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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 19th to 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 ElectReon is 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 a green solution to all of us.
We took a step back and we looked at the shift
to electric vehicles in a more holistic way.
And we said okay,
what makes the most sense?
How can we create a charging solution where the vehicle
battery can be as small as it can possibly be?
When you think about battery capacity and battery density,
not every vehicle requires a huge battery.
Not every vehicle needs to travel hundreds of miles.
So ultimately,
the vision is to empower the transition
to electric vehicles in the most sustainable
and efficient way possible
whilst ultimately lowering the cost
of ownership of the vehicles for the owner.
And the existing solutions based
on plug-in charging will not do the shift alone.
So we believe
that wireless charging is the technology
that can help to accelerate the adoption
of electric vehicles.
Yes, you heard that right.
Car charging wirelessly.
Wireless charging is a way 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
any time,
anywhere.
We don't 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 ElectReon's.
This charging can occur even when the car is moving
and comes with a holistic power management system
to maximize the process.
ElectReon'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