Govt plans e-highway between Mumbai & Delhi – Wait, what’s this e-highway? – EQ Mag Pro
Union Surface Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari seems enamoured of anything electric when it comes to travel and transport. He is doing his best to make EVs more mainstream in India. And now, he is bitten by the idea of electric highway. Yesterday, at a function, he said the government is planning to construct an electric highway between Delhi and Mumbai.
“Our planning is to make electric highway from Delhi to Mumbai. Just like trolleybus, you can run trolleytrucks also,” he said. As a matter of fact, this is not the first time he has spoken about electric highway. Earlier too, he had told Indian Parliament that the government is trying to construct a separate ‘e-highway’ on the 1,300-kilometre-long Delhi-Mumbai Expressway where trucks and buses can ply at a speed of 120 km per hour.
So it seems he and the government are serious about it, even though this electric highway will take time to build.
This electric highway that is being talked about is likely to be a separate lane in the Delhi-Mumbai express highway, the construction for which is underway. It is likely feasible for electric trucks and electric buses, as opposed to electric cars and two-wheelers
But what is this electric highway? Basically, an electric highway is a road which supplies power to vehicles travelling on it, including through overhead power lines.
Germany is the world leader in this where Siemens has pioneered the eHighway technology. On the eHighway, trucks can operate completely electrically and at the same time charge their batteries without using fuel.
Siemens Mobility supplies hybrid trucks which draw, tram-like, electricity from an overhead line via a pantograph. (A pantograph is just an apparatus mounted on the roof of an electric train, tram or any vehicle to collect power through contact with an overhead line.) The system, which uses 670-volt direct-current overhead cables, not only slashes energy consumption by half, but also substantially reduces air pollution.
When the trucks are connected to the overhead cable they run on electricity alone. When they rejoin the normal highway they switch back to their hybrid engines. It is said that that if a driver swerved to the left or right while connected to the cables it would not detach.
There is a proposal in Germany to equip 300 kilometers of autobahns with overhead contact lines by 2023 and electrifying a total of 4,000 kilometers by 2030.
How close is India in getting an e-highway?
Elsewhere in America, some pilot projects are on to test out similar e-highways. Interestingly, in Italy, Stellantis and Iveco and a bunch of companies are working on a technology in which coils positioned under dedicated lanes will transfer energy directly to cars, trucks and buses without the need to stop at charging stations to refill the battery. Named Dynamic Wireless Power transfer (DWPT) system, it will wirelessly recharge EVs as they travel over the specially equipped road lanes.
But the e-highway that India is contemplating is not similar to this. It’ll be closer to what Siemens is working on. To be clear, India is still only in the early stages of plan, which, of course, needs to be approved and then executed. By the looks of it, it’ll take at least a year or more for the e-highway to become a reality in India.
But by electrifying the core network and supplying electricity to the trucks and buses driving there with electric drives, a huge and quick contribution to climate protection can be achieved.
Source: PTI
