It is the cheapest and most efficient solution, the trucks only need enough range for local delivery and transport, and since they charge from cables, they dont occupy petrol stations.
https://movemnt.net/uk-trial-to-electrify-30km-of-motorway-w...
The highway where trucks work like electric trains
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg
Its interesting if it could be used in combination with self driving truck technology for long haul train style trucking.
Not necessarily disagreeing, but if the solution has been obvious for 50 years, why hasn't it happened?
Also we had trolleybusses in many cities and got rid of them
Entrenched interests make more money by prolonging the problem. Arguably the solution would be economically superior (vastly so!), but the folks who'd profit from it aren't in power _now_, and government lacks both the technical competency to understand what to do, and the balls to do it.
1. How do you use it? First you need an electric truck, or a truck where at least 50% of its wheels are connected to electric motors. Either way you'd have to retrofit existing fleets of all shapes and sizes, so one or more companies would need to specialize in doing that, which would be very expensive initially. So you have to have an electric fleet to retrofit, or retrofit an ICE fleet (which makes zero economic sense).
2. How often is it used? The truck might actually only spend 1/2-2/3 of its time connected to the system, what with time waiting to load/unload at ports and depots, time before/after you're on highway, dealing with traffic on the highway itself.
3. How do you pay for the energy? You need a company to generate the energy, a company to charge users for the energy, a way to identify the truck as it's receiving the energy, tariff management software, etc.
4. Where are you going to install it? What roads will or won't work? How long will that take before you have enough roads that you'd stop losing money? Mostly long haul, so this has limited application, even in trucking.
If all the trucks were electric, all exactly the same size/type, the system were installed on all roads, all the companies needed to service it were in operation, and you trained enough service staff, and electricity was cheap enough that the portion of your ride would be offset by the amount of time you are charging that you could carry a smaller battery, then it would make sense.
But first we need to roll this system out on all highways, then everybody needs a BEV, then we retrofit them all, then shrink all their batteries, and then it will make economic sense. Before that all happens we need enough chargers, enough grid capacity, cheaper cleaner power, and enough BEVs rolled out, which will take 10 years at least.
Electric trams work in cities because they have short routes, a small identical fleet, need very little battery, and all the money comes from one pool (the city).
Essentially your complaint seems to be that we don't get a free lunch, but that's never been an option
You have only 3 options: large expensive batteries on every truck, smaller batteries + overhead wires, or some kind of fuel like hydrogen. In all cases you need new vehicles, and in all cases you need new infrastructure to handle charging and/or fuel.
Production of fuel from electricity and it's distribution is always under 40% efficiency. So if you want efficiency, the only question is cost of overhead wires vs cost of larger battery in every truck.
Most of the battery would be spent travelling long distance on large, straight roads, and those are also the easiest roads to electrify.
Also what's with the complaint about energy billing? We can put a 5g connection into every car and make it charge us for heated seats, but measuring energy is a problem?
If the system is on the major roads, then that's where the major energy is being used. If you're stuck somewhere in traffic or waiting to load/unload, you're not actually using much energy.
Honestly I'd be okay with the energy being unmetered. I think the cost to society of CO2 emissions is probably greater than the cost of supplying trucks with free energy would be anyways, so I think it's probably a net win for society to have it as a free service. But there are also ways to charge for it if we wanted to go that route. Paying for the energy is a non-problem, you'd just need to decide on a policy.
Ideally in the U.S. this would be installed on interstate highways, at regular intervals. Maybe 5 miles on, 20 miles off or something like that. The overhead lines don't need to be everywhere, they just need to be in enough places that cross-country shipping is possible, and local shipping between major cities is possible.
But that shouldnt prevent us from trolly lines on highways.
There's a couple ways to do this though with pros and cons. Overhead lines are cheapest, but they'd need to be high enough that they'd be impractical for passenger cars to access.
Rails embedded in the road are a technology that's being tested in Sweden[1]. It's a bit more expensive to install, but the advantages are that it can be used by both cars and trucks, and it's less visible than the overhead lines (which some people find unattractive).
A third option is wireless, which is the most expensive and the amount of power you can practically transmit is a lot less than the other two methods.
I think the rails option is probably best if we want to kill the range anxiety issue for trucking and personal vehicles at the same time, but there are good arguments for the overhead lines too.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/12/worlds-f...
> they dont occupy petrol stations
In the US they usually have their own stations.
EDIT: Downvoters, care to explain?
HN is not a court of law and you are gonna have a tough time making friends if you ask for citation for every statement you hear.