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South Korea Debuts Road-powered Electric Buses
Green Technology Featured Articles
August 09, 2013

South Korea Debuts Road-powered Electric Buses

By Lavanya Rathnam
TMCnet Contributing Writer

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges threatening our very existence. It is caused by greenhouse gas emissions that come from the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil. To reduce the impact of greenhouse emissions, many governments around the world are taking initiatives to come up with eco-friendly public transportation, afforestation and sound urban planning.


One such country that has made rapid strides in eco-friendly public transportation is South Korea. Recently, South Korea's Gumi City introduced a new kind of environment-friendly bus called the Online Electric Vehicle (OLEV), which gets its charge from the road itself. In a unique model created by the KAIST Graduate School for Green Transportation, these buses take electric power from the electrical cables that are buried beneath the road surface.

The road has been designed to identify OLEV buses from other buses, so when OLEV buses pass through it, the road “switches on” the power strips. In turn, the cables buried under the asphalt surface create magnetic fields. These magnetic currents are captured and converted to electrical power by a receiver placed near the wheels of the bus. This mechanism will give the bus 20 kHz and 136 horsepower electricity, accounting for 85 percent of power transmission rate. Despite the passage of such high amounts of electricity, it does not affect the bus parts or the road because there is a 17 cm air gap between the road surface and the under body of the bus.

The first trial route spanned a stretch of 24 km. It started from the Gumi Station and went all the way up to the In-Dong district. This bus has been touted as one of the remarkable inventions that can change the face of public transport worldwide. Gumi City officials are happy with the success of this bus and they plan to have 10 more on the road by 2015.




Edited by Alisen Downey


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