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Transportation Government Power United Kingdom

UK Government Backs Scheme For Motorway Cables To Power Lorries (theguardian.com) 124

Posted by BeauHD from the transportation-of-the-future dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The government will fund the design of a scheme to install overhead electric cables to power electric lorries on a motorway near Scunthorpe, as part of a series of studies on how to decarbonize road freight. The electric road system -- or e-highway -- study, will draw up plans to install overhead cables on a 20km (12.4 miles) stretch of the M180 near Scunthorpe, in Lincolnshire. If the designs are accepted and building work is funded the trucks could be on the road by 2024.

The e-highway study is one of several options that will be funded, along with a study of hydrogen fuel cell trucks and battery electric lorries, the Department for Transport said on Tuesday. On the e-highway, lorries fitted with rigs called pantographs -- similar to those used by trains and trams -- would be able to tap into the electricity supply to power electric motors. Lorries would also have a smaller battery to power them over the first and last legs of the journey off the motorway. The project is led by Costain, an infrastructure construction company that also operates some UK motorways, using trucks built by Sweden's Scania and electric technology from Germany's Siemens that is already in use in smaller-scale trials there, Sweden and the US.
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UK Government Backs Scheme For Motorway Cables To Power Lorries More

UK Government Backs Scheme For Motorway Cables To Power Lorries

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  • I have an idea (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @11:50PM (#61628389)

    How about we put the overhead cables in cities to power, say, busses and light-rail?

    Oh wait [wikipedia.org]...

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Cum Gobbler ( 8437417 )
      Or sybians.
    • Nice snarky link, but this currently exists in some cities. Seattle has had overhead-electric powered busses in service for like 70 years now. They are on around 10% of the routes, but they concentrate them on the densest lines, so they carry around 25% of the systemâ(TM)s passengers. They also have some in San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, and Dayton, OH.

      • "Some cities" is the keyword.

        Streetcars and trolleybuses were widespread before the automobile and oil industries killed them. They're making a comeback of sorts, because common sense seems to prevail after all. But it's nothing like what it used to be. Meanwhile, cities have been gridlocked and choking in a cloud of pollution for decades thanks to the greed of a few.

        • Sure they have their place, however their place is rather limited for a whole raft of reasons, including cost of maintenance, safety, inflexible routing, and more.

          But no cities have NOT been gridlocked and choking in a cloud of pollution for decades thanks to the greed of a few.
          Although the 'we hate cars so are engineering congestion to force people on to (often not) 'green' alternatives' crew are doing their best to maximise such issues.

          The fact is that freedom of choice has resulted in people using the mo

          • Re:Hyperbole much? (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @12:33AM (#61628465)

            whole raft of reasons, including cost of maintenance, safety, inflexible routing, and more.

            Maintenance costs used to be born out by the streetcar companies. When it got replaced by busses, the cost shifted to the taxpayer, who paid for road maintenance. Of course transit companies love nothing better than externalizing their costs.

            Inflexible routing: yes, that is an issue with streetcars. Trolleys don't really have that problem though. There are also solutions involving electric busses running on batteries and scavenge-charging at bus stops.

            As for safety, I don't really see why trolleys or streetcars are more unsafe than their gasoline-powered counterparts or automobiles. I mean most of European cities are doing it and you don't get to hear about massive number of injuries and deaths.

            The fact is that freedom of choice has resulted in people using the most functional and flexible transportation available

            That's plain not true. People used to love their streetcar systems and busses. They all switched to private vehicles after big oil and big auto intentionally made public transport as unappealing as possible.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Entrope ( 68843 )

              Maintenance costs used to be born out by the streetcar companies. When it got replaced by busses, the cost shifted to the taxpayer, who paid for road maintenance. Of course transit companies love nothing better than externalizing their costs.

              How many local bus systems are not effectively operated by a local government? In my county, the public bus system is contracted to private operators but massively subsidized by the county. The 2019 actuals (latest available) had $18.2M in revenue and $74M in transfer

              • You are doing well. In Austin, taxpayers pay 95% of the cost, while riders pay 5%. Locally they would call it a magnificent success if riders were paying 18% like your system.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Entrope ( 68843 )

                  Riders don't pay 18% here. Normally, at least half of the "revenue" from a country perspective is money from state or other local governments. This year it's projected to be more like two thirds, so we're not that far from your 5%.

              • Not reading your paywalled article, don't care.

                It's a fact that profitable rail lines were bought up and shut down in the USA, we call it the streetcar conspiracy and the perpetrators were actually found guilty so there is literally no question as to whether it actually happened. It definitely did happen, it definitely was a conspiracy (a secret one even) and it absolutely did harm public transit in America.

            • They all switched to private vehicles after big oil and big auto intentionally made public transport as unappealing as possible.

              I'm pretty sure that there's plenty of blame to go around on making mass transit unappealing.

              I've read plenty of failures of mass transit before. The monorail outside of Las Vegas is something of well known failure. As a university student with access to a free bus service I found it inconvenient, slower than just walking or biking, and far more stressful than it was worth. Given that it cost nothing that is saying a lot. I lived in three different places as a student and in each place the bus was worth

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Ichijo ( 607641 )

            The fact is that freedom of choice has resulted in people using the most functional and flexible transportation available

            Freedom of choice? Are you joking, or which city do you live in that does NOT force property owners to have parking [fastcompany.com]?

            No, people don't really want to drive everywhere. So it requires that unfunded mandate, plus massive road subsidies [taxfoundation.org] just to get people to drive. As a result, people are overtaxed and don't have much of a choice about how to get from A to B, yet in true Orwellian fashion you

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Not really needed in cities, we have had busses and light rail with large enough batteries to cover those routes for years. It's the long distance heavy load stuff that is an issue and this could potentially solve it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        Looks great to me. £19 billion to roll this out nationwide is not a lot and they say it could pay for itself within 15 years! If the gov't incentivized the lorries to have biggish batteries then they could recharge more when other grid demand is less or when renewables output is higher.

        £19 -- how do I stop the stupid 'Ã' from appearing?

    • ...powered by overhead cables... but like... on some kind of a dedicated sort of a roadway for really fast moving.
      Like... on a special system or roads, just for trucks powered with overhead electric cables.
      The kind where you could make these really strong trucks and attach a lot of trailers to them and the road would be really straight and fast.
      Only thing is, for all that freight the road would probably have to be very robust. Maybe make it out of steel, but really thin, to keep it cheap and green, no wider

  • E-highway study given £2m to draw up plans for overhead electric cables on motorway near Scunthorpe

    I'm surprised we get to hear about this [wikipedia.org] at all...

  • Alternative solution (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @12:19AM (#61628437)

    There is already a national electric transportation network in place. It's called the railways. If they really wanted to limit the carbon footpring of long-haul trucking, they could put trucks on trains. It'd be cheaper to build train cars to load up trucks onto than build an entire infrastructure of overhead cables and convince truck manufacturers to install pantographs on their tractors - not to mention, converting existing rigs to electric.

    Also, it would be another source of revenue for the railways.

    • It would also be a lot easier since, unlike lorries, trains will always stay under the power line and only need to have one power line since their metal wheels in contact with the metal rail make an excellent ground.

      Lorries, on the other hand, have nice rubber insulating wheels and so will need two overhead lines to complete the circuit and will also need to stay carefully aligned with those wires. I can see some serious problems with e.g. keeping the two wires separated in windy conditions, being unable

    • This is the UK - a pretty small country, trucking there is not "long-haul" like in the US. You'll need a truck at the end of the route anyway, since trucks can go on any road to any warehouse/factory/store while trains can only go to the few locations that have rail spurs. For short UK routes when part of the route has to be by truck, it's not financially worthwhile to load/unload a train for another little bit of the route.

      Also, many of the existing UK railways are already packed with passenger travel (and

    • Yeah, not a really practical method. First, there is the time element to get the truck on the rail car and secure it, then assemble the rail cars into a train. Lets say the train has 100 rail cars with trucks on them. Next the train leaves the loading point and starts traveling. What is the top speed of these 100 rail cars? Maybe 50mph (80 kph) with slowdowns for vehicle crossings and populated areas. When you reach the destination you have to separate all 100 rail cars so the trucks can be driven o

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by spitzak ( 4019 )

        Containers are loaded from the side on/off of railcars, not the end as you seem to believe. The train is not split into individual railcars, and if you even bothered to look at a modern one you can see there is only one wheel truck shared by two in most cases, so this is not even possible.

        • Interesting. No, I hadn't seen this particular type of side loading of trucks / trailers. In the US most of the truck to train transfer is done using shipping containers, but this requires a crane to transfer the container from truck to train and back. Containers are also not particularly efficient for liquid or bulk dry goods like grains.

          The CargoBeamer system seems very efficient. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

          Thanks for the new information.

    • A key difference is that the article's proposed idea would involve converting existing motorway traffic to be powered by electricity, while yours would involve net new traffic on the railways. Having experienced the cost, overcrowding, and delays associated with travelling by train in the UK, I can tell you that there isn't a ton of spare capacity during daytime hours.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bazorg ( 911295 )

      There is already a national electric transportation network in place. It's called the railways.

      In this case, mostly optimised for passenger services, with London as a hub. North South travel is easier than East West, which is quite important for containers arriving to the sea ports.

      I have no objection to building new cities and more rail connecting them though.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Unfortunately the UK destroyed much of its rail infrastructure in the 60s. There was an infamous document called the Beeching Report that recommended closing most of the smaller branch lines and stations.

      I guess it seemed to make sense at the time but with hindsight we could now really use a lot of those lines. Used to be that a lot of industry was built around smaller lines so that deliveries could be made directly, for example.

      Trucks on trains is probably the way forward now, but because a lot of lines ar

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jeremyp ( 130771 )

        It actually didn't even make sense at the time. They made some bad assumptions about how shutting down branch lines would affect the traffic on the main lines.

        Trucks on trains isn't the answer because Britain's rail network isn't designed for anything so big as a fully laden 40 tonne lorry sitting on top of a flatbed rail wagon. It literally won't fit through the bridges and tunnels or under the overhead lines. Containers on trains works, but you've still got the problem that the rail network in the UK is m

    • Thanks for writing this so i dont have to . UK Government is utterly incompetent and this is a perfect example.

    • You don't have to do anything to the rail network to carry freight. You just use intermodal containers. Their weight is relevant to trucks, but you're not moving them as far, so it doesn't matter as much. Their weight is irrelevant to trains compared to the weight of the cars themselves. You don't load the trucks onto trains, just the containers. This makes much more sense than shipping trucks and their drivers all over the place.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by spitzak ( 4019 )

        Also putting containers on a train rather than an entire truck saves the extra weight of the cab, engine, drivetrain, and wheels of the truck.

    • True - but most UK railways are either unelectrified, single track when they need double, or so woefully over-subscribed that the slightest fart means dozens of trains get delayed. Fixing this in the UK has proven to be a multi-decade, multi-billion pound problem - and even after all that, the network can barely support the growth in passenger numbers, and so will suck up more billions over more decades.

      As much as I think numerous successive governments have made a right balls up of their (extensive) involv

  • There are simply too many places trucks have to get to, to rely reliably on this method of power. This is an application where fuel cells are best. The Port of Los Angeles is already doing this with their shunt trucks, which is another example of where trucks cannot rely on overhead cables to power them, and recharging batteries keeps the vehicles out of service too long. If all trucks will not be allowed petrol/diesel engines, it is better to pick one technology to go with, rather than one technology for s

    • Sadly, our government is still obsessed with motorways (highways), like we're back in the 1960's again.
      Despite the pandemic having shown that millions can work from home on full or part time basis, thus freeing up our road network considerably, they are forging ahead with a £27 billion pound ($37.5 billion USD) road building project.

      Our relatively small island is already absolutely crammed with roads as our once enviable rail network, savagely cut back in the 1960's (hooray for motorways!), slowly ero

      • The anti-HS2 lot and the anti-London crowd (often the same people) always seem to conveniently forget that HS2 frees up the existing lines for more freight. But you know, focus on the perceived negatives.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Cederic ( 9623 )

          Sure, lets destroy increasingly rare green and natural spaces in England, force people from their homes and build something that just isn't fucking needed at horrific expense in order to get two more freight trains from.. Birmingham to London?

          No, fuck that.

          HS2 is a waste of money and should've been binned years ago.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Malc ( 1751 )

            You could apply that logic to every road project in the country. Car volumes grow to match capacity - what a waste of money, fuck that too.

            But again, you're focusing on this bullshit argument about it all being about Birmingham to London. And two freight trains? It's more than that. Every one of those trains takes over 70 or 80 lorries off the road.

            Let's stop road projects, force as much freight as possible on to the existing roads and generally make life so miserable for car owners that they're forced

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Cederic ( 9623 )

              Clearly you don't live in once-rural England or you'd know that's already happened.

              The people that would move to jobs outside London already don't live in London. They live in Hertfordshire, Surrey, Kent, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, maybe even further afield.

              The issue isn't people moving out of London, it's excess population. A faster train to London won't fucking help that. Building more roads won't fucking help that.

              Of course, since people are already ditching jobs in the Capital and working from home you

          • Birmingham New Street to London Euston is not capable of supporting any more capacity, even though there is demand for it. This is what a Network Rail chappy (retired) told me. More capacity is required to meet current demands. I agree with nature conservation concerns that building HS2 will destroy some of our diminishing countryside. But what is the alternative? Build more roads?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Cederic ( 9623 )

              Get investment into Birmingham that's currently going into London. Then the jobs will be in Birmingham and people won't have to travel.

              Or have a global pandemic that shifts working patterns to be predominantly remote, that might work too.

              Telling us the rest of the country will benefit by making it easier to exacerbate the skewed London-centric economy isn't really selling it to us.

              • Telling us the rest of the country will benefit by making it easier to exacerbate the skewed London-centric economy isn't really selling it to us.

                I agree with this totally. London is far too dominant in the UK economy, and politics. I would much prefer that Birmingham businesses did not need such intimate connection to London. I can't stand the place (London), personally. But the fact is, that is where the work is now, so I guess the government has a duty to support people getting to work, as things are now, not how we would like them to be.

                I don't actually know what can be done about the London-centric economy of the UK. It is unusual among develope

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Cederic ( 9623 )

                  Well, the message is getting through at last - hence "Northern Powerhouse" and "Levelling up".

                  Makes bugger all difference but it's still an advance from ten years ago.

                  The revolt is already in full swing in the Highlands and the Valleys. They just haven't clocked that they're getting significantly higher funding than non-London England, and wonder why we have no sympathy for them.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by nagora ( 177841 )

              Birmingham New Street to London Euston is not capable of supporting any more capacity, even though there is demand for it. This is what a Network Rail chappy (retired) told me. More capacity is required to meet current demands. I agree with nature conservation concerns that building HS2 will destroy some of our diminishing countryside. But what is the alternative? Build more roads?

              The alternative is to have a worldwide pandemic which demonstrates that a huge amount of the passenger usage on those rails was completely wasted time and energy.

              HS2 has no business plan left now, and Crossrail isn't looking so smart either.

    • There are simply too many places trucks have to get to, to rely reliably on this method of power.

      The plan is for the trucks to be a kind of hybrid BEV, with a battery about the size of current Teslas batteries. Most of the time on highways they can be powered by the overhead wires (with some on-the-go recharging I think). They can switch to batteries on the move for the start and end of trips, for overtaking, or if sections of don't have power for some reason.

      This is an application where fuel cells are best.

      The UK is also looking at fuel cells, as well as full BEV trucks. Those are the three main competing technologies being considered.

      The Port of Los Angeles is already doing this with their shunt trucks, which is another example of where trucks cannot rely on overhead cables to power them

      Funny you shou

      • One thing I forgot - the Siemens eHighway doesn't have to be a BEV / overhead power hybrid. It can be a fuelcell / overhead power hybrid, presumably to reduce the amount of expensive green hydrogen we need electrolyze. It can also be an ICE / overhead power hybrid, either as a stop-gap, or if work out how efficiently synthesize hydrocarbons from atmospheric CO2.

    • Fuel cells are great. Now explain where the hydrogen comes from.

      • The low-mass elements, hydrogen and helium, were produced in the hot, dense conditions of the birth of the universe. Within about 3 minutes after the Big Bang, conditions cooled enough for protons and neutrons to form hydrogen nuclei.

        You are welcome.

      • Why are people so fucking retarded about this? Probably because they don't want to understand because they've invested so much of their thinking into battery cars. Or more likely they will feel a loss of self if the Tesla cars they brag so much about are no longer the status symbol of the woke crowd.

        Well just for you sunshine, sunshine and wind can do this [scientificamerican.com].
        Did I mention you could get hydrogen from wind and solar [siemensgamesa.com]?
        Hey! Did you know you could get hydrogen from wind and solar [bbc.com]?
        And people are working on ways

    • There are simply too many places trucks have to get to, to rely reliably on this method of power.

      That's why you don't. You use it as a charging and running method for plug-in hybrid trucks, or EV trucks. You have enough battery to get between the wired areas, or even a hybrid thus converting the issue to one of having enough fuel.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by spitzak ( 4019 )

      If you had bothered to read even the summary you would know that the trucks are expected to enter/leave this powered section of highway. Before and after that they are battery-powered and can drive anywhere that is paved.

  • This is already invented (Score:3)

    by spyfrog ( 552673 ) on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @01:41AM (#61628543) Homepage
    This is already invented. It has already been tried on multiple locations. It doesn't scale is the verdict. Guess why? Trains has overhead wires. In average one is ripped down each week in my country. That is with one pantograph on each locomotive. You need to scale that with thousands if all lorries has one. The wires would always be ripped down. Then you have high power lines laying on roads that the public uses. If you want carbon free transport - use trains with overhead wires.

  • Trams. (Score:2)

    by shm ( 235766 )

    Thatâ(TM)s what we used to call them back in the day.

  • Personally ever since I was a kid I've been hoping that somebody will make motorways into a giant scalextrix set.

    Slot cars electric pickups on roads would be simple enough and could be designed with automation in mind enough that the crazy lunge towards self crashing cars could actually be called self driving whilst on the slotted sections too.

    • Slot cars are more adept at automated driving than anything we currently have on the road. Well, until it snows. Or the leaves fall off the trees onto the road.

  • German prototype (Score:3)

    by romiz ( 757548 ) on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @04:04AM (#61628753)
    There is a highway section in Germany that has been fitted with power lines, and that is used as a test bed [siemens.com] for a similar technology.
    • We had one like it close to where I live in Sweden. It was taken down after some years of testing, and it's possible that it's actually the same one going up in England. That was one of the new locations mentioned when it was being taken down. Eventually, they'd like to build a new one here about 60 km long, between a major port and two steel works.

    • There is / was one near the Port of Los Angeles as well, built in 2017 [insideevs.com]

  • ...only after having hired the 100.000 missing lorry-drivers they need to drive those things.

    Supermarket shelves are empty. vegetables and fruit rots in the field because there are no drivers to deliver them, no to mention that there aren't enough pickers or packers.

  • Limitations? (Score:3)

    by hackertourist ( 2202674 ) on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @08:55AM (#61629423)

    Overhead power cables are fine when a limited number of vehicles use them. Problems arise when the number of vehicles on a single sector rises: the cable diameter is limited, which limits the current that can be supplied.
    This is an issue for trains in some countries: when the overhead voltage is 1500V (e.g. in the Netherlands), 2 locomotives (1600-class, 4500 kW, 3000 A of max power draw) can draw more current than the cable is rated to handle. This can be solved by increasing the voltage (some train systems run at 25 kV). Then the problem becomes safety when a cable is (inevitably) hit by someone not observing the height restriction.

    This may be less of an issue for trucks (which will carry batteries anyway because you can't electrify every road in the country).

  • ... in the UK. Because in the USA, we can't keep overwidth [staticflickr.com] or overheight [tn-cloud.net] freight off our roadways and stop it from knocking stuff down.

  • Who is going to pay for this overhead power kit? Near to me in Birmingham. England, a section of railway recently got upgraded to accept electric trains. I watched the overhead power kit being built on my frequent journeys over a year or so. I presume train operators paid for all of this, and it will ultimately be paid for out of train fairs. I gather electrification of the entire rail network in the UK faces some practical barriers. One of those is old bridges, that are tall enough to let modern trains thr

  • That nineteenth-century tangle of overhead trolley lines in cities may be ugly, but it sort of works for the low-speed trolleybuses that operate in such places. On the other hand for highway trucks, any sort of on-the-road charging from wires should be inductive cables buried under traffic lanes, especially in selected places where they can efficiently keep onboard batteries topped up. Nobody is going to want catenary wires festooning highways out in the countryside.

    • Seems like a natural fit for the US, though. The power lines already often on poles and paralleling the roadways anyway.

      Now if they could just add lowerable bogies to these trucks and embed rails in the right lane of the interstate, they could cut a huge amount of rolling resistance and make truck shipping far more efficient :-P

  • 'Powering Lorries' is not feminist woke-speak, they're referring to delivery trucks.

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