Designing and demonstrating an electric road system for efficient and sustainable road freight

To meet constraints faced by road freight in terms of significantly lowering or reducing CO2 emissions and
improved air quality an Electric Road System (ERS), based on an Overhead Contact Line (OCL)-hybrid heavyduty
vehicle (HDV), has been designed, developed, tested and demonstrated. The ERS demonstrated has twice
the energy efficiency of conventional diesel HDVs and enables usage of renewable energy. The technological
development was made possible by combining expertise from rail electrification, electric drives and a newly
developed active current collector for dynamically connecting to the OCL and receiving a continuous supply of
electricity to power the engine and store energy on-board. The research project demonstrated that a hybrid truck
can run in pure electric mode without any change in the operations for the driver and without concessions on
truck performance. This paper presents the latest results and points the way to a heavy-duty road freight system
with full electric power and full flexibility.