Imagine it's the year 1900. The horse and buggy still reign supreme as the choice mode of transportation, but a relative newcomer, the automobile, is about to become all the rage. And so roads begin to pave and things like gas stations and traffic lights appear, and voila! Everything looks different and probably smells a lot better, too. The transition from horse to horsepower ushered in a complete infrastructural change that had ripples through every sector imaginable and made our modern world possible.



 A century later, are we on the cusp of another transformation that of magnitude? Today, the world pretty much agrees on the basic idea that we need to get off fossil fuels and move toward more sustainable solutions to our modern needs. The transportation industry accounts for something like 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And that's one of the largest contributors of pollution in the world. But going electric is not a simple panacea for the world's climate problem. We need to understand that electric vehicle is very good but the battery is not so green. 

The more we consume electric vehicles, the more we consume electricity and electricity is powered by polluted materials like natural gas or coal. Just like going from 19thto 20th century mobility, the very infrastructure we built our society on may need to change. And a lot of unresolved issues remain before this shift goes into full gear. For example... There aren't enough lithium ion and cobalt resources in the world today. And the whole industry is centered on making sure that there's no anxiety associated with the range. Batteries don't grow on trees.

 And for every mile you want to go, they become heavier, which then drains them faster, forcing us to stop and charge up again and again and again, which of course takes up energy. And so we're left with the ultimate riddle. How can we move with the ease and freedom that internal combustion offers while successfully reducing our overall carbon footprint? Israeli EV startup Electronic helping crack the code. We don't need to remove the battery at all but we need to reduce the size of the battery. And this will create agree solution to all of us.

 We took a step back and we looked at the shift to electric cars on a much wider street. And we said well, what is the most worthwhile? How can we create a visual solution where the battery life can be as small as possible? When you think about battery capacity and battery density, not every vehicle requires a huge battery. Not all cars require to travel hundreds of miles. In fact, the vision is to force the transition to electric vehicles in a more sustainable and efficient way while lowering the cost of owning vehicles for the cave.. And the existing solutions based on plug-in charging will not do the shift alone.  

                                         

 And we believe that wireless charging technology can help speed up the adoption of motor vehicles. Yes, you heard that right. Car charging wirelessly. Wireless charging is away to transmit energy from one coil to the other coil without having hard connection between the two. While we're driving, we can charge it while we're waiting for passengers inside the city. We can charge it while we are loading goods at the loading dock. So it means that we can charge the vehicle almost anytime, anywhere. We do not need to carry a huge battery with us. We can reduce the size of the battery and we can transmit the energy almost all day long. 

We have the copper coils that are installed under the road, under the roadway or wherever it is that we're deploying that transfer energy over the air to a receiver that's installed directly under the vehicle chassis. Works on the exact same principle as an electronic toothbrush, or we're seeing a lot of new generation wireless charging for iPhones. There's no actual connection required between the two. The energy is via the app. Wireless charging is actually nothing new.

 It's use has been around almost as long as the discovery of electricity itself. The principle is based on Nikola Tesla discovery more than 100 years ago. Nikola Tesla, was so ahead of his time that his vision for wireless energy transformation was buried by his competitor, Thomas Edison, in favor of a less egalitarian and more capitalistic system of energy transmission. Today, he's practically worshiped by the tech elite and the Tesla coil remains the inspiration for wireless internet connections as well as charging solutions like Electron’s. 

                                    

This charging can occur even when the car is moving and comes with a holistic power management system to maximize the process. Electron’s technology is made up of four major components. There's the copper coils directly under the road. There's the receiver unit, which accepts the energy from the copper coils under the road. Then that relationship is managed by a management unit at the side of the road, which receives energy directly from the grid and then safely transfers it to the copper coils under the road. 

These three components are managed by cloud software, which enables us to remotely monitor the entire relationship, make sure enough energy is being transferred, and ultimately charge and bill for the energy. The benefits of wireless charging are huge. When we look at the transition to electric mobility, there are a lot of costs incurred on the vehicle side and on the infrastructure side. Installing the technology means a vehicle's battery capacity can be massively reduced, which can be up to 50% of the cost of the vehicle itself. 

The vehicle never needs to stop to charge again. You can charge with different amount of energy different vehicles on the same platform, which is very unique to wireless charging. Just as in the transition from horses to automobiles, public infrastructure plays a critical role in enabling mass adoption, but making major changes to large complex systems while they're in use isn't easy. There is no standard for wireless charging dynamically. Ultimately, in order to be able to enter the market and offer our technology at commercial scale, we need standardization of the technology.

 So of course, we're looking, in this case, at involvement with the local government municipality, regional transport authority, whatever it may be, that funds the infrastructure deployment on the one side and then the user, the vehicle itself, or the owner of the vehicle will be charged for the amount of energy that’s transferred to them in the same way that you pay for roaming services or a vehicle today is charged. When you deal with disruptive technology, you need to educate the market. You need to deal with standardization, regulation. 

You need to teach lots of students and bring them to the company. You need to gain new knowledge. You need to learn from others' mistakes. We need the electric companies and the grid companies to work together to figure out how best to deploy this technology in terms of the grid requirements at scale. And that's what all of the pilots that we're working on are aimed at. To figuring out all the pieces of the puzzle. Implementing this technology sounds like quite an ordeal, but then again, if there's anything that is constantly being worked on already, its roads.   

                             

We're talking about scraping off just a small amount of the center of the road to deploy the technology and doing it as quickly as possible. So today we can lay a kilometer in just one night. So really limiting impacts to the road. You know, if we're doing it on one side of the road, then the public can still use the other side of the road the different direction and making sure that as much of the preparatory work is done ahead of time as possible, limiting impacts to road users. In a few hours, we can take an existing electric vehicle and we can install our unique receiver pad, connect it directly to the battery, and then you can drive.

 So it's very easy to convert or to deal with any type, any kind of electric vehicles. What's really interesting about this technology is how it fits into each different type or use case. So of course there are the vehicles that long, long range. You know, long haul trucking companies, for example, traveling between states or between countries want an extended mileage. When we think about last mile or delivery vans, well they're limited today by the vehicles battery capacity and how often they need to charge. But essentially, with this technology, they could run double shifts. 

If we look at city taxes, just as an example from the mobility as a service world, they're also limited by the amount of charge required. Ultimately, if we installed charging technology along the areas where they were resting, they'd be able to operate for longer hours. Buses, too, which operate on fixed routes. So it makes perfect sense for them to be able to charge while driving and save downtime. There is a huge need for electric busses. So we decided to start with this section. We have one kilometer of electrified road, then we will drive the bus, and you will see that it transmits energy during driving. Every hour, we get 75 kilowatts charging the bus. 

That means that in two hours, we get 150 kilowatts. This is half of the amount of energy that the bus needs to drive all day long. That means that we can reduce the size of the battery by half and lead to great savings and cost of the bus battery and the bus itself. Once we're going to drive the bus, we're going to see that the bus driver doesn’t need to do anything. This is the beauty of it. For him, it's a normal bus. He doesn't need to change anything with the driver. Electron is not relying on this test site alone. 

As a proof of concept, they have several projects around the globe in various stages. We have a project in Gotland, Sweden where we show the charging of a large truck, a 40 ton truck, and a large electric bus showing the capacity for battery reduction. As the vehicles are charged directly from the road in Tel Aviv, we're showing that ultimately, a bus can operate an extended or 24 seven service with higher frequency trips because it doesn't need to stop for dedicated charging time. In Italy, we're going to be deploying an interesting project with a toll road operator, which is a classic use case for us, right? If you, as a user, are already paying to use a toll road, why not also get energy transfer to your vehicle then and charge your car? 

Part of Elect Reon's vision is in alignment with the trend of increasing public spaces in urban environments. We're talking about infrastructure that's essentially invisible. It's under the road, so no changes to the road surface, no noise, no additional use of space. So if we look at the urban environment, for example, it makes more sense to have dedicated space for pedestrians, for cyclists, to increase the amount of space for them and to not have the focus on the visible charging infrastructure. In keeping with Nikola Tesla's egalitarian ideals, Elect Reon plans on sharing their solutions with the world at large.     

So our approach is a bit different. We are going to offer the IPs for free for a car manufacturer in order to increase the adoption of wireless charging. This sort of open source IP sharing is typical of the Silicon Valley set. Elon Musk did the same in the hopes of moving to a new generation of sustainable development. Because the tide really lifts all ships up. ElectReon, even as it proves its concept and takes on more partners, remains in its infancy. 

There's still some questions about the economics behind their product, and if it's able to be deployed around the world, but they are picking up steam with several projects in Europe and plans to expand in the U.S. and capture on President Biden’s initiative to try to ramp up EV infrastructure in the country. That's a big if since there's no guarantee that ElectReon will receive the benefits of Biden's infrastructure plan, not to mention that they’re not the only game in town. 

Siemens eHighway, Elways, and ELONROAD all claim to have commercial-ready electric road systems, but the ElectReon team and their ambitions remain undeterred by competition and held strong by an unwavering faith in their core mission. The real question is, is what are we doing to limit the environmental impacts of electric mobility? How are we making it truly sustainable? And that's how I was really able to get behind the vision that the founders have here and what they're trying to do. And as for the daunting task of altering the world's roads for wireless charging, ElectReon is taking it one kilometer at a time. When you start something that at the beginning you need to put lots of effort to start moving this change. But once you are in motion, then it will be much easier to move fast and fast and accelerate.