Automated Electric Transportation - elab and others are advancing the notion that the mobility of energy - measured as transit time and cost per unit energy distance traveled - may be the most important indicator of how well energy-intensive industries are serving industrialized societies. Historical evidence suggests that when "step function" improvements in energy mobility occur due to a technology-driven switch to a new energy carrier, industries - and the societies they serve - are transformed in ways previously unforeseen. If history repeats itself, America's most energy-intensive industry - vehicle transportation - will likely be transformed only when electricity becomes its energy carrier of choice and disruptive technologies are developed that minimize the need for on-board energy storage and automate the delivery of energy to vehicles at its point-of-use.
Electricity has already transformed several energy-intensive industries. It transformed how we communicate - literally removing the time and energy required to physically move information from place to place. It led to dramatic improvement in lighting and food preservation. Before electricity, these energy-intensive industries required the collection and manual transport of energy stored in solid and liquid forms to its point-of-use using time and money intensive methods. In both cases, electricity automated the energy delivery process - saving users time and money.
When these industries switched to electricity, America enjoyed many transformative changes to life such as more freedom to do things indoors at night and the ability to design larger and taller building without worrying about access to daylight. It also led to the comforts of air-conditioning, new forms of entertainment such as television, and new appliances that saved people time, money and labor.
Like the lighting and food preservation industries of the 19th Century, the collection, distribution, storage, and transport of liquid petroleum on-board vehicles remains a time, labor, and energy-intensive process. Paradoxically, "in-the-box" pathways to use electricity in vehicle transportation only perpetuate a century-old paradigm suggesting that on-board energy storage is necessary to propel vehicles - and that vehicles themselves must serve as energy carriers. For these reasons, current electric transportation R&D pathways stop short of leveraging electricity's primary value propositions, its ability to: a) move energy quickly and cost-effectively, b) remove users from the energy delivery process, and c) eliminate point-of-use energy storage. elab suggests that a more appropriate "out-of-the-box" strategy would entail finding a way to deliver energy to its point-of-use and reduce or eliminate the need to use vehicles themselves as energy carriers.
Attempts were made at electrification a century ago, but the nation's electricity infrastructure had yet to be fully developed. Power electronics didn't exist. Storing liquid fuels on-board was less challenging than electrification. Liquid petroleum was abundant and the environmental impacts of using internal combustion engines were not fully understood. For these reasons, a different transportation paradigm was established, e.g. self-propelled vehicles, driven on highways, used as energy carriers, controlled by humans, with on-board energy storage of liquid fuels. Over the past century, this paradigm has become firmly entrenched in American life and has led to many unintended consequences that fundamentally limit America's mobility, and therefore, its prosperity.
- It has led to more complex, costly, heavier, and less efficient vehicles than may be necessary because energy is stored on-board and multiple energy conversions (chemical-to-thermal-to-mechanical energy) are required to move vehicles.
- It has led to more politically and institutionally complex and costly energy supply and distribution networks. America's dependence on foreign oil from unstable nations has transferred wealth to foes, made foreign policy more complex, and increased the cost of national security.
- Today's transportation paradigm hampers efforts to automate transportation because self-propelled vehicles currently require human involvement in their control and navigation.
- Human control of vehicles, in turn, reduces highway safety and capacity, and increases land-use, congestion, accidents, and the need for infrastructure investments.
- Labor is required to manually refuel vehicles every few hundred miles - a time- and resource-consuming task
All told, these unintended consequences result in more than a $1.5 billion per day drain on the American economy.
elab believes integrating electricity into vehicle propulsion, simultaneously addressing the many interdependent transportation challenges facing America today, and investing research in strategies that seamlessly use electricity to deliver energy to its point-of-use is a logical, albeit conceptually counter-intuitive, path forward.
Unlike a century ago or even a few decades ago, electrification of transportation networks can be integrated to existing highway infrastructure without the need for the overhead wires of old or a completely new, dedicated infrastructure such as electric guideways. With the advent of such things as advanced grid technologies, power electronics, electric motors, wireless energy transfer, high-temperature materials, on-board computing, and a wide array of sensor and control technologies - America is poised for a paradigm shift and radical redesign of surface transportation - a new era of "automated electric transportation networks."
Using a network of automated electric highways and flex-mode electric vehicles seamlessly energized by the highways either directly or inductively and continuously or intermittently - a systematic transition to automation through electrification is both feasible and better addresses virtually all of our transportation challenges while maintaining the flexibility convenience and control American's demand.
A recent informal analysis of automated electric transportation by an interdisciplinary group of 20 researchers suggests that such a strategy could be more technically feasible, address more interdependent transportation challenges, and do so less-expensively than a roll up of R&D pathways being pursued by different federal agencies working separately within the current transportation paradigm.
The probable benefits of merging vehicle, roadway, communication, and energy infrastructures using automated electric transportation networks are staggering.
No longer will we be dependent on oil from the middle-east or require food and fuel to compete for valuable farmland, as we transition to a more diversified, domestic suite of energy sources like natural gas, clean coal, and carbon-neutral options such as nuclear energy and renewable sources.
No longer will we spend as much time driving and refueling vehicles. Transitioning over time to a system that takes humans out of the control and navigation loop will enable a slow transition to more automated traffic flow, driverless freight, platooning of vehicles (which reduces wind drag and improves energy efficiency), higher speeds, increased vehicle capacity on existing highways, less stress and fatigue, more time to do other things, and subsequently, an improved quality of life.
By taking energy storage and multiples conversions off vehicles and moving it to power plants, car and truck weight, complexity and up-front costs will fall, energy efficiency will improve, and air pollution in many high priority localities will be dramatically reduced.
And there are a number of ancillary benefits to the merging of infrastructures such as the use of existing highway right-of-ways for Americas growing electricity distribution needs and the potential for bundled services.
To realize the benefits, however, public and private stakeholders representing a wide range of interest groups vested in the existing transportation system will need to set aside institutional self-interests and deeply entrenched policies, pathways, and paradigms based on outdated perceptions of what is possible.
An obvious place to start is in the transportation and energy research communities where new, disruptive ideas - even those that represent systems-level change - can be vetted and evaluated holistically. Using internal funds, researchers at Texas A&M University are already evaluating the probable impacts of automated electric transportation on the nation's electricity grid. At DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, researchers are using internal funds to model the efficiency of energy transfer to vehicles from electric lines using resonance-coupling techniques. Their initial findings suggest highly-efficient energy transfer may - in fact - be possible. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is developing a computer modeling tool to compare the energy security, emissions, congestion, and cost aspects of advanced transportation systems that are powered electrically along the roadway to other options such as adding lanes or light rail. The model will include multiple roadway options (regular, guided), vehicle types (passenger cars, light rail, personal rapid transit), and electrical infrastructure options (third rail, overhead lines, induction, wind power, solar power).
Other research is needed to understand the energy supply requirements and associated implementation strategies of AET, anticipated vehicle component and user costs, infrastructure requirements, environmental impacts, human factor issues, etc.