Because the logistics never worked, and won't work for at least another 10 years.
1. How do you use it? First you need an electric truck, or a truck where at least 50% of its wheels are connected to electric motors. Either way you'd have to retrofit existing fleets of all shapes and sizes, so one or more companies would need to specialize in doing that, which would be very expensive initially. So you have to have an electric fleet to retrofit, or retrofit an ICE fleet (which makes zero economic sense).
2. How often is it used? The truck might actually only spend 1/2-2/3 of its time connected to the system, what with time waiting to load/unload at ports and depots, time before/after you're on highway, dealing with traffic on the highway itself.
3. How do you pay for the energy? You need a company to generate the energy, a company to charge users for the energy, a way to identify the truck as it's receiving the energy, tariff management software, etc.
4. Where are you going to install it? What roads will or won't work? How long will that take before you have enough roads that you'd stop losing money? Mostly long haul, so this has limited application, even in trucking.
If all the trucks were electric, all exactly the same size/type, the system were installed on all roads, all the companies needed to service it were in operation, and you trained enough service staff, and electricity was cheap enough that the portion of your ride would be offset by the amount of time you are charging that you could carry a smaller battery, then it would make sense.
But first we need to roll this system out on all highways, then everybody needs a BEV, then we retrofit them all, then shrink all their batteries, and then it will make economic sense. Before that all happens we need enough chargers, enough grid capacity, cheaper cleaner power, and enough BEVs rolled out, which will take 10 years at least.
Electric trams work in cities because they have short routes, a small identical fleet, need very little battery, and all the money comes from one pool (the city).
> first we need to roll this system out on all highways, then everybody needs a BEV
Essentially your complaint seems to be that we don't get a free lunch, but that's never been an option
You have only 3 options: large expensive batteries on every truck, smaller batteries + overhead wires, or some kind of fuel like hydrogen. In all cases you need new vehicles, and in all cases you need new infrastructure to handle charging and/or fuel.
Production of fuel from electricity and it's distribution is always under 40% efficiency. So if you want efficiency, the only question is cost of overhead wires vs cost of larger battery in every truck.
Most of the battery would be spent travelling long distance on large, straight roads, and those are also the easiest roads to electrify.
Also what's with the complaint about energy billing? We can put a 5g connection into every car and make it charge us for heated seats, but measuring energy is a problem?
You just need electric trucks with one pair of drive wheels powered by electric motors. Maybe more if you want more traction, but an 18-wheeler doesn't need 9 drive wheels. It might have 8, if the tractor has two drive axles with dual tires. In practice you could just replace the engine with an electric motor and keep the rest of the drive train the same, as is done on many EV conversions now.
If the system is on the major roads, then that's where the major energy is being used. If you're stuck somewhere in traffic or waiting to load/unload, you're not actually using much energy.
Honestly I'd be okay with the energy being unmetered. I think the cost to society of CO2 emissions is probably greater than the cost of supplying trucks with free energy would be anyways, so I think it's probably a net win for society to have it as a free service. But there are also ways to charge for it if we wanted to go that route. Paying for the energy is a non-problem, you'd just need to decide on a policy.
Ideally in the U.S. this would be installed on interstate highways, at regular intervals. Maybe 5 miles on, 20 miles off or something like that. The overhead lines don't need to be everywhere, they just need to be in enough places that cross-country shipping is possible, and local shipping between major cities is possible.
Same reason Detroit doesn't have useful mass-transit.
Entrenched interests make more money by prolonging the problem. Arguably the solution would be economically superior (vastly so!), but the folks who'd profit from it aren't in power _now_, and government lacks both the technical competency to understand what to do, and the balls to do it.
Because historically diesel has been cheap and the externalities have been ignored. It's also a major infrastructure project, and getting it installed widely enough to be useful on, say, the interstate highway system in the U.S. would require an act of Congress, plus buy-in from vehicle manufacturers and operators, plus widely-agreed on standards.
I mean, we still haven't even electrified all the railways, and the proposal for IceLink, a cable to import cheap renewable power from IceLand to UK, was sitting on the shelf for 60 years.
Also we had trolleybusses in many cities and got rid of them
Not necessarily disagreeing, but if the solution has been obvious for 50 years, why hasn't it happened?