The Electric Highway Evolution
Rethinking the Electric Transportation Model With Transformative Electric Highways
The transportation sector accounts for more than one-third of CO2 emissions globally
Despite widespread attention on electric vehicles, only 14% of car purchases today are electric
In the freight sector the challenge is even greater, as electric trucks would require batteries and equipment that ultimately make them over 5,300 pounds heavier than diesel trucks
Electric highway models can turn the paradigm on its head as studies conclusively outline the social benefits of operational cost savings and emissions reductions would undoubtedly outweigh the costs.
Current Problem
The transportation sector is arguably the most critical industry to decarbonize, as people’s car-centric daily lives pour countless emissions into the atmosphere daily while the global economy relies heavily on trade powered by extremely heavy and work-intensive trucks. Help certainly came with the advent of electric vehicles (EVs) as an option, starting with the flashy Tesla cars at first only accessible to the wealthy but increasingly becoming more affordable across different automakers, but penetration of vehicle-miles from EVs has been slow to scale.
Polls of the general public show that the real holdup for EV purchases remains range anxiety, with EV chargers not necessarily being ubiquitous enough for drivers to feel comfortable and confident they’ll be able to regularly make longer trips they desire and the inertia that long stops to recharge being a further holdup. When it comes to company fleets and the trucking industry, the challenges are even more significant because heavier vehicles need larger, heavier, and longer-to-charge batteries to make the logistics work. While diesel trucks today can refuel in 15 minutes and then be ready to drive 1,200 miles, an electric truck using today’s technology might have a range of up to 330 miles and could require 10 hour charging times, making direct replacement of diesel trucks with electric trucks a logistical challenge.
While the industry continues to seek out better batteries and chargers that can make iterative improvements to these logistical headaches, perhaps a larger reframing of the whole model is in order. As noted on this page before, truly sustainable transportation strategies don’t look just at what fuels our existing vehicles, but they question the very nature of how we get around, how often, and why.
Specifically, electric highways have started to become a trending new model to consider when it comes to moving large quantities of goods. The definition of an electric highway is a modified section of a highway for the use of EVs (predominantly large, freight-carrying vehicles) that provides recharging power to the vehicles while traversing it, whether by overhead power supplies, a rail system the vehicle drives on, or even a futuristic inductive charging system that doesn’t even require physical contact.
While the deployment of any type of electric highway remains more in demonstration, pilot, or scall-scale state, these early installations are serving as proof of concept and allowing the highway operators and fleet managers alike to test them out while working out any kinks in how they work. With time, as technologies improve and the cost of deployment fall, EV owners and electric truck drivers alike may soon find themselves looking less and less for charging station pitstops and instead navigating their routes along more common electric highways.
Already, examples of advancement in electric highways can be found at the local level all the way to the global level:
Emerging Solutions
LOS ANGELES
The city of Los Angeles is well known for being at the intersection of a car-centric city filled with people who are seeking to embrace sustainable and environmental solutions in their lives, making it one of the most notable U.S. markets for EVs and presenting a key opportunity to lead the way on electric highways.
This background provided the needed environment for the first electric highway demonstration project to take place in Los Angeles back in 2017. Specifically, the South Coast Air Quality Management District and Siemens teamed up for a demonstration project of large freight trucks traversing the mile-long eHighway on Alameda Street near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Using an overhead power source and catenary system, reminiscent of streetcars, this project successfully demonstrated a key way to reduce localized air pollution and incentivize local shipping stakeholders to embrace electrification.
CALIFORNIA
Zooming out to the state-level, California has sought to embrace electric vehicles more than any other state. The Siemens project on Alameda Street was deemed a success, but to date remains the only electrified highway stretch. In the meantime, California has been embracing, studying, and implementing other methods of ramping up electric vehicles across its highways and shipping industry, including:
The implementation of the ‘West Coast Electric Highway’ project that rather than installing eHighway technology to charge while in motion instead seeks to ensure publicly available stop and charge infrastructure is available every 50 miles.
Building out truck charging depots across northern California to encourage more freight companies to add electric trucks to their fleets
Installing piezoelectric crystals on several freeways capable of converting the movement from vehicles traversing them into electricity
NATIONAL
Across the United States, the eHighway movement still remains fairly restricted to California. That said, the company ENRX saw the success in Los Angeles and in 2023 pushed forward to build a $13 million project of wireless charging roads for EVs near Orlando, Florida.
Similar to California, though, U.S. leaders have sought to find other methods in the meanwhile to inject life into the EV industry, such as a the “Electric Highways Study” from National Grid that investigates the grid impacts of EV chargers becoming ubiquitous on interstates, the National Electric Highway Coalition (NEHC) collaboration among electric companies committing to provide EV fast charging stations across major travel corridors, and the massive amount of federal funds released to fast-track EV charging installation across the country.
The Map below is from Q4 of 2020 – we are currently gathering data to update the map.
GLOBAL
While the U.S. has notoriously lagged behind key international leaders in EV purchases and integration, it should come as no surprise that electric highways are also further along in development in a number of other nations. Notably, cross-country shipment by truck tends to be more feasible in nations with smaller geographic footprints, making the electric highway model even more achievable and appealing. Notable global projects showing more recent advancement in the eHighway push include the following:
Sweden has remained perhaps the most advance country in the world with electric highways, building the first permanent electric highway in the world and promising to expand that to 3,000 kilometers by 2035.
Germany engaged in a test of the same Siemens technology used in Los Angeles on three public test routes enroute to a plan to equip 2,500 miles of German roadways with overhead electric highway technology (good to meet 60% of the nation’s truck traffic).
A Cambridge University study has made the official recommendation to the UK government that electric highways are the most efficient and affordable solution to decarbonize road freight in the country