Could the world’s first solar power truck be the answer to decarbonising haulage?

Swedish manufacturer Scania has developed a haulage trailer fitted with solar panels which could decarbonise existing trucks.

Transcript

00:00 We've developed the world's first solar-powered truck.

00:04 The average truck, we estimate, lives to about 15 or 20 years.

00:09 So that means that even vehicles which are rolling off the production line today will

00:13 live until 2040, basically.

00:15 If you can add solar panels to the trailers, and they can decarbonize the rolling fleet,

00:20 which is already out there, which is very difficult to do anything about in any other

00:25 way.

00:27 My name is Erik Falkheim.

00:28 I'm the technology leader for vehicle design, and I work in Scania R&D with coordinating

00:34 research on vehicle design.

00:35 In the European Union, the transportation industry, that's passenger cars and heavy-duty

00:40 vehicles, all transport, is responsible for about 25% of the greenhouse gas emissions,

00:47 so a very large part of our total emissions.

00:50 And heavy-duty vehicles, even though there aren't that many, they consume a lot of fuel.

00:54 At Scania, we are always working to drive the shift towards a sustainable transport

00:59 system.

01:00 The truck basically consists of two parts.

01:02 So the tractor unit is a more or less conventional plug-in hybrid tractor, but the other part

01:08 is the trailer, which is equipped with batteries, power electronics, and solar power.

01:14 The benefit you get with the trailer is that you have an additional 200 kilowatt hours

01:18 of energy storage, which means it's in total three times as much as the tractor itself.

01:22 But then in addition to that, you can also get dynamic charging, well, if the sun is

01:27 out, and so you're actually charging while you're driving, which is a big upside to having

01:34 the panels on the truck rather than on the side of the road.

01:37 Preliminary data we have from that particular vehicle is that with the hybrid system and

01:42 the solar panels together, we're looking at a reduction in fuel consumption of about 40%.

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