A simple method for sizing and estimating the performance of PV systems in trolleybus grids

Opportunity Charging of Electric Buses Directly from a DC Metro Catenary and Without Storage

“…Table III shows how the additional harvesting of braking energy by the added charger offsets by far the amount of additional energy losses that this charger brings to the grid. This comparison is by more than a factor of 2, and resonates with earlier calls in the literature to the addition of smart base loads for the sustainability and efficiency of transport grids [3,6,20,21,24,26,27,[31][32][33]. Table III also offers an estimated equivalency in bus kilometers of this harvested energy.…”

“…One common workaround has been to place storage systems in the grid to harvest the braking energy and deliver it to an accelerating vehicle at a later moment. Still, this method is both expensive and subject to severe efficiency losses [7,8,11,[15][16][17][19][20][21][22][23].…”

“…In particular, the integration of smart loads such as electric vehicles (EV) chargers into transport networks can both increase the braking energy recuperation and provide a base load for the integrated renewable energy sources. Both are phenomena that can reduce the dependency on costly, inefficient, and complex storage systems [20,21,26,27]. Indeed, an EV charger connected to the DC side (directly to the catenary/third rail) of a traction grid can recuperate some of the otherwise-wasted braking energy.…”