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Ten most Electrifying Transport Ideas of 2009

Ten innovative ideas of using electricity in transportation

In future, trains, cars, bikes and other vehicles will be powered by electricity -- here are ten of the most innovative transport ideas of 2009 of what that electric future of transport could look like.

1. Trains

High speed rail can move large amounts of people and freight fast, conveniently and economically. High speed rail systems have been operating successfully in Europe and Japan for many years. In Canada, a survey found that 86% of Canadians are in favor of the introduction of high-speed trains.

In the U.S., Amtrak lost $32 per passenger in 2008, according to a Pew analysis, but the Northeast Corridor, which carried over one third of passengers, made a profit of about $10 per passenger. The loss of almost $5 per passenger of Northeast Regional was more than made up by the corridor's high-speed Acela Express, which made a profit of about $41 per passenger.

California has done the maths. Transportation accounts for 40% of California's greenhouse gas emissions. Last November, California voters approved a $9.95 billion bond to fund a high-speed train line from San Diego to Sacramento (picture below). This was followed up last month by a bid for more than $4.7 billion in federal stimulus funding for a high-speed (over 200 mph) rail system to serve millions of residents in virtually every major city in California.

Above: proposed High Speed Rail in California - image courtesy of cahighspeedrail.ca.gov

Solar Bullet proposes to create a series of tracks in the U.S. Southwest, serving a 220 mph train system that would require 110 megawatts of electricity, to be produced by solar panels mounted above the tracks, at a target price of $20 to $40 Million a mile. The cost for the first phase alone is estimated at $27 billion.

Above: proposed Solar Bullet train - image courtesy of Solar Bullet

The above locomotive accommodates 1, 080 rechargeable 12-volt lead-acid batteries, enabling it to run for 24 hours on a single charge, while pulling the same load as a conventional locomotive. Developed by Norfolk Southern, with the help of a partnership, including the U.S. Dept. of Energy, the Federal Railroad Administration, and The Pennsylvania State University, the 1, 500 horsepower machine makes use of regenerative braking for extra power and can recharge in just two hours. Congressman Shuster secured $1.3 million in federal funding for the project. Norfolk Southern says it costs the same to make as a traditional locomotive.

2. Planes

One of the highlights at AirVenture 2009 in Oshkosh was the E430 electric airplane by Beijing startup Yuneec International. The E430 seats two, is powered by lithium polymer batteries, weighs close to a thousand pounds and consumes only $2.50 worth of electricity per hour of flight.

Before arriving at Oshkosh, the E430 completed a number of test runs, including two test flights of around 15 minutes on June 21, 2009, during which it reached a top speed in level flight of 150km/hr and heights of up to 300m (975ft). Another test run, in Camarillo, CA, can be viewed at YouTube. A comment at YouTube by YuneecInternational says that the plane will cost around $89k.

The Solar Impulse made its maiden flight on 3 December 2009, at Dbendorf Airfield in Switzerland. During a run down the runway, the plane was for the first time brought to takeoff speed (35 km/h, or 22 mph) and flew one meter (3.3 ft) above the ground for some 30 seconds, during which it traveled over a distance of 350 meters (0.22 miles).

The plane will now be moved to another airport, to be fitted with solar panels. The wing and stabilizer will be covered with 11, 628 monocrystalline silicon cells, each 150 microns thick, which are low in weight, are flexible and have a 22% efficiency. The next flight should see the plane reach an altitude of nearly 9, 000 meters (5.6 miles).

3. Automobiles

The Solar Electric Vehicle featured at the Sanyo display at the Eco Products 2009 International Exhibition at Tokyo Big Sight, held from December 10 - 12, 2009.

The truck has a body weight of about 2t and is powered by solar panels (with a capacity of 1.89 kW) and a 25.9 kWh lithium ion battery pack. To fully recharge an empty battery pack takes some 16 hours from the solar panels, or 8 hours from an AC charger (presumably 200V outlet, or twice that time from a 100V outlet). On a full battery the truck can drive a maximum distance of about 130 km (81 miles). The Sanyo Electric Vehicle can also function as an emergency external power supply.

The Active Wheel

In 2008, Michelin first introduced the Active Wheel concept. This year, at the Frunkfurt Motor Show, Michelin has taken the concept one step further, introducing a wheel that not only integrates the brake disk and the vehicle's electrical drive motor, but also a suspension motor.

With this Active Wheel, the vehicle's suspension is intelligently controlled by electrical suspension motors inside the wheels. This delivers an extremely fast response time of just 0.003 of a second. All pitching and rolling motions are automatically corrected.

The Active Wheel simplifies vehicle design by making many of the mechanical components of a conventional car superfluous. The wheel eliminates not only the need for an engine under the hood, but also the need for transmission components and a traditional suspension system. Thus, the car no longer needs a gearbox, clutch, transmission shaft, differential and shock absorbers. This can make cars safer and lighter, and thus more energy efficient.

4. Roads, Parking and Recharging

Car parking lots, such as at high speed railway stations or airports, could use the parked cars' windshields and roofs to mirror sunlight onto a solar energy concentrating tower to produce electricity.

Solasis design by Yongbang Ho and Klaud Wasiak, Canada- from images at Designboom

Sanyo will, in the spring of 2010, install its Solar Parking Lot in Setagaya, Tokyo. The parking lot will have approximately 46m2 (7.56 kw) of rooftop solar panels and will also incorporate a lithium-ion battery system to provide electricity on demand to electric bicycles.

The electricity that is generated by the solar panels is stored in the battery system and used to recharge the electric bicycles, to illuminate the parking lot lights and to power a wireless remote monitoring system. The system also features AC power outlets that can be used to power external equipment during emergencies.

Sanyo will also supply 40 electric bicycles -- they will be made available by the Rental Cycle Port operating at Setagaya. This model bicycle, called the eneloop bike incorporates regenerative charge technology to enable "generating and storing of energy while running." Compared to Sanyo's standard models, which do not incorporate the regenerative charge technology, this model is capable of traveling up to 1.8 times farther per charge.

Opening of Santa Barbara solar parking lot - first car (with solar roof) enters the lot. Photo: Victor Maccharoli.

The solar panels of a parking lot in Embarcadero del Mar, Santa Barbara, power lights, parking meters, recharging points and an irrigation system that uses rain water and bio-filters that remove pollutants from storm run-off before it reaches the beach. The panels generate enough electricity to power all the lights along Pardall Road as well. The lot has 45 parking spaces, two of them with recharging points for electric vehicles. The solar panels, mounted on steal beams, double as shade for vehicles, which also means the cars need less air-conditioning.

Solar Roads

Roads paved with Solar Panels - Artwork by Dan Walden - part-image from Solar Roadways

Idaho-based Solar Roadways has a received a $100, 000 Department of Transportation (DOT) grant to further develop the concept of using photovoltaic (PV) solar panels as road surface.

Such roads could supply electricity to power street lighting, traffic lights, buildings and vehicles. The roads could be marked by numerous embedded LEDs, which could create lines on the road that could be changed depending on traffic. This could reduce congestion and provide better street signage, both of which would make driving safer. Solar panel roads could even be heated in winter to avoid ice building up on the road.

Solar Roadways believe that solar panel roads would be cost-competitive with conventional roads once you take into account savings in energy production and distribution.

The average cost of asphalt roads in 2006 was roughly $16 per square foot, says Company founder Scott Brusaw. A one-mile stretch of asphalt highway costs over $4 Million and will last only seven years.

PV panels cost about $10 per square foot. They would need to be strengthened with a thick layer of glass to withstand traffic, but PV panels are already able to withstand 3/4" hail at 60 mph, while solar panels carry 20-25 year warranties, with life expectancies of 40+ years, according to this BBC report and figures by Namaste.

The upfront cost may be higher, but this could be mitigated by less need for maintenance.

The figures can only get better. Strength and efficiency of PV panels can be expected to increase with further innovation. Low-cost PV panels currently are 12 - 15% efficient, but efficiencies of 35.8% for solar cells for satellites and 41.1% for terrestrial solar cells have been achieved earlier this year. A terrestrial concentrator solar cell efficiency of 40.7% was already achieved back in 2006. These figures are for multiple-layer panels, which are more expensive, but mass production could bring down costs substantially.

Importantly, such roads could also replace both power plants and the electric grid. There are many advantages in getting rid of electricity poles and upgrading the 110V lines currently going to many homes (see sidebox). It makes sense to switch to buried cables at the same time as switching to roads (and driveways) paved with solar panels.

Some will argue that roads paved with solar panels could spoil the scenery. But aren't asphalt roads and electricity poles a eyesore?

Petroleum-based asphalt surface can be smelly and it melts during hot days, the black asphalt absorbing 90% of the heat from the sunlight. Moreover, the asphalt comes from oil, which is environmentally not the best choice of material. Solar panel roads would consist mostly of glass, which is easy to recycle.

Using solar panels as road surface could easily provide more electricity than the entire U.S. demand, as calculated by Scott Brusaw and as illustrated by the image below.

Getting rid of Electricity Poles

The average pole in the U.S. is about 40 years old, well past its use-by date.

Roads paved with solar panels can supply electricity directly to homes. Since electricity is produced locally, there's no need for power plants, relay stations, transmission lines and distribution network to carry electricity to the streets on poles.

Electricity poles are a safety hazard, a fire hazard, people get killed during storms and when driving into the poles. Poles can interfere with broadcasting and communications transmissions, while there are claims that overhead wires can cause cancer. Electricity poles also make access difficult for high vehicles, such as removal trucks, and prevent trees being planted underneath and require access strips for maintenance.

Currently, the burden of maintenance and inspections of roads and power poles is high, both for landowners, utilities and road maintenance crews. Solar panels and buried cables to the homes can be expensive, especially in rocky and uneven places where people live far apart. Buried cables may require digging up streets and gardens, which is inconvenient, but once it's done it often turns out to be cheaper in the long run. Paving roads with solar panels could at the same time create new pedestrian and bicycle paths.

Without overhead wires and electricity poles, more trees could grow in gardens. Buildings could extend to places that were previously out of bounds, due to the access that maintenance people needed to power poles in backyards. Houses in streets paved with solar panels and without power poles would most likely increase in value.

Solar roads would provide a more decentralized grid, better able to respond to local needs for high speed battery recharging.

Irradiance chart - black dots show the area that, if covered with solar panels (8% efficiency), could produce the world's entire energy needs.

German company IAV (Ingenieurgesellschaft Auto und Verkehr) has taken out a patent to allow wireless recharging by means of electromagnetic induction.

A strip embedded in the road would transfer electricity by means of electromagnetic induction to vehicles driving on the road. Sensors would spot the cars and activate the charging process, when required, while radio chips would identify cars for billing purposes. IAV has achieved 90% efficiency in transmission from road to electric vehicle.

Wireless recharging - screenshot from video at IAV website

Earlier this year, researchers at the Korean Advanced Institute Of Science Technology (KAIST) had achieved a 80% efficient transmission through a 1 cm gap, or a 60% effective transmission when the space widened to 12 cm (nearly 5) when they tested the technology to move a bus.

KAIST project being tested out in february 2009 - image courtesy ctnt korea

Parking Plate

The Nissan Parking Plate (below) was developed in collaboration with Showa Aircraft Industry Co Ltd.

The diagram below explains the inductive recharging process that requires no cables to be plugged in.

5. Vehicle to Grid (V2G)

Vehicle to Grid (V2G) means that electric vehicles feed surplus electricity into the grid, as opposed to drawing electricity from the grid when recharging their batteries. Around the world, V2G studies are under way.

U.S. power grid chief Jon Wellinghoff recently saidd that electric vehicles could deliver significant earnings this way, using a figure of $1, 500 a year in paybacks for their owners when their batteries are connected to the power grid. How did Jon arrive at this figure?

Let's have a look at a car that is about to be introduced in the U.S. and is already on sale in Japan. The Nissan LEAF has a 24kWh lithium-ion battery. A full charge can give the Nissan LEAF a driving range of more than 100 miles (160km).

Charging the battery at home through a single phase 200V outlet (~15 A) will take about eight hours, while it will take twice that time from a 100V outlet.

The battery can also be part-charged. In less than 30 minutes it can be charged up to 80% capacity with a quick charger (three phase, 200 V), or it be given an extra 50 km (31 miles) worth of range in about 10 minutes.

Pacific Gas and Electric Company has off-peak rates (in summer, midnight to 7.00 am) as low as $0.05/kWh. So, part-charging the battery with 20kWh of electricity can cost as little as $1.00 a day.

If the car drives with an efficiency of 4 miles/kWh, then 20kWh will be enough to drive the car for 80 miles, which would more than suffice most cars -- 80% of cars are driven less than 50 miles daily, while half the cars are driven only 25 miles a day or less.

80% of cars are driven for 50 miles or less daily

That daily total consists of several separate trips. Most people live less than 10 miles away from their work, so the car could also be recharged when drivers are at their place of work. As more recharging points become available, it will also be possible to recharge when visiting friends or when going out for dinner, shopping, or entertainment.

Fully recharging the battery will leave the average driver a daily surplus of electricity in the battery of 18 kWh. Pacific Gas and Electric Company has peak rates as high as $0.28/kWh. That daily surplus could be fed back into the grid, which at $0.28/kWh would result in a credit of $5.04 daily or $1, 840.86 a year.

So, if one can recharge for about $1 a day, one could make a profit of about $4 a day, which comes close to that figure of $1500 a year. One could have even more daily surplus than the 18 kWh, if one could top up the battery at cheap rates while at work, to return home late afternoon with an almost full battery and feed even more electricity back into the grid. It depends of course on the voltage the power line can handle, but the above scenario seems plausible for a 200V line, even without rapid recharging.

Some areas have generous feed-in tariffs, so a feed-back rate of $0.28/kWh may even be conservative. Even where utilities don't offer attractive feed-in rates yet, one could use the surplus power from the car battery for household needs in the evening, avoiding rates of up to $0.28/kWh. Rates for electricity are likely to rise in future, making V2G even more attractive for owners of electric vehicles.

6. Streetlights

In Drentrup, Germany, the streetlights are switched off at 11.00pm, instead of staying on all night. They can be switched on by phone.

The image on the left is from dial4light.com, where local residents can sign up.

If they need a particular street illuminated, they can dial a central number and give voice commands to switch on specific lights. The lights will stay on for 10 - 15 minutes.

Several other communities in Germany are looking at joining up.

Here's a BBC video that explains how it works.

In France, some streetlights are adjusted automatically, as people pass by. In Toulouse, as the Guardian reports, there is a streetlight experiment in which, on a 500-meter section of pavement, sensors

detect human body heat when pedestrians pass by.

The lampposts double the strength of the light they cast when people pass by. Ten seconds later they revert to normal.

Sharp has announced a LED street light (photo left) equipped with a solar battery, which means that no wiring or remote power supply is needed for these street lights.

The lamp provides a luminance of 1, 800lm, among the highest in the industry, according to Sharp. This is partly the result of a special lens (photo right) mounted on each LED chip.

The lens is composed of convex lenses that are stacked on concave lenses.

The convex lenses focus the light, while the concave lenses widen the light along the length of the street.

As a result, the solar-powered LED street lights can be installed at an interval of 32m, compared to conventional street lights that require a 40W bulb and need to be installed at a distance of 12m apart.

7. Batteries

This MIT special report on Better Batteries gives a good impression of the rapid developments taking place in this area. MIT lists Donald Sadoway's Liquid Battery as one of the 10 technologies that can change the way we live. MIT researchers have managed to dramatically reduce the time it takes to recharge lithium ion batteries. GM-Volt.com gave the story the title a 100-Fold Lithium-ion Battery Breakthrough.

Earlier this year, A123Systems announced $2.3 Billion Lithium Ion Battery Facilities in Michigan. One of the problems with batteries is that they gradually lose their charge over time. Tests by A123 indicate that their batteries can keep working for a decade or longer. On their site, you can find a chart like the one below:

In early 2008, CNET reported how researchers used silicon nanowires to give rechargeable lithium ion batteries a tenfold improvement in battery life. The study can be found at Nature.

Battery provider Southern California Edison (SCE) has demonstrated a lithium ion battery with a lifespan of more than 180, 000 miles. Since the average family car travels about 10, 000 to 15, 000 miles each year, the battery could last a decade before it needed replacing.

New Scientist wrote about this more than four years ago in an article called Charge a battery in just six minutes. Here are also some technical details, from a Altairnano presentation dating back to 2006. The Altairnano Nanosafe battery reportedly has a life expectancy of 12+ years, and can retain up to 85% charge capacity after 15, 000 charges. With a 3 phase power supply, it can be recharged in about 10 minutes. Altairnano has demonstrated that a NanoSafe cell can be charged to over 80% charge capacity in about one minute.

Further innovation, mass production and economies of scale will further bring down cost and increase performance.

8. Hydrogen

Mercedes-Benz displayed a fuel-cell version of its compact B-Class at the Frankfurt Motor Show.

Mercedes-Benz will start building 200 units of the F-Cell, to be offered to customers in the U.S. and Europe at the beginning of next year.

The car will be powered by a 136-horsepower electric motor, a fuel-cell and a lithium-ion battery (35 kW output / 1.4 kWh capacity) supporting a driving range of 250 miles and a top speed of 106, reports Popular Science.

According to the hydrogen association, a $2.5 Billion investment is planned in Japan (page 8), while a $2 -2.8 Billion investment is planned in Germany for 1, 000 filling stations until 2017 in Germany (page 9). These are publicly funded programs, car manufacturers are expected to invest additional money into fuel cell, tanks, car design, etc.

9. Shipping

Solar panels can produce some of the energy needed to power shipping. The M/V Auriga Leader below features no less than 328 solar panels to power the ship's electrical grid, providing some 10% of the ship's total electricity usage.

Without including military vessels, shipping was responsible for over 1 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2007, according to a report issued by the International Maritime Organization in 2009.

Furthermore, shipping is responsible for emissions of methane, nitrogen oxides, ash and other particulate matter. Bunker fuel causes a lot of soot. There's even organic material, from engine lubricating oil.

In short, shipping causes significant amounts of emissions and, without regulatory change and in the prospect of international trade increasing, emissions can only be expected to rise.

Hydrogen can provide a clean way to power ships, as well as be used for other purposes.

With the number of wind turbines increasing, there will be a growing surplus of electricity at night. This energy can easily be transmitted at night over the grid without a need to upgrade the grid.

The electricity can be used to produce hydrogen at filling stations, stored in tanks, ready to supply hydrogen on demand to vehicles and ships in the area.
Image uploaded CC by jdnx at Flickr on Sept 21, 2008.

10. Incentives

In Canada, the Ontario government has announced that it wants to have one out of every 20 vehicles driven in Ontario to be electrically powered by 2020.

Ontaria green vehicle plate

To help achieve that target, buyers of plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicles will receive:

Rebates of between $4, 000 and $10, 000 for plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicles purchased after July 1, 2010.
Green vehicle licence plates that would allow drivers to:
- Access public charging facilities and parking at Ontario government and GO Transit lots.
- Use less-congested High Occupancy Vehicle (carpool) lanes until 2015, even if there is just one person in the vehicle.

Ontario will also add 500 electric vehicles to the Ontario Public Service fleet and the people of Ontario can vote on the design of the new green licence plates.

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