Regulating Electric Road Systems in Europe - How can a deployment of ERS be facilitated?

Despite rising electric vehicle sales, road transport is still dominated by fossil fuels usage. Transport is responsible for about one quarter of global energy related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with the largest share of the transport GHG emissions comes from road transport at about 72 % (International Energy Agency, 2021). Fortunately, technologies enabling low carbon road transport are already becoming commercially available or are under development. These technologies include the direct use of electricity in battery electric and plug-in hybrid trucks (BET and PHET) with stationary or dynamic charging via so-called Electric Road Systems (ERS), Fuel Cell Electric Trucks (FCET), biofuels and synthetic renewable fuels. These options are in different stages of technological maturity, commercialization, and development for heavy duty vehicles (HDV). The role of each option, or more likely of reasonable combinations, in a future sustainable road transport system is still under debate (International Energy Agency, 2021; Kluschke, Gnann, Plötz, & Wietschel, 2019).

This discussion paper is the result of an international collaboration on ERS research, the CollERS2 project (please visit: https://electric-road-systems.eu/ ). It summarizes key results of the second workshop held in March 2022. This paper thus has a focus on regulation and standardization of ERS. The aims are to achieve legal and technical interoperability and to facilitate a rollout of ERS in Europe.