If electric roads are gonna happen, they might come to Sweden first

While these projects are in the initial stages of testing, Sweden is hard at work on finding a way to implement Electric Road Systems (ERS) onto public roads. A new project dubbed the "Research and Innovation Platform for Electric Roads," has been granted a total of roughly $3 million to test the real-world uses of ERS.

The funds, which came partly from the Swedish Program for Strategic Vehicle Research and Innovation and the Swedish Transport Administration, will be used to fortify the research and innovation resources used by Swedish and Nordic researchers. To do this, the project will be in charge of building a shared knowledge base that can be used jointly between institutes, authorities, universities, and more. The move to create a joint base that can be used by various organizations will help companies find what type of ERS will and won't work in Sweden.

The goal of the project is to get a better understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of ERS from various perspectives. Things that prove to be successful will be identified and implemented into ongoing ERS projects currently taking place in Sweden. Various transport organizations from Sweden and Norway have teamed up to conduct the research, while an assortment of energy and automotive companies, like Volvo, will lend a hand as partners.

The project will focus on Airport City Stockholm, Region Kalmar, and Region Gavleborg – all areas in Sweden – as these locations have expressed interest in deploying ERS in the near future. Viktoria Swedish ICT, a nonprofit research institute that concentrates on sustainable mobility, is coordinating and managing the project.

As stated earlier, the Swedish Transportation Administration is currently working on two projects: one on a stretch of highway E16 in Sandviken that involves heavy-duty trucks obtaining electricity from an apparatus that's roughly 18 feet above the ground and an electric rail system inside the roadway near Arlanda that currently has its own dedicated lane for the other.

Sweden seems to be the hub for electric-road testing as Volvo started testing its own electric-road system last year that involves wirelessly charging moving city buses that is called ElectriCity.