A Proposal for a Pony Express Approach to Achieve Electric Heavy Duty Trucking

To reduce CO2 emissions, carriers and shippers would likely be very interested in the development of all-electric heavy duty trucks, but the barriers are daunting.

Consider the size of a Tesla car battery today, and now imagine that increased many fold to meet the power requirements of over the road freight trucking.

Given these barriers, there have been a number of ideas floated about for enabling electric trucks. Those include:

Use of overhead power lines, similar to a trolley car: But this would require a massive build of infrastructure and is really not a practical idea.

Systems capable of ultra-fast charging during driver stops and breaks: the technology is simply not there now and may not be for many years if ever.

A technology called in-road conductive charging:Infrastructure is placed underneath the road that is capable of delivering consistent electric power to vehicles. Off road tests are said to be occurring right now for cars not trucks in the UK, and some public buses are said to be running using the technology in South Korea, but the reality seems many, many years away and would again involve a huge investment in infrastructure.

Battery swapping: Changing these huge batteries out at charging stations would be very difficult and result in a variety of logistics challenges.

So, should truck makers, carriers and shippers just focus on natural gas trucks and forget about electric vehicles?

There is another approach that could work, says executives from a Swiss company called Furrer+Frey Opbrid, which offers a unique overhead charging systems for a variety of electric vehicles.

While the proposed system offers a fast charging solution, that is not at the core of what the company envisions, which involves instead a tractor swapping approach.

The proposed tractor-swapping model calls for a truck with a nearly-depleted battery to pull into a station, where a fully-charged tractor would be waiting to pick up its trailer. That tractor would then in turn have its battery quickly charged (perhaps in about an hour) to be ready for another driver later in the day/night.

In other words, it would operate just like the Pony Express of the early American West, when postal employees would swap out a tired horse for a fresh one.

There is actually some precedence for something along the same lines, with some carriers currently experimenting with so called "relays," in which drivers on a long haul move hand-off the trailer to another driver from the same carrier, perhaps after 300 miles of driving, to continue the move. The goal is to get each driver home more often to improve lifestyle factors and thus driver retention.

With the tractor swap the idea is generally that the same driver would continue on with the trailer load using the new truck.

Another key bit of technology in this system would be the use of something called the the Jost KKS automated coupling system, which can couple and uncouple tractors and trailers with minimal driver involvement, obviously to make the swap out as quick as possible.

The fast charging system from Furrer+Frey uses something called a pantograph design, similar to ones used to power electric trains, as shown in the graphic below.

Details of just how fast a battery could be charged are unclear, due no doubt in part because no such battery powered truck now exists, though Furrer+Frey says the solution is "available now," and suggests it would take about an hour to charge a battery.

It also says for this to be practical, batteries must be capable of power trucks for about 200 kilometers, or 125 miles.

The company cites the following benefit from its approach:

- No large infrastructure projects are required

- No "ultra fast" charging systems are needed

- Simple, inexpensive and proven equipment

- Fast and safe - swap out tractors in a few minutes.

In addition to reduction in CO2 emissions, Furrer+Frey says there should be a good ROI, with equivalent costs for electricity to power the tractors just 20% of what the diesel costs would be, though of course that depends on the cost of diesel at any point in time.

There are of course numerous hurdles to all this even assuming all the technology is available - a giant assumption.

Scheduling of the swaps could be quite complex, if carriers or shippers keep investments in tractor assets low. One delay could back up the whole system, like flight delays rippling through the entire air network.

Only large carriers and shippers likely could embark on such a system, since a large fleet would likely be required.

However, in theory, a relay system could be used - and that potentially could involve multiple carriers in the swap and total move.

SCDigest doesn't expect to see this in action any time soon, but it is an approach and technology worth keeping tabs on.

Source: http://www.scdigest.com/