KAIST, or Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, is busy developing a new idea for urban electric vehicles that would be suitable in terms of capacity, cost, raw materials, and efficiency. The OLEV project (Online Electric Vehicles) running on a non-contact power supply system, seeks to solve the problems that may plague any attempt of a large deployment of electric vehicles, by powering the vehicles through cables placed beneath the road.
As lithium deposits are expected to fall short soon, large deployment of cars powered by lithium-ion batteries would increase the cost of the material further, overcoming any cost benefits that the battery may offer. Plus, removing the battery from the vehicle will reduce its overall weight, and make it more efficient. We’ve seen a number of concepts based on similar ideas, and transmission losses and the large scale infrastructure and costs such concepts would require always seem to be a problem.
The OLEV however, puts the facts and figures into a better perspective and shows that if investment is made in such projects, the returns could be huge. It is expected that if half the vehicles on South Korean roads moved to OLEV (around 6 million vehicles), they could all be powered by two of the nation’s atomic power plants. Also, they would save the country around $3 billion USD a year by slashing down oil imports by 35 million barrels.
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