More and more hybrid and electric vehicles are being bought each year, as petrol and diesel is slowly but surely getting phased out. The movement towards renewable energy is seeing fossil fuels becoming less and less desirable, as consumers become more conscious of living sustainable lives. There’s been an increase in companies getting help from their IT Support, like having an Office 365 Consultant or tech expert to advise on where to be more sustainable. Nowadays, IT Support Companies need to consider the impact that technology has on our environment and which tech is more eco-friendly.
There has been a great deal of innovation in sustainable technologies, and a mass movement by businesses to become more sustainable through various means. Yet the technology for electric cars has been around for many years, without seeing much of a boom in popularity. So, what is the future of Electric Vehicles?
Better Car Batteries
Lithium ion batteries have consistently proven to be the most efficient way of storing energy for portability for many decades now. The batteries you buy in stores for appliances are all lithium ion, an the batteries used in electric cars are just bigger, more complex versions of them.
One innovation in battery technology that may lead to more efficient and larger capacity batteries is a variety of the material known as Iron Triflouride. This material has been explored for its use in batteries in the past, but this new variation, according to the team that developed it, could triple the energy density of traditional lithium-ion batteries.
Electric Roads & Highways
One of the biggest challenges surrounding widespread adoption of electric personal transport is the fact that electric car batteries are expensive, take longer to recharge than petrol cars take to refill, and the fact that the infrastructure for electric car recharging is less well established.
So, one solution that is being pursued is the electrification of roads and highways. The appeal of this approach is that drivers may not even have to stop driving to recharge their battery.
Two nations that have made proactive steps in this direction is Israel and Germany. In the case of Israel, a small start-up called Electreon has tested a project where they placed copper coils beneath roads, in order to wirelessly transmit energy to suitably equipped electric cars. Tests were done using a Renault Zoe test car, driven over roads at a boarding school near Tel Aviv. We spoke to providers of IT Support South London Solutions to see if they think this kind of tech will be used in PC’s and laptops in the future.
This same technology has been utilized in Sweden, as part of their plan to build at least 1,000 miles of electrified highways.
Then, in Germany, the infrastructure for electric HGVs is already in use. But instead of putting energy transmitting coils under the roads, they have used power lines, which are a much more established technology that everyone knows works. Trucks and other Heavy Goods Vehicles can merge onto special lanes with overhead power lines, which the vehicle connects to, allowing their battery to be recharged whilst driving. Germany is also hoping to greatly expand the infrastructure of this technology to cover up to 30% of their highways.