Are Self-Charging Roads the Future of Green Transportation?

How many times do I have to say it, we just want trains!

But no, no public transport or high-speed rail for us in the US, instead we get flights rideshares (check out this post), and self-charging roads.

Electric vehicles (EVs) are also a topic for another day. They’re not as eco-friendly or as ethical to make as you once thought. But for the sake of today’s post, we will assume EVs are great and also part of the future that we want and need.

What is a self-charging road?

It essentially works the same as wireless phone charges but on a huge scale. Instead of needing to be plugged in, you can just park or drive on these roads and it will charge. The leader in this technology is Electreon, an Israeli company. Oh boy, Free Palestine, by the way. They already have functioning self-charging roads in modern-day Israel on Palestinian land as well as in Europe.

What is the goal of these roads?

Since it takes a lot of raw materials to make EV batteries and especially make EV batteries bigger and more efficient, the goal of these roads is to keep batteries smaller but without sacrificing driving distance. I think this is plausible in places like crowded Europe and perhaps even New England and parts of the Midwest in the US. But, in most parts of the US, this probably won’t work out very well. It’s already hard enough to drive EVs across the SW, PNW, and INW with charging stations, let alone building hundreds of miles of self-charging roads across some more remote areas of the country. Sure, they’ll probably just be on highways and so forth.

The goal also isn’t so much for individual vehicles but rather electric city buses and electric city delivery vans. The goal is cities. I think this is cool. It would make EBs (electric buses) more efficient instead of having to stop to charge as often and the same for delivery vans. This seems much more plausible to me than for all these individual EVs.

They also plan to put them in places where vehicles are for longer periods of time like stoplights and bus stops for example. This will allow for the most charging and makes more sense than trying to replace parts of major highways.

Take a look at these coils. The vehicle only charges when it’s over the coils so you can see why a stoplight would be a much better place to put one than on highways where people are traveling very fast. It’s more efficient to allow cars to charge for a few moments.

How do they work?

I’ll let the folks are Car and Driver explain this for us:

“The technology utilizes a series of specialized coils laid beneath the asphalt, with each individual coil connecting back to a series of power-managing hubs along the side of the road. A corresponding receiver is also placed beneath the EV and absorbs power as it crosses over each coil. Of course, automakers will need to collaborate with Electreon to have receivers installed on vehicles in the future.”

That sounds like a lot of hoops to jump through and also a price increase for consumers. Will they put them on every EV from now on? Will they ask if you want one installed when purchasing an EV? I think it’s too early to tell that plus how much extra it may cost us as the consumers for this extra technology.

But, the actual installation of these coils and these power hubs doesn’t seem to be that intensive or intrusive. Especially for small stretches of city streets, it appears to be easy to install these where they see fit.

Is it efficient enough?

Price-wise, I would say definitely not. This 1/4 mile (400m) stretch of road in Detroit, the first in the US cost, according to MDOT, is $1.9 million in state funds and $4 million from the Electreon team and others. Wowza. $6 million for 400 meters of roadway? That seems wild to me. So if you’re an EV driver in Detroit, not only did your tax dollars go toward this project but now you also have to pay extra for the sensor to be added to your EV to even use this feature. Wild.

As for the price for the individual, Electron currently charges $3-4000 per EV but they’re working to get it down to $1000, which is still a lot to get that receiver installed. But, the pro, is you can charge for free while driving or parking in designated areas as opposed to paying to plug in. I’m not sure how long it would take to pay off a $4000 receiver though.

I couldn’t find any information on their website about how much charge it will give cars. You can check out their full FAQ here to learn more about environmental impact, how long they last, and more.

They monitored the first drive in Detroit to see how an EV would charge on it. I couldn’t find any solid numbers on how much these roads can charge your car, but this is what they provided in the Detroit article: “Those numbers would fluctuate as the van moved along, 16 kW and 9 mph at one point, with the van at a 63% charge.” That’s it. It didn’t say what the van started at or how much it increased over the 1/4 mile.

Even doing a broad search on Google I could not find any hard data on how much these actually charge per minute, per mile, nothing. Let me know if you have found anything, I would love to hear the numbers!

Is this the future of driving?

My biggest worry is that all manufacturers are now going to say “We can make our batteries smaller now!” This will save them money and time. But, if you don’t have these in your cities, now you have an equally expensive EV with less range and nothing you can do about it since you don’t have access to these roads. I hope that doesn’t happen, but there’s a capitalism playbook and similar things have been done before so it’s just something to keep an eye out for.

While EVs are a decent step in the right direction (as I hinted at, they are extremely nuanced), they are still out of plenty of people’s price range. Top that off with the $3-4000 fee to have one of these receivers installed and it’s not very affordable for most people. And, since it really won’t work in rural areas or highways, this is going to be available to city folks.

I think this is a cool advancement honestly. I think it makes a lot of sense when it comes to electrifying our buses, taxis, and delivery vans. It helps them save time and money by not having to stop to plug in.

But, I don’t think this is a great solution for individuals. If we really want to lower our individual and transportation carbon footprints, we need better buses, better trains, and better overall public transportation and bike lanes. I don’t think creating tech from brand-new, raw, unethically mined materials is the answer to anything, even the climate crisis. Especially when we have public transportation staring us right in the face.

These are just my thoughts, let me know how you feel about these down below!

Thank you so much, as always, for reading along. I appreciate your time and support and I hope you learned something today!

I’ll catch ya in the next post, until then, remember that your small actions make a big difference in the long run.

Emma