Electric cars will charge on the move
The roads will look the same but coils under the car and tarmac will provide energy as you drive
Picture the warm glow of an LED lightbulb. Someone is holding it in their hand, walking around a room. The bulb isn’t connected to a plug but it’s still on. Scientists at Stanford University in the United States think this is the next big breakthrough.
Wireless charging is not new. A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) cracked that technology in 2007. It now comes standard in cellphones and other devices. This has so far only been for stationary devices and all it has done is made charging more convenient.
But being able to wirelessly charge something that is moving is a gamechanger, especially for electric vehicles. The researchers said: “In theory, one could drive for an unlimited amount of time without having to stop to recharge.”
This would involve running electric coils underneath roads and cars. Both of these coils will be surrounded by magnets, which create an unstable magnetic field when electricity flows through them. That allows electrons to leave one coil, or magnetic field, and jump to a similar one nearby, taking with them electric charge.
Being able to continually charge as you drive will eliminate one of the biggest obstacles facing electric vehicles: range anxiety.
The new Tesla Model 3 can do 350km on a single charge, and other car makers are achieving similar distances with their battery technology. But doing so requires cars to stop for a long time and charge up. Wireless energy does away with this limitation.
In South Africa, electric vehicle technology has not left cities. There are only 300 such vehicles in the country. The government intends to increase that to three million by 2050.
With wireless charging of moving objects, the Stanford researchers said the breakthrough could also profoundly change how manufacturing happens.
Now, even in automated factories, robots have to stick to a certain area within the radius of their charging points. With wireless charging conduits under the floor, those robots could now move wherever they needed to.
The same is possible for robots in households and any other areas.
At the same time, a lot of research is going into working out how to make roads save the electricity that is generated by people stepping on them, or car wheels spinning along them. All that energy is currently wasted.
Roads of the future will collect that energy. In the Netherlands, running and cycling paths that absorb energy have already been built and the energy is used for lights.
This could mean networks of roads that collect their own energy from whatever uses them, and then transfers that energy to cars driving on the road, or to the cellphones of people walking down them.
Those cars will be electric, and smarter and safer because they will be operated by artificial intelligence. This will mean a transport system that looks like the one of today, but is much more efficient and is built on smart technology. Its cost will be paid for by the energy saved, and the fact that the system doesn’t need to buy energy. This, in turn, will mean power stations need not be built to supply energy.
For now, the Stanford team of two has made the technology work. It can already transfer enough electricity to charge small devices, such as pacemakers. But they admit that they still need to “significantly increase” the amount of electricity they can transfer for it to work on something as energy-hungry as a vehicle.
That, though, is just a matter of upping the scale of their operation. From cellphone companies to car giants, hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in battery technology and moving energy between devices. Sony recently patented technology to move electricity between devices, so a computer screen could be wirelessly powered by a laptop. Similar advances are pushing the envelope.
Put together, all of these incremental advances are changing the world of energy.
Battery technology requires cars to stop for a long time and charge up. Wireless does away with this limitation