In-road electric vehicle charging, a promising avenue for wireless battery charging technology, has gotten a boost with the recent award of a contract to build a demonstration project for it in Michigan.
The state announced on February 1 it was giving an Israeli company that has been testing the concept overseas, Electreon, a $1.9-million contract to build a mile-long section of public road in Detroit that will enable inductive vehicle battery charging. The magnetic resonance induction technology used puts copper coils under the roadway surface, which takes power from the grid through ground assemblies. That energy is then transmitted to an undercarriage receiver and onto a vehicle’s battery, enabling both dynamic charging as the vehicle moves or semi-dynamic charging of a parked vehicle via charging stations.
Electreon and its partners, including Dallas-based Jacobs Engineering Group, Michigan utility DTE Energy, and Detroit-based Next Energy, will design and build the road in Michigan Central, a visionary re-development project near downtown Detroit that includes a transportation-focused “mobility innovation district.” Ford Motor Co. is spearheading the project assisted by the Michigan Department of Transportation and the Michigan Office of Future Mobility and Electrification and other public-private entities. The project’s timeline calls for the road to be operational and open to utilization and testing by potential stakeholders sometime in 2023.
The contract award moves the Michigan project to a leading position among various initiatives underway to study in-road wireless electric vehicle charging. Several in the U.S., including one in Indiana that will utilize a magnetizable concrete mixture, are being fostered by Advancing Sustainability through Power Infrastructure for Road Electrification (ASPIRE), a research center at Utah State University seeded with a $26-million National Science Foundation grant to advance electrified transportation.
The Michigan Central funding is important news on that front but will be limited in terms of its contribution to knowledge that can cultivate the most impactful use-case scenarios for in-road charging, says Tallis Blalack, Ph.D., managing director of the ASPIRE NSF Research Center.
“The technology going in Michigan will be a lower power level than in Indiana, where it will be set up specifically for heavy-duty trucks, and in Utah, where we’ll look at both heavy-duty and medium and light-duty drayage trucks moving from rail yards to distribution centers,” he says.
With gas-guzzling trucks increasingly targeted for electrification, wireless, in-road charging could address one of the biggest obstacles: the need for large, heavy, and costly batteries. Enable trucks to wirelessly charge even as they’re moving along a corridor, Blalack says, and the path to widespread electrification opens up significantly.
“Heavy-duty trucks pose the biggest problem (that wireless charging could address), but the key to this technology is having something that can be used by all vehicle classes,” Blalack says.
Built to attract a broad range of EV technology stakeholders, the Michigan Central project should evolve into an important hub for deepening understanding of the EV charging infrastructure challenge. Jim Saber, president & CEO of NextEnergy, which as program manager will use its experience bringing public and private partners together to accelerate commercialization and deployment of mobility technologies, says the project will be comprehensive enough to “serve multiple users of different transport categories to demonstrate the technology, test use case-particular key performance indicators, and prepare for scale-ups according to user needs and infrastructure circumstances.”
The project could also afford its designers and builders an opportunity to learn more about the supply side of wireless charging, which Saber says has an inside track in EV charging because of its deployability, lower operational costs, and efficient power utilization.
In building the project, he says, “Electreon will defer to the advice of its technical partners and the Michigan Department of Transportation and would strive to involve Michigan's leading and experienced electrical professionals.”
