‘E-highways’ look set to be the direction of travel
THERE is no question about it: transport belches out carbon. As a sector, it is responsible for 24 per cent of global emissions. This means that radical thinking is needed to develop innovative solutions.
One promising answer to the problem of pollution caused by road traffic is to build e-highways. These will cut emissions from HGVS, and a number of companies including Siemens have extensively tested them in Germany, Sweden and the United States.
In some ways, this proposed technology harks back to the days of trolley buses some 60 years ago, though it is clearly more sophisticated.
E-highways will use powered overhead wires, with lorries having pantographs fitted to draw the electricity.
The power supplied would power an electric motor on the vehicle. At the same time, it would charge an onboard battery, allowing the lorry to use this when it drove off the directly electrified route.
A consortium including Siemens Mobility, is to undertake a pilot e-highway project in Yorkshire. This is part of the £20m put aside for zero emission road freight feasibility studies and aims to electrify some of the major UK freight roads by 2050.
“Effectively, we are taking rail technology and putting it on the motorway, but we now need to see how it will work in terms of logistics”, says Siemens Mobility’s Justin Moss.
“It will be a way of reducing carbon output from HGVS, using the sort of overhead line you would find on a light rail system. This would be installed above the slow lane of the motorway for vehicles to attach themselves to.
“We’ve identified that the road link between Glasgow and Edinburgh, for instance, would work very well for this sort of technology. It complements the need for getting more freight on the railway.
“You’re not going to get rid of HGVS completely, but this solution would work in terms of agility. It’s potentially quite expensive, but not necessarily as complicated as it would be for rail.”