Charge as you drive.
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I’d love to believe this is worthwhile, but I don’t. For starters the coils below have to be energized nearly all the time to have any effect, and that means there will be tons of wasted electrons flowing, often for no reason.
I also note that the receptor needs to be as close to the coils as possible to have any effect; efficiency decreases with the square of distance.
Given the number of times city streets are dug up to add sewer pipes, cable, or other underground utilities, I can see this being an expensive nightmare to try to keep in operation.
I would like to be wrong on every one of these points, but I will be surprised if any one of them isn’t a deal killer.
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I tend to agree that it isn’t worthwhile. That’s partly based on what you list above, but also based on my wireless phone charging experience. I find that wireless charging produces a whole bunch of excess waste heat, and I suspect that it may tend to age the battery a bit more than wired charging does (if anyone has any info about that, please post!)
Perhaps, instead of under roadways, we place these in parking spaces. Both on-street parking and parking garages. The car would be sitting over something for an extended period.
JimA
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Already in use. If your EV can utilize such a system, you can buy an undercar recharger.
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Yep. Heat is the killer of cost & efficiency. They have to cool the plug handle and cable for super-chargers. I wonder what percent of the power you buy is lost the heat of resistance in the cable?
I saw a Neil Degrasse Tyson video a few weeks ago where he pointed out that the reason an LED light uses like 10% of the watts of an old incandescent bulb is because all the power is going to generate visible light. Most of the light spectrum emitted from an incandescent bulb is in the infrared range which we experience as heat rather than visible light, only a small portion is in the visible range.
intercst
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Absolutely. I equate heat in this regard as being akin to the “skim” by all the financial institutions out there. It’s almost 100% wasteful, sure some of the waste heat in a vehicle, for example, can be redirected to the cabin to warm it up, or redirected to the battery to warm it up (in advance of fast DC charging), but most of the heat is pure waste. Similarly most of the skim is entirely wasteful.
Yet people charge their cell phones and hearing aids this way. EVs should be possible. But massive investment required. Charging plugs at every parking space seems more practical.
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What they have been testing in Sweden with this technology is charging buses that make regular repeat trips such as to an airport terminal. The reduced downtime for regular charging might make the idea attractive.
DB2