Remember our Formula-E story? Well Manhattan is getting these awesome chargers that power the racing cars and disguising them as drain covers so delivery trucks or maybe even taxis can charge as they stop off.
The company planning this is called Hevo Power and wants the chargers to blend in with their surroundings.
"I was walking down the street, pondering how wireless charging could be deployed," Hevo’s CEO and founder Jeremy McCool told the WIRED website.
"I was standing at 116th and Broadway, and I was looking down and saw a manhole cover. And thought, that’s the ticket. There are no cords, no hazards. Everything can be underneath the manhole cover."
The result is a new system of wireless charging stations that Hevo plans to deploy in New York’s Washington Square Park in early 2014, beginning with two Smart ForTwo electric vehicles operated by NYU.
Normally, inductive charging requires a primary coil to generate an electromagnetic field that is picked up by a second coil mounted underneath the electric vehicle to charge up the battery pack. But it’s not particularly efficient, with large amounts of energy dissipating through the coil. With a resonance-based system, which Hevo plans to use, 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.
In its current form, Hevo’s system is classed as a Level 2 charging station, with 220-volts and up to 10 kilowatts of energy being transmitted from the pad to the vehicle. McCool says the system can put out more than 10 kW, depending on the application. But for now, Hevo is focusing on Neighborhood Electric Vehicles with small footprints, low speeds, and minimal battery capacity — something that’s perfect for inner-city delivery vehicles.
In addition to the NYU program and working with E-Ride, Hevo is in talks with PepsiCo, Walgreens, and City Harvest to discuss the possibility of rolling out the system for a larger fleet of vehicles.
"It’s an iterative roll out strategy that starts with a fleet and builds on policy matching technology," McCool says. "This is the kind of ecosystem that needs to exist [for EVs]."
