dont drive at high speed in the city anyway so these are perfect. The regular diesel busses pollute so heavily i hate them especially 15 year old models we have in our city.

[dalekphalm]

8 minutes ago, yian88 said:

Why arent all the buses in cities replaced with trolley buses by now, you dont drive at high speed in the city anyway so these are perfect. The regular diesel busses pollute so heavily i hate them especially 15 year old models we have in our city.

A lot of the buses in my city are Hybrid ones, so that's one possible solution.

 

I think the big answer to your question is cost. It's a big up front investment of infrastructure - even if it might make sense long term.

[Guest]

4 hours ago, Rattenmann said:

The lines only allow charging while driving. 

It is a bonus. Even Tesla trucks could add those and just charge on the highway while driving.

 

Also, 90km/h is more than allowed in Germany. 

Only cars have no limit, but trucks have. Don't trucks have speed limits in the US?

Tesla trucks shouldn't need them, why invest in the wrong infrastructure only trucks can use, rather than a universal system?

[Tech Enthusiast]

12 minutes ago, RorzNZ said:

Tesla trucks shouldn't need them, why invest in the wrong infrastructure only trucks can use, rather than a universal system?

I don't think this is meant to replace anything at all. It is done to make the switch faster and easier. Added options, not replacing the option that is Tesla.

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, Rattenmann said:

I don't think this is meant to replace anything at all. It is done to make the switch faster and easier. Added options, not replacing the option that is Tesla.

What could make it faster and easier than less infrastructure needed?