Thanks for the comment.. Sounds like we can do something

Dale asked me to pass your contact details on to one of our guys here to follow up – so hopefully you will be hearing from him soon.

I am not sure about the answers to your other questions though – but will try and find out.

Cheers
Paul

The first myth is that wind turbines will mean you can’t sell your house, plenty of studies have been undertaken into the effects of wind turbines on house prices, including here in Stroud after we got our first windmill 13 years ago…..! The most recent study I saw suggested that NIMBY pressure groups actually talked house prices down with their scaremongering, but they recovered shortly after.

BTW – back when we first proposed this one (at Nympsfield) all sorts of things were said – it was going to ruin TV signals, kill thousands of birds a year, ruin house prices, keep people awake at night and so on. And guess what – none of that happened. So this is all a bit back to the future really. If you want to know what modern windmills are really all about go see one at Nympsfield – 13 years old this year and still going strong (and quiet).

The other myth I wanted to dispel is that we choose cheap land to build windmills on. First we don’t buy the land, usually. But most importantly, where a wind turbine or wind park can be built is determined by an enormous number of constraints (there is post about this over on Stroud5050 blog)- the need to avoid interference with for example, airports, MOD radar, microwave signals – the need to have safe separation distance to houses (to safeguard against noise and so on), the need to be near the grid and have roads big enough for access – and yet be outside of landscape designated areas and so on. When you apply all these constraints you are left with very few places wind energy can work – and value of land has nothing at all to do with it.

Cheers.

Cheers.

Or wind powered electric cars….

Electricity is not a source of energy as such, it’s a medium. You can’t dig it out of the ground, like say petrol. We could all switch to electric cars tomorrow and have a big impact on emissions but the electricity would have to come from somewhere – more coal or oil burning most likely.

So rather than build and discuss the concept of electric cars, as vehicles of the near post oil future, we’ve skipped to the end game of the debate – electric cars that are powered by wind energy – or wind powered cars.

That’s really the point we’re trying to make, the electricity has to come from somewhere, actually it has to come from renewable sources – and it’s more than feasible. In the process we hope to be a little thought provoking – electricity doesn’t grow on trees…….. Cheers.

I think charge times are over rated as an issue anyway – most car users drive less miles each day than modern batteries can take us – charging upon the go will be the exception not the norm (IMO) and fast charging of say one hour – sounds feasible in the not too distant.

Cheers

Understand where you’re coming from. This is still a work in progress (until we get on the road for a proper set of trials), once we get past that we’ll be in a better place to judge what’s been achieved and where else it (or bits of it) might have application. I def want to see whatever can be used elsewhere, used elsewhere. Several ideas kicking around right now – just too soon to call it, we’re not there yet.

Cheers.

Cheers.

we’ll post some battery stats when we get it fully on the road, should be over the winter so we’ll also have some answers on the cold. We have designed the battery container to re circulate air for heating, or to vent for cooling – so we hope to have the ability to control the temperature sufficiently.

Cheers.

The return we went looking for is the kind we’ve been getting – stimulation of the debate. More on future plans soon.

Cheers.

You’re right, perhaps ‘wind powered car’ is a little misleading. But I still submit that we absolutely need electric cars, and they will give us a benefit right now, even with our fossil grid. We also need grid decarbonisation. These two things can happen in parallel though. Also electric cars can help to balance supply and demand in a renewable energy powered grid.

I take your point that electricity can be better than oil, all I’m saying is that at the moment, the electricity we use *isn’t* 100% green, just looking at the indicator on the ecotricity website, the figure it has for the UK grid as a whole right now is 4.2%. So any electric car, including Dale’s, would be a 4.2% wind-powered car, even assuming the whole percentage of our renewables came from wind, which obviously they don’t. It would be a 74.4% fossil-fuelled car, which is still obviously better than the ninety-plus percent fossil-fuelled cars we have now, even without the loss of efficiency (you’re right, I didn’t know that figure, so thank you!)

I wasn’t saying that electricity is a worse way to power a car and that we should all stick with petrol, that’s just silly. The point I was making was that, while I accept that Dale might be trying to make people imagine what could be rather than what is, i.e. getting people to dream of a UK where the entire electric grid was powered by renewables and specifically wind, that just doesn’t come accross. It is still an electric car, not a wind-powered car, and in my view the wording should be changed.

Even more so having read Dale’s bit a few months ago on how pointless most all-green tariffs are as the actual energy we get from the grid is a mixture of whatever’s been put there by all the different energy companies. We could claim we paid for the green bit, but it doesn’t mean the energy we’re using doesn’t cost the earth, in more ways than one! Dale might be able to plug directly into a wind turbine but for anybody who uses the mains, at the moment this would be what, a 90%ish brown-energy-powered car? Even those who pay their bills to Ecotricity basically have to use the same energy as everybody else, with whatever averaged-out proportion of green energy comes from all the electricity companies put together, which currently aint very much. So the only circumstance in which it could *ever* become a wind-powered car is if the *entire UK* was powered by the wind, which isn’t likely or even neccessarily preferable as there are many different types of renewables, not just the wind, and there needs to be at least some balance as the wind isn’t the most reliable of power sources.

I long for the day when the whole UK does use renewable energy and therefore by default a car that is electric is automatically greener, but in the short term the only advantage would be that the money I would pay to run it would go to Ecotricity and be invested in renewables rather than going to some big oil multinational.

In the mean time it seems like hydrogen fuel cells are closer to providing cars that don’t produce *any* emissions (except the water, obviously!).

All the innovations around what you’re doing are great, and good luck with the publicity, just be careful that the fact you’re completely pulling the wool over people’s eyes doesn’t backfire – I too would recommend at least slipping in somewhere (on the main website rather than at the bottom of a 15 page comments section) that it is for all intents and purposes just a very cool electric car.

All the best anyways (honestly!),

Saz

Skimming through the comments, I have found other people who were equally confused. I do think the car is great, they did some remarkable things with it. However, I think it would behoove the team to clarify that the car is meant to promote wind power to the grid; that is was not designed with wind directly powering the car.

I am sorry if I missed where this was stated clearly (it is not in the description of the blog-which is most easily accessed). I have not read through every post and most people who visit the site would not. I just found out about the car yesterday and to expect me to have read the history from the beginning (and then to imply that I was planning on bad-mouthing the car from the beginning) is a bit ridiculous. I am merely suggesting that it might be beneficial to Ecotricity and the team to make the wind-powered aspect more visible and clear to a web-”Surfing” audience.

I had been excited to find the car because I thought someone had finally discovered a way to use wind turbines on a car, overcoming the weight and drag issues it creates. I had been surfing to find that particularly. So when I found the Nemisis, I was very excited for that reason. After spending time watching all the videos and skimming through posts I was still excited but wanted to hear more about the wind-power Finding out there was none, my disappointment matched my previous excitement.

Ecotricity means nothing to me because I live in Ohio, USA. We are FAR behind in moving toward wind power (for some reason many people here think wind turbines are a blight on the landscape). Because of this, the car’s mission to promote Ecotricity was largely lost on me. The US automakers would also not see the point because it could not be marketed here as a zero carbon car.

The car is still a great accomplishment and a step in the right direction. I was just disappointed because I thought it was the car I was looking for and it wasn’t.

How many people would expect a fossil fuel powered car to run on dinosaur bones or ammonites?

The fact that the Nemesis does not have an exciting and eye-catching on-board wind turbine should not be seen as a drawback. It is not just another electric car, as its prime raison d’etre is to tell the story about where the power comes from and how that power can be used. I think it exists primarily to spark the imagination.

You start one post with “I think what you guys are doing is great” and yet less than one hour later you say “how disappointing”. Maybe you had not read the story through from the beginning – or were you gearing up towards feigned disappointment from the start?

In UK we can elect to have our power supplied by companies which generate or sell wind derived electricity, such as Ecotricity. Perhaps you are not so fortunate.

However, there is another Ecotricity backed wind-powered car – the Greenbird. This is probably a bit closer to a literal definition of wind power, although it would be hard to use it on the public highway.

Dale, now that has GOT to be done! I am thinking M5 near Stroud (heading north-east, with a prevailing south-westerly) perhaps with Richard Hammond at the wheel – Clarkson would be unlikely to fit. I am sure that DETR would be happy to close the road for such a worthwhile endeavour.

Best regards,

Jonny.

You can’t market the car as wind-powered because most of the population does not have access to wind power. I myself live in an apartment and do not have that option. Without converting all our electric supply to wind, the car is no more “zero carbon” than any other electric car.

The car’s design is not wind-powered, only its owner makes it thus, therefore it is not really a wind-powered car. That is very disappointing. The car is great as a high performance electric, but calling it wind-powered is misleading.

When will someone make an electric car that performs as well as a gas-powered car and is affordable for the common person? That would be my challenge.

This car proves nothing to the big automakers other than saying you can make a really expensive car that looks cool and accelerates faster than a gas car but has a slower top speed and a lot smaller range than comparable priced gas cars. Only the rich who are interested in conservation would be interested and that is not a large enough market to make the car profitable.

How disappointing.

Cheers

As far as I understand (and someone please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong!) the car doesn’t have an internal turbine or a linked alternator – the battery is purely charged by plugging in to mains electricity (which is supplied by turbines, hence the wind-powered)

But I agree, a video about the in depth workings of the Nemesis would be very interesting to watch.

A thought for your videos: I have watched all of your videos, find them very interesting and fun to watch, however none of them have explained how the car is wind-powered in any sort of detail. It is mentioned from time to time but I can’t find anything on how you have made it work. I assume there is a turbine in the nose of the car that spins an alternator/generator that re-charges the battery, but I’d like to see how it actually works. That is the whole point of the car isn’t it? How many more miles does the turbine allow you to go? How fast does the car have to be going for it to work properly? How much power can the turbine produce? How was the nose engineered to maximize the output of the turbine?

The point to this car and the challenge behind it (from my understanding) is the fact that the car is wind-powered. I feel like all the emphasis of the videos and articles, etc is on how sporty the car looks, how it accelerates, how it has fingerprint entry, etc. Can you guys make a video that goes into what makes the Nemesis a wind car (love the name btw), how the wind-power works (what problems/hurdles there may be with it), and why it is so much better than other electric car designs?

Thanks,
Jeremy

But you need to quickly tie-in with a ‘serious’ manufacturer now to keep on track…. unless you want to be a Brit-pack-small-run player…. but we all know what happened to TVR don’t we? Lol…

(Renault and Better Place are on the move)

Check out all 4 electrickery concepts here…

http://www.renault-ze.com/uk/

The Zoe ZE will do nicely for me… simple girlie name too…. sniggers

No Drathvaderishness style spin it would seem necessary?

However at the lower end the govt expects peeps to no longer to be able to afford their ‘own’ cars… but pool options at the local ‘service hub’ will be the green new deal… for the masses.

However we all have to contend here in Blighty with those dastardly Chinese…. seems they already have part of the manufacturing equation all tied-up…

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article13640.html

(Check out China’s Rare Earth Metal Monopoly section)

We’ll need 2nd gen nuclear too here if we don’t want 30m Brits with regular lights out…

Toodle-pip

Alexandra

People never seem to have a problem with building things for their own comfort but when it comes to actually trying to do something with more substance a few people make a lot of noise & fuss.

I would love to be able to live in a more rural area and I’d look on at any nearby turbines with a sense of pride. As I’ve said in an earlier comment I’ve stood underneath one turbine and been across the road from another and I’m yet to hear/think of a convincing argument against them.