THE EV SOLUTION IS TO GO WIRELESS
Society has to start considering how we will accommodate battery-powered cars
Here’s a bold prediction: We will never, ever have enough charging stations to allow us to convert all of our internal combustion-powered cars — 300 million and counting in North America — to battery power.
The dirty secret about the EV segment is that no one has any idea how we’ll service all those vehicles if we were really to convert 100 per cent of them to electric propulsion. Nobody.
There are plans to slowly build up a recharging infrastructure: Quick-charge stations at the mall, more at service stations that dot our superhighways. But no one — and I have asked virtually every EV automaker and infrastructure engineer I have ever met the same question — has any idea how we’re going to recharge our cars when we go 100 per cent electric.
Just one of the problems is recharging between cities.
For roadside charging ports to replenish lithium-ions as quickly as we otherwise can with gas or diesel, we would need two-megawatt chargers, which would require 4,000 volts. And nobody is even dreaming about, let alone engineering, 4,000-volt batteries or charging stations.
Then there are all the households with no access to charging points, which include existing condos and apartment buildings, not to mention the multitudes that still rely on curbside parking. Meeting all these challenges is simply not on anyone’s radar.
What’s required is an all-encompassing plan, a real plan. Not one based on Tesla fanboy fantasies of 1,000-kilometre range Roadsters and not using their car heaters during the winter.
I suspect one of the key contributors to the effective transformation to zero emissions will be wireless inductive charging, which makes home recharging more convenient. A little sevenor 10-kilowatt pad in the garage, or a magnetic coil built into the driveway, means never forgetting to plug in your car.
Wireless charging, although considerably more expensive, would solve the issue of curbside parking. Norway’s capital, Oslo, is slated to become the first city to offer wireless charging at taxi stands. Finnish utilities giant Fortum and U.S. supplier Momentum Dynamics are combining to build 75-kW roadside “charging plates” powerful enough to allow taxis to drive all day with intermittent charging. Similar built-in “opportunity chargers” already work so well that electric buses in Wenatchee, Wash., can be driven all day without interruption, thanks to powerful 200-kW “resonant magnetic inductive” chargers. The same technology, albeit less powerful, could be used to allow charging to those limited to street parking, a huge problem in places such as Montreal. Wireless charging will also be far more reliable; Wenatchee’s Link Transit reports that Momentum’s opportunity chargers have been working completely trouble-free for 14 months.
As difficult as solving those issues will be, finding a solution to intra-city recharging will prove more difficult. But at least partial salvation will come from building wireless inductive charging right into our roadways. Of course, as one might expect, the problems with such a perpetual charging highway are manifold, not the least of which is that they cost at least US$2 million per mile to build. But not all roads need be converted. Inner-city travel could still be handled by home charging, while the only intra-city highways that would need immediate upgrading would be the most essential of routes.
Sweden, which already has two kilometres of electrified public highway outside Stockholm, has half a million kilometres of roadway, but Hans Sall, chief executive of the eRoadArlanda consortium, says that as little as 5,000 km would have to be electrified to service long-distance travellers.
Based on that, it would cost about $2 billion to connect Windsor and Montreal inductively.
The sooner we start thinking beyond the conventional, the sooner we can achieve our EV goals.