Inductive bus-stop charging Södertälje

For this project we built a single inductive bus stop charger in Södertälje, not only to show it can reduce 60% of energy consumption and lower CO2 emissions compared to a traditional bus, but to study and develop vehicle- and road-side technology. It also gave us opportunities to study the need for new business models and their attractiveness for users and operators. 

Induction technology, electricity transferred without cables or wires, is well known: you find it in electric toothbrushes or in your stove, but it needs to develop further to serve the transport sector with energy. This was the first Swedish test in the field with inductive technology.

Scania and the municipality of Södertälje cooperated in this project that involved a prototype bus from Scania that ran as a regular public bus line. The purpose was to study and evaluate this technology for a longer period of time, 2015 – 2017.

Inductive technology does have a great potential: Infrastructure that supports electric vehicles could save approximately 50 million liters of fuel in a fleet of 2000 busses and it reduces costs with 90% when switching from fossil fuels to electricity. But todays fleet of electric vehicles rely on batteries and for busses these batteries need to be of great size (and weight) to last for a whole day. Batteries are also a scarce resource since they contain limited materials such as rare metals and used batteries are difficult to recycle. Induction needs lighter batteries and therefore less material.

Publications