City
Kassel, Hessen
Region
Central Europe
Audience
…
Theme
…
Aspect
11.1 Monitor progress and adapt
Context
With a population of 193,803, Kassel is the third largest city in the German state of Hesse, behind Frankfurt am Main and Wiesbaden. It is located in the north of the province, near the border with Lower Saxony. The project “Mobility plans and concepts in Hesse” develops synopses and basics for sustainable mobility planning in Hessian municipalities and regions. The project should help in the development and implementation of sustainable mobility plans. Through the EMOBICITY project (ELISA project), Kassel represents Germany’s first eHighway and a new dimension in electric mobility.
Activity description
The ELISA project in Kassel shows the way in which the transport sector can make a significant contribution to achieving the national climate protection goals. In the first part of the ELISA project, the eHighway Hessen was built over a distance of around ten kilometers on the A5 highway. Within two years, the project partners set up an overhead line system that can supply overhead line hybrid trucks with energy. This created the technical prerequisites for the field test. In the second phase, the eHighway system will be tested on the infrastructure side over a period of four years until the end of 2022. The eHighway Hessen was planned, approved and built within just two years. This demonstrated that this type of electric road can be erected in a short time, even on busy roads. Since May 2019, with the delivery of the first vehicle, the eHighway Hessen has been in operation. Since the beginning of 2020, 24/7 operation started. Although the final results of the evaluation will only be known at the end of the project, the purely electrical operation of trucks is demonstrably working.
Lessons learnt
Heavy traffic on the streets increases from year to year. Since solutions to effectively avoid road freight traffic or shift these goods to other modes of transport cannot be foreseen, Europe must find a way to make road freight traffic more climate-friendly. The ELISA project shows a possible and functioning way of how long-distance road transport can be electrified. The national implementation of electric roads already has great potential for reducing CO2 in the transport sector. The really huge breakthrough in this sector is brought about by European cooperation and the vision of an electric truck driving across Europe.
Costs
23.9 million Euros funded by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety.