KAIST OLEV: A Better Idea?

Posted on 13 August 2009

Some “out of the box” thinking from South Korea caught our attention.  Instead of the current idea of electric vehicles with batteries (fixed or swapable), which leads to problems like cost, weight and energy density, how about charging the vehicles from power strips buried along roads or at intersections?

A small battery in the vehicle could allow it to go off-road, but most of the time the vehicle would be near to power supplies, and the power could be transferred, without contact, across a gap of a few centimeters.  OLEV stands for Online Electric Vehicle.  The idea is being developed by the “MIT of Korea,” the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).  A demonstration event was scheduled for today, August 13, in Korea.  More details can be found here and here.

Obviously the concept is years away, if ever, but more than anything it shows that scalable solutions that can truly compete with the fossil fuel based infrastructure will require disruptive ideas that perhaps we still have not seen.  The early internet had the browser, what will be the cleantech equivalent?