Hasta La Ideas

Reporting by Ray Hu and Rain Noe

HEVO Power has been making headlines this week following the announcement not of the product itself but the fact that they’ve made the semifinalist round for the SAFE (Securing America’s Future Energy) Emerging Innovation Award. That and the fact that they’ll be launching a pilot program for their flagship wireless electric vehicle charging system in New York City in early 2014. HEVO Power is founder Jeremy McCool’s approach to reducing America’s dependence on foreign fuel—he served in Iraq before recently completing his Master’s in Urban Policy at Columbia—a solution to overcome certain barriers to EV adoption (which we’ve previously explored in relation to BMW 360° Electric). Wired reports:

McCool and his crew opted for a resonance charging system rather than the traditional inductive charging system used by some smartphones, tablets, and retrofitted EVs like the Nissan Leaf.

Traditionally, inductive charging requires a primary coil to generate an electromagnetic field that is picked up by a second coil mounted underneath the EV to juice up the battery pack. But it’s not particularly efficient, with large amounts of energy dissipating through the coil. With a resonance-based system, both coils are connected with capacitors that resonate at a specific frequency. The energy losses are reduced and you can transmit more energy at a faster rate and further apart.

Hevo’s system comes in three parts: a power station that can either be bolted to the street or embedded in the pavement, a vehicle receiver that’s connected to the battery, and a smartphone app that lets drivers line up their vehicle with the station and keep tabs on charging.

To be honest, I’m not so impressed by the fact that they ‘blend in’ to extant infrastructure, I see it as a kind of quasi-skeuomorphism: Granted, HEVO is not a vestige of an outdated sanitation system, but the manhole-cover aesthetic is essentially a marketing hook for a subtle, street-based. (Then again, the idea of transposing a charging port onto the traditional gas tank is as good an example of the S-word as anything.)

In any case, the pilot program—HEVO is partnering with NYU to install a pair of stations for electric Smart ForTwo’s near Washington Square Park—is widely being hailed as a major step towards greater adoption of electric vehicles… ostensibly because New York City is a tougher crowd than, say, the Greater Bay Area. Yet a far more ambitious plan in Gumi, South Korea, is already underway. Engineers at KAIST have developed what (I assume) is a similar resonance charging system, SMFIR, which boasts a whopping 85% transmission efficiency and will be embedded in bus lanes in Gumi, under certain stretches of road.

The other upshot of KAIST’s SMFIR system is that the buses can incorporate smaller batteries, which allows for weight and cost savings, as well as reducing the unquanifiable variable of range anxiety. With a bit of data, I’m sure someone could undertake a cursory CBA of whether installing a widespread induction/resonance charging system—cf. Citibike stations: start dense within a limited area and slowly expand, maintaining the same density—would bring down the cost of (and resistance to) the vehicles themselves, and what the break-even point would be. (It’s also worth noting that only certain battery systems will work with these charging systems.)

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