One of the great promises of electric cars is wireless charging, which, taken to the next level, could make connecting the vehicle to a station history… in the future. Recharging while driving sounds utopian, but in Germany they are going to build the first wireless charging highway so that drivers can benefit from it.
Wireless or inductive charging technology in the automotive industry it works much like it does on our mobile phones. Under the asphalt, a system of coils is created and, when electric current passes through them, a magnetic field is generated. The car, for its part, has another coil located in the lower part of its structure that generates an electric current with which it feeds the battery and also recharges it.
The scenario chosen for the project is the city of Balingen (Germany). There, the Israeli company Electreon and the German EnBW have partnered to build a one kilometer stretch of Electric Road System (ERS) or road wireless charging. To this we must add a couple of static recharging stations that will be placed in places where the leading bus of the initiative stops on its route.
Although only a single bus is involved at the moment, this technology it could be implemented in private electric cars in the coming years. These infrastructures would generate a constant flow of electricity that would end dependence on the charging network and also with high-capacity batteries: this would give rise to cheaper vehicles (they would not need such large batteries), more efficient (they would not spend as much) and more sustainable (the amount of materials would be less).
Static charging platforms have been around for a long time, but freight roads are more complicated and in an earlier stage of development. This is not the first time we have heard about them, but, as we said before, it will be the first time that it can be used publicly.
It is not the first time that Electreon and EnBW have collaborated: before they carried out a pilot study in the training center that the latter has in Karlsruhe (Germany). The first also has an agreement with Eurovia to electrify a part of the Bavaria highway. Sweden (one of the European countries with the highest rate of electric), for its part, has its own project to create roads with wireless charging and Stellantis opened, a year ago, the ‘Arena of the Future’: a driving circuit equipped with a wireless inductive charging system that is located next to the A35 motorway, which connects Milan with Brescia.
