Christopher de Saxe, head of sustainability at London-based freight management start-up, Zeus,
says an electric road system (ERS) is an economically attractive solution to decarbonise heavy goods vehicles.
“An electric road system is essentially a dynamic charging solution for any vehicle, but we’re mainly talking about heavy trucks,” he says.
According to de Saxe, an ERS reduces the battery capacity needed for many journeys compared with big battery trucks. This reduces vehicle cost, weight, and embodied emissions, as well as peak loading on the electricity grid. “A big drawcard for these kinds of systems is the impact that they have on reducing the battery capacity needed on vehicles,” he says.
“This has a number of implications regarding vehicle cost, weight, and efficiency, as well as the embodied emissions in those batteries, which can be significant.
“If you look across the ERS for light, medium and heavy vehicles, the impact that they have on reducing battery sizes is fairly consistent. For any of these, if you consider the price of BEVs, especially your kind of 40-, 44-tonne units, whichever way you slice it, the batteries are a huge part of the cost. A 40% or 60% reduction is going to have a big impact on the cost of that vehicle.”
A slight indirect impact is peak loading on the grid, de Saxe says.
“If you imagine an entire country’s HGB fleet transitioning to either big battery trucks with high-capacity static chargers versus smaller battery trucks with dynamic charging, the impact on the grid could be significantly more favourable,” he says.
ERS can involve in-road conductive systems, in-road inductive systems, or an overhead-cable type of conductive system.
“This is the solution we were most interested in early on,” de Saxe says. “The work that we’ve done could be applicable to any type of dynamic charging. Essentially it looks to be economically attractive based on a number of studies that have been done throughout Europe and the UK, particularly for the higher-end heavy vehicles, which in Europe is up to 44 tonnes,” he says.
“We’ve done a lot of work on electric road systems for the UK. Compared to the competing options of big battery trucks or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, it does look to be like one of the lowest-cost economically feasible solutions.”
However, de Saxe says that doesn’t mean it’s politically attractive. “This requires centralised, big decisions from government and it’s very likely many governments wouldn’t go down this route. But that doesn’t mean it’s not potentially the best economic solution.”