What if highways were electric? Germany testing the idea
OBER-RAMSTADT, Germany — On a highway south of Frankfurt recently, Thomas Schmieder maneuvered his Scania tractortrailer and its load of house paint into the far right lane. Then he flicked a switch you won’t find on most truck dashboards.
Outside the cab a contraption started to unfold from the roof, looking like a clothes-drying rack with an upside-down sled welded to the top.
The cab became very quiet as the diesel engine cut out and electric motors took over. The truck was still a truck, but now it was powered like many trains or streetcars.
There’s a debate over how to make the trucking industry free of emissions, and whether batteries or hydrogen fuel cells are the best way to fire up electric motors in big vehicles. Schmieder was part of a test of a third alternative: a system that feeds electricity to trucks as they drive, using wires strung above the roadway and a pantograph mounted on the cab.
At one level the idea makes perfect sense. The system is energy efficient because it delivers power directly from the electrical grid to the motors. The technology saves weight and money because batteries tend to be heavy and expensive, and a truck using overhead wires needs only a big enough battery to get from the off-ramp to its final destination.
And the system is relatively simple. Siemens, the German electronics giant that provided the hardware for this test route, adapted equipment that has been used for decades to drive trains and urban streetcars.
At another level the idea is insane. Who’s going to pay to string thousands of miles of high voltage electrical cable above the world’s major highways?
Figuring out how to make trucks emissions-free is a crucial part of the fight against climate change and dirty air. Long-haul diesel trucks produce a disproportionate share of greenhouse gases and other pollutants because they spend so much time on the road.
But the industry is divided. Daimler and Volvo, the world’s two biggest truck makers, are betting on hydrogen fuel cells for long-haul rigs. They argue that the heavy batteries needed to provide acceptable range are impractical for trucks because they subtract too much capacity from payload.
Traton, the company that owns truck makers Scania, MAN and Navistar, argues that hydrogen is too expensive and inefficient, because of the energy needed to produce it. Traton, majority owned by Volkswagen, is betting on ever-improving batteries — and on electrified highways.
Traton is among the backers of the so-called eHighway south of Frankfurt, a group that also includes Siemens and Autobahn GmbH, the government agency that oversees German highways. There are also short segments of electrified road in the states of Schleswig-Holstein and Baden-Württemberg. The technology has been tried in Sweden and, in 2017, on a 1-mile stretch near the Port of Los Angeles.
The government is being cautious because of the risk that taxpayers would pay for electrified highways only for the technology to be shunned by the trucking industry or rendered obsolete by something else.
“We don’t support it because we don’t think it’s going to happen,” Geert De Cock, an electricity and energy specialist at Transport & Environment, an advocacy group in Brussels.