We get a slick new carbon body, save a lot of weight (where we don’t want weight – the rear) and make the charging kit an easy install. Neat solution.

We’ve also got a new diffuser coming out of the moulds. This is the bit that sits under the rear of the car. It’s being engineered with some nifty flaps to the left and right that pull down to expose the two charging options:

Normal (13A and slow) or Abnormal (100A and fast).

With some changes to the rear lights and to the internals viewed through the rear window thrown in – this part of the car is going to be pretty slick.

News from ‘up North’ is that the BMS (Battery Management System) is ready and we’re planning to ship the car up for fitting and testing next week. We’re also having a new Vehicle Control System (VCS) from the same guys – all of it CANbus connected, which, when you get into the detail of it, looks pretty essential (the old stuff wasn’t).

When we get the car back with it’s BMS and VCS we’ll have pretty well just the interior to do – plus fit the new panels and give it all a quick spray job. And that’s it.

We should be on the road.

The next update should be episode 12 of 6 – in another week or two I hope.

Cheers.

I had my first breakdown the other week. I went to drive away in the morning and everything was just dead. Turned out the 12v battery we use to power the control side had gone flat, and oddly enough a couple of fuses were blown. As you can see from the picture, I got the youngest member of the team on the job, with my own personal favourite ’spanner’….

And when we’d finished fooling around we called Bob and he came down and fixed it. No big drama but some useful ‘operational experience’.

Actually things have kind of ground to a halt on the Nemesis. It’s been with me since August, for what was meant to be a months worth of road testing while the Battery Management System (BMS) was finished. Three months later I’ve still got the car and we’ve not got a BMS yet. Which is disappointing to say the least. Everything else about the project has gone incredibly well, but for this – and it’s held us up for over six months now. It’s a frustration for all of us, not just me.

The car goes – it goes like hell, it’s just not ‘plug and play’ – by which I mean I can’t just plug it in to charge it. It takes a laptop and some close attention and we’re not able to charge to the full potential of the cells (for safety). So it’s “close but no cigar”.

But we are entering the end game, a BMS is in sight, almost. And we’ve planned the final pieces of work to finish the car – tweaks to the suspension and body, interior decor, paint job and so on – and we’ll do all of this at the same time as the BMS gets fitted. It’s probably 4 to 6 weeks work from the time I take the car back to the team, which I hope will be any day now.

And then the Nemesis will be fully functional, properly plug and play (and with a fast charger I hope) and capable of it’s maximum performance – which we’ve not had out of it yet (incredibly).

I expect we’ll post episode 12 of 6 in January, including (I hope) a revisit to Snetterton where we’ll be trying for a 1 minute 15 second lap – this is the goal we’ve been set by somebody interested in starting an EV racing series. Such a lap time would convince him it’s a serious proposition (range isn’t such a big deal apparently…) I’ve no doubt that if a petrol driven car can lap at such speeds we’ll have no trouble matching it. Won’t be me at the wheel though…

On another front, we know our friends at Lotus keep a keen eye on our progress and it seems like they like what they see – so much so that they’ve created their very own, limited edition, matt black version of the Exige – named ‘The Dark’ (or ‘Stealth’ in Japan). How’s that saying go – about the sincerest form of flattery?

That’s the latest on the car front. BMS breakthrough any day now… Followed by rapid completion and a resumption of testing and the fun part.

Cheers.

Paul here (back off my hols).

A couple of event announcements for our UK based readers. Firstly – I thought you might like to know about a public appearance of the Nemesis Wind Powered Car happening on the 12th/13th September at the Science Museum in Wroughton, Near Swindon in Wiltshire. It will be part of the family oriented Festival of Innovation. I am hoping to be there with my family on the 12th – so might see you there? It is a free event (although high carbon producing transport will be charged £5 to park).

Here’s the event page for the Festival of Innovation on Facebook.

Also – Ecotricity are hosting a kite festival to celebrate the power of the wind on the 13th September 2009.

Help us to fill the sky with kites and celebrate the power of the wind at Thistledown Environment Centre, near Nailsworth (Stroud).

• Free Admission
• 500 kites to give away (or fly your own)
• Explore 70 acres of natural environment and wildlife
• Free soft drinks courtesy of bottlegreen
• Professional kite demonstration

I also created a Facebook event page for the 500Kites event too.

Take it easy, and we hope to see you at one or both

Paul

^{Video production: Tim Walter Associates Limited}

Here’s our latest, probably penultimate, video update of the wind car project.

I’ve had the Nemesis (yes it finally has a name) on the road for the last few weeks and it’s been a lot of fun (unless you’re a hedge in my vicinity….:).

I’ll give the car back to the engineers in a couple more weeks, once the battery management system is ready to install and we’ll enter the home straight then. There’s still quite a bit of finishing to do.

I’m hoping to have the car back (and finished) towards the end of Oct, but we’ll see.

Sorry not to have had the time yet to answer a number of questions posted here, hope to catch up soon.

Enjoy….

ETA: This video (and all the others) is also available on Youtube for your embedding pleasure etc.

The car has come a long way in the last few weeks since the first test drive. The last few days have been especially hectic (for the team, not me). It got its MOT last Friday, had a Tracker fitted yesterday and we taxed it today – you wouldn’t believe how hard it was to find insurance… Anyway it’s road legal now. And sat outside my house.

It’s not totally user friendly though. The charging system is the last big thing needing to be finished, the guys are working on that while I road test the car. So recharging is a bit of a manual process, to say the least – balancing the individual cell charges and the like.

And the car has actually only run through one full battery cycle so far, so that side of life is a bit of an unknown still. And it’s not been out in the rain yet…….! We’ve got data sensors and gauges all over the place and one of the things I need to do is to take readings after each run. It’s still a bit of an R&D prototype for sure.

The interior and exterior reflect this – both being a bit rough and ready, good job too (more on that in a minute).

But I’m really looking fwd to just hacking around in it these next few weeks.

Should be fun.

OK time to fess up. I had my first prang in it today. I was coming back home and stuck my foot on the throttle instead of the brake pedal, corrected that but too late to avoid skidding into a hedge…. Ooops.

That’s my first bit of feedback for the team – pedals too close together, especially if you have big feet. It happened to me on the airfield test actually, though nothing came of it with all that space to play with. Of course it’s the standard Lotus pedal layout, minus a clutch pedal, so I reckon we can move the brake pedal leftwards a bit with no trouble.

So there you are. The Wind car is finally here in Stroud, for a few weeks shakedown, and er… I’ve pranged it already… Doh!

Cheers.

PS episode 11 of 6 will be up in a few days.

^{Video production: Tim Walter Associates Limited}

Is it a Nemesis?

It finally happened. Last Monday on a windswept old airfield in Norfolk, we got the wind car out of the workshop and took it for its first spin on tarmac.

Not entirely without a little drama mind you – the car barely being able to climb the transporter loading ramp at full throttle was a challenging start to the day… but we quickly enough adjusted the bugs out of that and it flew, really flew.

The acceleration is astonishing. I had a run up and down with John Miles (ex Lotus F1 man) at the wheel – OMG! If you’ve ever been on the Oblivion at Alton Towers, that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach as you go over the edge and rush groundward – that was exactly the feeling, and it was relentless.

There’s no power build up, no power curve – it’s on full (especially when John’s driving), and it stays on – until the throttle comes off (and then the brakes burn… ) It’s incredible.

We clocked over 100mph, accidentally, (I mean it wasn’t a speed trial) just running up and down a few hundred metre stretch. And we didn’t spin a wheel, we burnt nothing – not even rubber, more on that later.

The big surprise of the day was the noise – we reckon part Stuka dive bomber and part supercharger, don’t know how well it will come out on film, but this car definitely is not quiet. And I really like the noise it makes.

That takes care of one of Mr Clarkson’s favourite EV ‘worries’ (bless).

Our attempt to test it more fully at Snetterton later the same day was (madly) rained off, as you’ll see in the video. But we’ll be back there in a week or so. By which time we’ll have upgraded the standard brakes (which we cooked) and made some small suspension tweaks. I’m expecting it to be incredibly quick.

The big question will really be how long we can drive it for – that we can’t be sure of.

All the time and care our guys have put into the design and build of this car really is starting to show – I mean to perform ’straight out of the box’ like this is a real feat. I’m impressed.

It looks and sounds awesome and it goes like hell.

Looking at it and having driven it I really am thinking it suits the name Nemesis.

Very much so.

Cheers.

ETA: This video (and all the others) is also available on Youtube for your embedding pleasure etc.

^{Video production: Tim Walter Associates Limited}

This months highlights are;

Meeting the Sun’s environment correspondent – yes seriously. They’ve not had one very long but they do have one and he is serious about it – and:

That amazing machine at Leeds University – the one that looks like it belongs on a Sci Fi film, in fact I’m sure I’ve seen versions of it, recreating humans from DNA samples… In our case we used to make a ‘gear lever assembly’.

As you’ll see here we’re getting close to the end game now, in fact I’m ready to predict that episode 10 of 6 will see me driving the Wind Car for the first time… !

The thing that’s been holding us up this past month or so is the Battery Management System (BMS), in case you wondered. The solution we were chasing kind of fell apart a few weeks ago and we had to hunt around for some new technology. Bit scary this late in the day…

But we’re very much back on track now having found exactly what we need from Linear Technology. These guys went above and beyond by expressing us a bunch of pre production chips and a board, that’s been a massive help. Thank you.

Returning to the question of a name, not sure if this one came up before, but in an e-mail last week I made a quick ref to the e bird (easier to type than wind car), and I kind of liked it. Any thoughts on that welcome.

Other than that current front runners are still Zero, Hurukan and Zephyr.

I’m off to Norfolk the week after next to shoot episode 10 and, hopefully, actually get to drive it – that’s a pretty exciting prospect after all this time and effort.

Hope you enjoy the vid.

Cheers.

PS – This just in – been challenged to a drag race with an RAF Tornado – can’t turn that down, racing for pink slips I hope, winner keeps all… More on this later.

^{Video production: Tim Walter Associates Limited}

Here’s our latest video.  The big focus of this episode is design and, as you’ll see, it’s definitely taking shape.

I’m off to Norfolk next week to meet the Sun, they love the idea BTW, and nail down a few questions on detail (with the A team).

Couple more weeks after that I hope we might be having our first test drive, perhaps in episode 9 of 6 – but let’s see….

Some really cool names keep coming in.  Though I’m back to thinking maybe zero.  But as somebody said here, I reckon I’ll need to see the finished thing and drive it – then I’ll know its name.

There’s been a lot of electric car stuff in the news lately, particularly today with the Government’s announcement of a £5k bung to EV buyers and other initiatives. 

The thing that excites me most of all though is the fact that the government has come out and said we all need to be driving electric cars, they even use terms like ‘green revolution’ these days – that’s just amazing, so far from where we’ve been.

It makes me think the changes we need to make are all the more likely.  We know the technology exists or will exist and we know we need to live sustainably – now we seem to have political will behind us.

Just need to re invent capitalism to be orientated to social and environmental outcomes rather than monetary ones – and we’re there…..

Cheers.

^{Video production: Tim Walter Associates Limited}

Here’s the latest episode of our Wind Car series, clearly we’re running behind the original plan, with episode 7 of 6…

But hey ho, I don’t suppose the wheel was invented in a day – to mix metaphors a little.

We hit a big milestone in this episode with the first turning of the wheels and John Vidal from the Guardian joining us.

The car still looks a bit of a mess in some ways, a bit like road kill (no offence to the A-team) but the engineering fundamentals are in place now. Current best guess is first drive at the end of April…

Meanwhile we still lack a name. Had two new suggestions this week.

Hurakan – Mayan god of wind and storm and stuff. Quite like that.

And this very interesting one – evince

Meaning to show or demonstrate clearly, to make a point.

There’s a French version of the word apparently – evincer – meaning to conquer entirely, to prevail over, to prove exhaustively.

That has some resonance for me – what do you guys think?

Cheers.

Back in the UK now. I’ve been on holiday for a week, which is a rare event (ask my partner… ) and sod’s law determined that an even rarer event would coincide with that – the perfect conditions for a land speed record attempt.

My disappointment at not being there though was marginal compared to the huge excitement of the result – the smashing of the record.

All the credit for this goes to Richard Jenkins of course (with just a little to the gods of wind… ).

Richard’s the guy who’s been pursuing this dream for a decade. To say he’s dogged would be an enormous understatement.

I’m really chuffed for him, it’s just fabulous that he’s got there, and by some big margin. He might get to get his life back now… )

After the ice challenge of course, which should reconvene this winter.

Actually given the speed of the land version and the relatively low ice record of just 80 mph or so – I reckon it’s a dead cert he’ll smash the ice record, put your money down if you can get odds.

We’re hoping to bring the Greenbird back to England to put on display somewhere, maybe at our Ecotech centre in Swaffham. More on that later.

On a personal note, it’s been a great pleasure to be a part of this. And to see a purely wind powered craft running at such an incredible speed (and four times the actual speed of the wind) is a huge thing. Greenbird has grabbed headlines all over the world and in the process it’s made an awful lot of people think again about wind power, it must have. For me that was the reason to be involved, Greenbird makes a statement and actually breaks down the door for what’s coming next – the second generation wind powered car, the one you could drive down the shops.

I’m chuffed for all these reasons.

Cheers.

Just thought you might like to know this bit of breaking news from over on the Greenbird site

Richard and the Ecotricity Greenbird have only gone and smashed the World Land Speed Record for Wind Powered Vehicles!!!

Yay!! Big congrats from all of us Richard!

More details to come soon….

^{Video production: Tim Walter Associates Limited}

I was in Norfolk earlier this week for a milestone in the development of our wind powered car, the first turning of its wheels…!

While I was there I met with John Vidal the Environment Editor of the Guardian. He’s a great guy John, enjoyed discussing things with him and he really gets the wind powered car thing.

We made this little video with John while we were all there, should be on the Guardian website as you read this.

Meanwhile we still need a name for the car.

Nice idea from Leo recently was ‘the car with no name’ – reminds me of America’s classic hit – Horse with no name.

Kate (my other half) lobbed in the idea of naming it ’symbol’ – a reference to Prince (just in case… All good fun. We still seriously lack a name though, that’s despite the tons of good suggestions that keep coming (thanks to everybody for those). Here’s why:

This is the latest image of what the finished car will look like, pretty awesome I think.

And Mojo was front running for me but looking at this image I’m thinking the car really does need a name that’s a bit tougher’, I just don’t think Mojo will work.

I’m currently resurrecting Nemesis as a front runner. Zephyr is also back in frame.

As always, thoughts are welcome.

Cheers.

BTW – Danny of Danny’s Contentment came and interviewed me a while back and has posted them up on his blog:

Part 1
Part 2

^{Video production: Tim Walter Associates Limited}

The first thing I should say here is that this isn’t the last episode of our little video series – it can’t be – we just haven’t finished yet. So expect Episodes 7 and probably 8 of 6 before long…

Second thing to say is I’ve got a new idea for a name. I’m quite taken with it.

The Mojo.

Keen to hear views and feelings on that. I like Zero, but as many people here have pointed out, it’s appearing on cars all over the place, in one form or another.

And Mojo (to me) is less technical, less hard maybe (less macho Damon?… ) and more fun.

So the Ecotricity Mojo – tell me what you all think.

Third thing to say is I went to Norfolk the other week to see the car and although the drives train bits weren’t installed as hoped, it was an exciting visit. It seems that the motors arrived quite a bit bigger than the manufacturers spec and we’re having to adjust the transmission to fit them in (that’s a euphemism BTW… ). That’s been the main hold up anyhow.

Still we’re making good progress, nailing a bunch of issues and having fun in the process.

What more could you ask for.

That’s it. Cheers.

^{Video production: Tim Walter Associates Limited}

Thanks to everybody for that massive response to the last video posting on the wind car. And some more great names rolling in. I’m going to reply globally here if that’s OK.

Couple of people raised valid issues/questions – why aren’t we making a family car for example, or transforming a Prius (nice idea) – and haven’t Tesla already proven the EV sportscar thing?

The answer to all these lies in two parts, timing and my nature.

With regards timing, when this project was first conceived I’d never heard of Tesla and couldn’t find an electric sportscar anywhere, other than concepts (and I did look). To get one I was going to have to build one. Things moved on from there.

As for my nature, I like sportscars – they’re fun. It seemed like the ideal place to start, especially because I think it’s important that being green shouldn’t all be about sacrifice – to engage a bigger audience we need to show that cutting carbon and living more sustainably can be done and can still be a lot of fun. Sportscars turn heads and grab media attention – so I chose that route.

I don’t think Tesla have really proven this concept yet BTW, Top Gear may have been harsh, even manipulative with the imagery, but the serious flaws were real. And of course Tesla are not the only people pursuing this dream right now anyhow. The Lightning looks really good.

The more the merrier I say. We can’t be sure of the success or survival of any car company in these times – especially those trying to bring EV’s to market.

I accept that a family car would have more practical value, I’m not sure if it would have more impact though and that’s what we’re trying to achieve first and foremost. Plus we know this car will cost a lot and high cost is easier to justify if you have a more exotic car – think Lamborghini for example.

And maybe this will be the car that changes hearts and minds at Top Gear. That’s a prize in itself. Love them or loathe them (or just be amused by them), these guys are opinion formers.

On the naming front I’m grateful for all the new names and for the pointers to other cars called Zero. The Italian one looks quite cool, thanks Greenmotor.

I’m still torn.

Anyway, hope you enjoy episode 5 of our video series, things are moving a pace now.

I’m off to Norfolk this week to hook up with the team and shoot the next episode.

Expecting to see the batteries, motors and transmission all installed, have to say I’m more than a little excited by that.

Cheers.

^{Video production: Tim Walter Associates Limited}

Good vid this one, all looks very industrial over there in Norfolk – and stuff is starting to come together.

I’m thinking it’s about time to come up with a name, and I’ve come up with a short list.

First thanks to everybody that sent suggestions, I enjoyed and appreciated them all, very much.

The short list I’ve come up with, and the reasons for each, are as follows:

Zero – Short version of the Zero C suggestion, has a certain neatness about it and many interpretations.  WW2 Japanese fighter of course.  Also a typical car has a badge announcing it’s cubic capacity, valve and/or turbo numbers  – Zero all of this in our case.  And Zero combustion/carbon.  And it has a nice ring to it.  The Zero.

Nemesis – Darker altogether and spawned from my traveller days when 2000 AD (the comic) was a cult read – anyone familiar with that will know the nemesis character.  Pretty awesome.  And Nemesis to the ICE car industry is exactly what EVs and WEVs are going to be, IMO.  Like this one for the dark side.  The Nemesis.

Storm – Weather inspired (not X men… ), toyed with Tornado and Hurricane, both of which I like, but feel that Storm is more understated but still evocative.  This is after all a weather driven car.  The Storm.

I’d love to hear what you all think.  Time to name the Wind Powered Car.

Cheers.

We thought the Greenbird had flown silently past the deafening roar of Top Gear towers, but we were wrong. Check out this link to watch the good ol’ Top Gear boys practically combusting internally at the prospect of cars powered by the wind. They got the wrong end of the stick of course – the fun end of the stick though – shame it ended up in the out-take bin…

The big thing not in those calculations was the embodied energy and therefore carbon in both cars and bikes. Many people on this site argued it needs to be taken into account, and I don’t disagree with that. The inference was, I think, that taking this into account the bike would have a way lower impact – that bit I wasn’t so sure of. I’ve pulled together some figures now.

The original numbers looked at the energy expended by the rider and driver respectively of a bike and a wind powered car – it was only energy used for travel and surprisingly the wind powered car had a smaller carbon footprint. Far smaller.

But that ignores the ‘cost to build’ of each vehicle. Let’s add that in now.

The best estimates we could find for the ‘carbon cost’ of building an electric car are 6 Tonnes. The cost for a bike a miserly 63 kilos. The cost for a conventional gas burning car BTW is 4 Tonnes. So the wind powered car produces a lot more carbon on day one.

It’s hard to imagine that with a virtually 6 tonne headstart the bike is ever going to catch up to the wind powered car in a lifetimes use – but let’s see.

The tricky bit coming next is the number of miles and the number of years to assume each is used for. Cars drive many more miles than bikes pedal, it’s in the nature of the beast, as someone said here because you can do more miles easily, you do.

The average lifespan of a car in the UK is 14 years, the average annual mileage is 9,800.

It might be fair to assume a bike can also last 14 years, it might not. But even if the bike had to be totally replaced, it’s only 63 kilos which is negligible in the scheme of this – so it doesn’t matter if the bike can match the car for lifespan or not.

What about annual mileage? Not so clear. So here’s two scenarios:

10 miles a day (typical bike use?) and 9,800 miles a year (typical car use).

At 10 miles a day for 14 years:
The cyclist racks up 4.7 Tonnes of lifetime CO2. Or 0.09 kg per mile.
The wind car driver racks up nearly 6.4 Tonnes. Or 0.13 kg per mile.
(The petrol car is over 21 Tonnes BTW)

That’s if you use a car like you might use a bike.

How about if you use a bike like you might use a car?

At 9,800 miles a year for 14 years:
The cyclist racks up 12.7 Tonnes of lifetime CO2 . Or 0.09 kg per mile.
The wind car driver 7 Tonnes of lifetime CO2. Or 0.05 kg per mile.
(Petrol car 51 Tonnes…!)

The kg per mile figure for the cyclist doesn’t really change because the embedded carbon cost is so small, it’s lost in the rounding. For the wind car it drops significantly with mileage.

Two things I’d stress here. Cars and bikes are not apples and apples. We use them differently. Cars enable bigger distances and more travel – we take that opportunity. The Wind car wins easily based on the car use scenario of 9,800 miles a year and the Bike wins easily based on the biking scenario of some 3,000 miles a year.

Hang on a minute though, at 9,800 miles a year, that’s roughly 30 miles a day – is that a crazy bike use scenario? I don’t know, but it doesn’t look off the scale.

Second thing to stress – these figures are for energy used by rider/driver and vehicle – and they include carbon embedded in the making of each vehicle. They don’t include hospitals and roads and stuff… (And no, I’m not going there next…

The answer is not what you’d expect I think. On a low use basis (for a car) the cyclist has about two thirds the impact of the wind car driver – better for sure but not exactly as massive a difference as you might have assumed. But on a car use scenario the wind car wins by a bigger margin – the cyclist has almost double the impact of the wind car.

The reason, I’m sure, is that human bodies are not anywhere near as efficient as electric motors – which are some of the most efficient machines we make. Our talents lie not in doing the work of machines but elsewhere…

PS – Here’s a thought – If wind powered cars were made using wind energy rather than fossil fuels (more than feasible in the near future), we could slash the embedded carbon figure for a wind EV by a couple of tonnes perhaps… and it would beat the bike in either mileage scenario. Just a thought.

^{Video production: Tim Walter Associates Limited}

You can see the body really starting to take shape here, and hear Peter talk about ‘toughening up’ of the look, from his original.

We’ve ‘placed’ all the parts within the car now and began machining/producing some of the bigger components, like the transmission.

And the batteries have arrived. Crazy thing about that was, to travel by ship they needed to be in their own 40 foot container, for safety reasons – but it was OK to stick them in the hold of a Jumbo jet, as they are… Not sure how that works!

Hope you enjoy the vid.

Cheers.

But it occurred to me – there’s an assumption frequently made that riding a bike is for free.  And it’s not.  You have to power the bike, it’s human power but that’s not free – we need food to do work.

The rates at which we burn calories and therefore food are pretty well established for various activities – resting, walking, running for example – as are the carbon impacts of food and therefore of the calories we use.

Typical daily calorie requirements are also well established.   And if you up your activity level you up your need to eat – it’s that simple.

Easy enough then to take a closer look at just how many more calories it takes to ride a bike, and what additional carbon impact comes from that – compared to the calorie intake required to drive a wind powered car instead.

It might not be surprising to find that driving a wind powered car is actually better in terms of CO₂ impact than riding a bike – after all wind power is zero carbon (the embedded energy in a windmill is repaid in about six months of operation – after that it’s all carbon free) – the assumption though has been that biking is zero carbon too, but it ain’t.

Biking requires 40 additional calories per mile – or 400 additional calories for a ten mile trip.

Using some typical food carbon footprints and assuming ten miles a day for a year you get a total annual impact of 333kg CO₂ – from riding the bike.

This is over and above the normal food impact – which, based on a mixed diet of 2,400 calories a day (for example) would be responsible for 2 tonnes of CO₂ a year – veggies and vegans will do better than that of course.

Driving a wind powered car on the other hand requires 100 calories an hour (to power the driver), which is roughly 4 calories per mile (assuming average 30 mph) this produces 76g of CO₂ for a ten mile stint and a total of 28kg of CO₂ for that 10 miles a day for a year.

The difference is 0.3 tonnes CO₂ per year.  The wind car is one third of a tonne of CO₂ better than the bike…!

Like I say not surprising that wind cars win if you accept that wind power is zero carbon and biking requires more food than not biking.

But the big surprise in all of this, and perhaps the bit that makes it worth sharing – is that an electric car powered by the grid as it is, actually emits only ever so slightly more carbon a year than biking the equivalent distance.

A grid powered electric car travelling 5000 miles per MWh of electricity will produce 94g CO₂ per mile (including the drivers contribution), that’s 342kg per year of CO₂ for the 10 mile a day trip.   Only 9kg of CO₂ per year more than cycling.  And what’s 9kg out of one third of a tonne?

This is counter intuitive I think.

Biking isn’t so obviously squeaky green as it’s assumed to be – it has a carbon footprint virtually equal to grid powered electric cars – that’s a shock to me.  The reason for that is probably that the human body is not the most efficient user of fuel, whereas electric motors hit the high 90 percents.  And even the grid manages around 50% fuel efficiency.

No embedded carbon in the car or bike (or food chain) has been taken into account here of course – just straight use of each.

It might be interesting to look at embedded levels of CO₂ in cars and bikes and calculate how many years it would take for a wind powered car to……

Any volunteers?

Cheers.

PS – A petrol car doing the same 10 miles a day would emit over 1.2Tonnes of CO₂ in a year – about four times that of the grid EV or Bike – and 45 times that of the Wind EV.

^{Video production: Tim Walter Associates Limited}

I’m off to Norfolk next week to take a look at the proposed body modifications and generally have a catch up with the team. I’m looking fwd to it.

Chassis has been lengthened, battery housing and transmission are now designed and under construction and we’re very slightly behind the estimated timeline, but still heading for Dec on the road.

Meanwhile out in the world, where so much is changing lately – I hear Tesla are laying off staff and suffering some kind of financial difficulty raising doubts about their future.

Regular readers might remember that a guy from Tesla posted on this site. I’d questioned their performance figures and he basically said it works and I should buy a Tesla and not bother building a car of my own. He turned out to be vice president of sales or something, but I could see some sense in not reinventing the wheel and all that. So I said I would buy a Tesla – if he let me drive one first to prove the performance claims. A fair offer I thought, but never heard back from him.

Sat here today, with doubts circulating over their future, only 27 cars on the road after all these years and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, I’m glad I’m not sat in a queue for a left hand drive Tesla, that might or might not one day arrive. It makes sense to have been pursuing a different path.

That said, I hope the dot com guys have the pockets to pull Tesla through, the world is a better place with them in it for sure.

The ranges made possible by new batteries seem very practical, when looked at against current car use patterns refuelling appears to be possible, even desirable, without the need for garages. And the National Grid appears readily able to accommodate the switch from oil to electricity for our entire car fleet.

So far so good.

Justin Noe raised a good point the other week, probably the next big practical question – is there enough Lithium in the world for us all to have EVs?

Justin quotes an article by a Michael C who says there isn’t enough, he doesn’t offer any numbers to support that view though – so we took a look, this is what we found…

Lithium is the 33rd most abundant element in the Earth’s crust – it makes up about 0.0007% which doesn’t sound a lot when compared to Iron’s 5% and magnesium’s 2%, but it may still be enough. How much is 0.0007% in metric tones?

According to Keith Evans, a geologist who’s been working on and writing about lithium reserves for decades, there are 28.4 Million Tonnes of Lithium metal in the ground. Let’s assume he knows his stuff.

That’s (apparently) equivalent to roughly 150 Million Tonnes of Lithium Carbonate – the stuff that goes into ‘Lithium batteries’.

According to William Tahil, the guy who seems to have kicked the lithium shortage debate, a typical Hybrid EV will need 16kg of Lithium Carbonate in it’s batteries. Let’s assume that a pure EV needs four times as much.

There are 900 Million cars in the world and so we’d need 58 million tonnes of lithium carbonate to power them all as pure EV’s with Lithium batteries.

That’s a little over one third of global reserves. Clearly enough to go round with some left over.

The world currently produces and consumes 16,000 Tonnes of Lithium metal a year, or 84,000 Tonnes of Lithium Carbonate (equivalent). And it produces 50 million new cars a year – this needs adding in to the equation.

Powering 900 million cars with Lithium Ion batteries, allowing for the additional 50 million cars a year and maintaining the current levels of demand for lithium in ceramics, drugs, aluminium smelting etc – would leave enough Lithium in the world to last another 28 years.

OK 28 years is not very long, but this assumes that Lithium reserves don’t increase as deposits become more economic as the price goes up – as with oil.

But the bigger factor is that Lithium is recyclable, unlike oil. Currently the USA recycles 98% of its car batteries whilst we in the UK recycle 90%.

If we assume that only 10% of those 50 million new cars need virgin lithium due to recycling old batteries then suddenly our reserves are going to last for over 200 years.

I don’t suppose that Lithium is the only game in town, to power EVs. The article Justin pointed out actually argued that super capacitors were ‘better’. They may or may not be one day, and EV’s will no doubt come with a range of technologies powering them – but there’s one thing we can be clear on;

If we relied 100% on Lithium, to ‘repower’ the world’s car fleet – we should have enough Lithium to do that and still ‘last’ for a couple of centuries.

And that’s a very (very) long way from the conclusion that there’s not enough in the world.

A bunch of crazy guys have been doing just that this weekend, from our turbine at Ecotech Swaffham, the world’s first ever legal base jump off a windmill apparently. In fact this is the final round of UK Pro Base championships 2008.

Hot off the virtual press is this video:

Modern parachutes are amazing, just 80m to open and land – on a target!

A bunch of us have abseiled of the turbine at Ecotech before, and we thought that was pretty cool, and ‘out there’… but this is whole nother level.

Even if they do make it look easy. Fair play.

Source video by Hot Under The Collar
Music ‘Carcinogens’ by Sawtooth

The first vision was of an internet café style ‘park and surf while you charge’ kind of thing. Looked cool, not a bad first stab, but on further examination – it wasn’t it.

The second vision is an abandoned, moss grown relic. The gist of this vision is that with modern battery ranges of 200 miles + and given that 99.5% of car journeys are less than 100 miles – all we need is some destination charging, in supermarket and public car parks, motorway services, that kind of stuff for long journeys and when we get caught short – and for the most part we’ll be able to plug in at home. We won’t need garages.

This raises the very important question – can the grid take it? Can we switch the entire energy consumption of UK cars – from petrol stations to the grid? By the way the combined power output of the UK car fleet is bigger than the total power output of the grid. So it might be a problem.

We crunched some numbers and came up with this:

In the UK we drive 250 Billion miles in our cars every year…! Seriously.

It’s reasonable to assume that an electric car can do 5,000 miles on one MWh of electricity.

Therefore we would need an additional 50TWh of electricity annually, to power the UK’s cars – if they were all electric.

In 2006 total demand on the grid was 404TWh, so the extra 50TWh we’d need would amount to a 12% increase in grid delivered power. Just 12%. That’s actually four years of annual UK demand growth to give it some perspective. Not so much.

It would take very roughly 10,000 of today’s turbines to produce this 50 TWh and so power all our cars. It’ll be less then that by the time it happened of course because turbines keep getting bigger and more efficient.

In the process we’d save 69 Million tonnes of CO2 per year – that’s 60% of UK road transport emissions and 12% of total UK CO2 emissions. No small achievement.

I was pretty staggered by the results. There are after all nearly 30 million cars in the UK (that’s more cars than homes by the way, about 25% more) and we drive that crazy 250 Billion miles – there was a good chance, I thought, that the extra power demand would be more than the grid could cope with. But an extra 12% is well within the realms of the possible.

It’s worth bearing in mind that most car charging will probably be overnight, the time of lowest grid demand, and therefore we can probably deliver this extra 12% volume without a need to increase the actual capacity of the grid. And such a large overnight load could result in a considerable smoothing of the peaks and troughs of demand on the grid and in the process make the grid more efficient cost and CO2 wise.

And an electric car fleet for the UK could also help with the smoothing of intermittent renewables like wind energy, because for the most part car charging will be non-critical loads, non-time sensitive that is. 30 Million cars could act like vast distributed energy storage system, able to take power when the wind blows and able to manage without when it doesn’t. It could even give power back to the grid at times of need.

All interesting stuff. But one thing is clear – the idea that we could all drive electric cars, powered by existing infrastructure – the grid, looks very (very) doable.

And the alternative vision, of the oil companies – building a new hydrogen infrastructure and for us all to keep on visiting their garages to fill our cars up (for which we’d need three times as many windmills and three times as much additional electricity to achieve the same thing by the way) – is looking more like our second vision of garages of the future – a moss grown relic, though not yet abandoned…

We’re pretty disappointed not to have even been able to get the Greenbird out of the starting blocks. And it’s an irony not lost on us while that while Greenbird is intended to show how the world might be getting around when fossil fuels run out – the changes that fossil fuels are causing to our climate right now appears to be the very thing that has stopped us.

In the next twenty years, I firmly believe that wind power will be our main energy source and wind-powered cars will no longer be the stuff of dreams. We’re dedicated to making this a reality, and at the end of this year hope to have our second generation wind powered car on the road here in the UK, an everyday kind of wind powered car. We need to change the world, nothing less will do and for that (amongst other things) we need a transport solution for world post oil. Wind power has the potential to provide this.

I’m off to Oz in a few days to join the Greenbird team and attempt to take the world land speed record – powered only by the wind.

Greenbird,  the awesome looking craft in the picture above, we named as a nod to Donald Campbell and his historic Bluebird.  We reckon the world is at a watershed, the age of fossil fuels is passing and we’re moving (back) to the age of renewable energy  – Greenbird  symbolises this perhaps better then anything else.

Donald broke his records in the golden age of fossil fuels, the age of big engines and abundant, energy dense fuels.  We’re going to break ours with no engine, no fuel and no pollution – using just the wind.

We’re trying to raise a serious question too.  How are we all going to be getting around in a world without oil?

I reckon it’ll be with wind powered cars.  Check out this illustration sent to us by Dave Mills, I think it’s really cool.  Not exactly what we have in mind but really cool.

Greenbird is our F1 car,  a highly technical, pretty impractical,  single purpose thoroughbred machine, we know you couldn’t go to the shops in.  But we have a second generation wind car on the way – that you could use day to day.  More on that later.

We need to do about 120 mph to scoop the record, and if the wind blows we’re very confident we’ll get there.

Right now the Salt lake we’re using for the attempt is flooded, and there’s no wind – both unusual this time of year.  So it’s all against us.

But we have another 10 days of weather window and have our fingers crossed.

You can find out more, and follow our progress at greenbird.co.uk, we’ll keep the zerocarbonista site updated too.

Finally, thanks massively to Fred Chambers for sending us the image below, of a land yacht from 100 years ago, on the same lake we’re using.  I think it’s just awesome.

Wind power is so ‘back to the future’.

We’ve been discussing the charging of electric cars in previous posts and I’d suggested a vision of rows of charging posts and it taking 20 minutes or so to fill your car up while you surfed the net or otherwise chilled out. In a nutshell.

Two good counter points were made – we’d need big garages if it took that long to fill up (to hold all the cars) and why not swap batteries instead.

I think the case against swappable batteries is pretty clear, primarily that we just won’t need them and secondarily that it would be a huge undertaking to standardise car designs to accept a common ‘cassette’ and we’re talking maybe 100 Kilos each – that’s a hefty thing to just ‘swap’.

On the question of how many charging posts we’d need at these new garages, I pointed out that most of us (70% – I stand corrected that it’s not all) could charge at home each night and so would only need a ‘garage’ on long journeys. How long typical car journeys are, I thought, is going to be key to this.

I went away and did some digging and it’s altered fundamentally how I see garages of the future – I don’t think we’ll have any!

It turns out that less than 1% of all car journeys are above 100 miles. There are no figures above 150 miles, which is easily possible with today’s batteries – but it would follow that it’s a smaller number again. Some people talk of 200 miles being possible now – certainly in the future we can expect that. So far (far) less than 1% of cars on the road at any one time will need a filling station – as we know them.

There are 27 Million cars on the road today by the way – re-fuelled by under 10,000 petrol stations. Clearly we don’t all want fuel at the same time – except when there’s a scare on – otherwise that would be 2,700 car visits per garage per day. The fuel tank range of cars is a buffer, a vast rolling fuel tank. And so it will be with batteries. The big difference will be that we can fill up our cars at home and for most people (70%) and most journeys 99%+ that will be enough.

If just half a 1% of cars on the road were on journeys their batteries could not support (ie 200 miles or more) – which is a very reasonable ‘if’, then in theory, if it takes say four times longer to charge batteries than it does to fill with petrol (20 minutes versus five minutes) – we’d need four times one half a % of existing garages (if you follow). I make that 200 garages max, to simply meet the capacity – not taking location into account.

But if you factor in the probability of charging points in car parks and supermarkets – giving the chance to charge at your destination, for the return leg (doubling the range before a garage is required) I think we’ll need virtually no garages at all. Maybe a few on the motorway network – but then again, they can be in car parks.

Petrol Stations are destined to be extinct.

Where does this leave Oil companies?

With no liquid fuels to make and deliver (though they’ll try and foist Hydrogen on us first) and no retail outlets. There’s no future for them, except as reborn renewable energy companies. Or footnotes in history.

Roll on the day.

“Revealed: UK’s blueprint for a green revolution”

So – we may actually be entering into a second industrial revolution if the government gets stuck in with that £100 billion. They’re making all the right noises…

But … the fact remains – we have to cope with a planning system not fit for purpose. In 1999 the House of Lords Select Committee on the European Communities first identified that the planning process is a “grave hindrance to achieving the necessary growth in renewables”. Nearly ten years on and nothing has changed –the planning system still remains the most significant barrier to achieving the delivery of wind energy.

It’s the only major generation source that depends for planning on District Councils – the government deals with all others for very good reasons.

Lord Adair Turner suggested that there may be a tweak in the planning process to ‘unstick’ more wind projects following my little piece on Radio4’s PM on Friday.

The planning bill was debated yesterday – it’s been heralded as the cure for all planning’s ills but it still leaves the majority of wind projects in planning hell while at the same time smoothing the way for New Nuclear and nice new runways.

With all this on his plate Prime Minister Brown couldn’t quite stop himself from running off to OPEC, asking ever so politely if it would be possible to “keep the price of oil down a little bit please … while I try and sort out our little energy problem” … and also to ask them if they wouldn’t mind investing some of their trillions of profit in ‘our’ nuclear programme…

It also seems there has also been no better time to be looking at electric transport (well – it would have been better to be looking at it a century ago, but better late than never!):

“Electric cars given official green light to boost climate change goals”

Most eco-towns are being turned down or criticised for lack of coherent transport policy.

Dyson has just entered the electric vehicle game… (I hope his cars don’t suck!)
It turns out Dyson is not entering the electric vehicle game!

McCain puts bounty on batteries

For those people who travel less than 30 or 40 miles to work (well more like 15 or 20 if you can’t charge at the other end) – a sub £1000 electric scooter has arrived in the UK.

Finally there is an interesting piece from The Register – it’s an analysis of a draft book by Professor David J C MacKay of the Cambridge University Department of Physics, which attempts to do some real number crunching when it comes to looking at our future energy choices. The draft e-book is available here – it makes interesting and thought provoking reading if nothing else. I haven’t had time to check his figures though!

Simon – you make a couple of good points there. The idea of sitting around for 20 minutes while your car charges will be a bit of a challenge for some people, and it could require large numbers of ‘pumps’ or parking spaces. On the other hand we’ll all have ‘petrol stations’ at home, since we can plug our cars in every night and so the number of us using on street ‘petrol stations’ will drop perhaps massively. It would really only be when travelling more than 150 to 200 miles at a time – I don’t know what proportion of car journeys that is, but it would make interesting reading. And when so many of us have electric cars it’s easy enough to imagine fast charging facilities springing up in Supermarket car parks – I mean for how long will Tesco be willing to sit this one out? Even public car parks could have fast charging bays, and slow ones – for short and long stay parking. It’s quite possible that habits will change significantly and trips to the ‘garage’ disappear altogether.

Loads on the local grid are another good point, there’s definitely an issue to look at there. Electric cars shift the current petroleum load (in terms of energy) onto the grid anyway – and that’s a really big shift. Easier to strengthen that infrastructure though than build a new (hydrogen) one.

I don’t personally believe that swappable batteries are something that will work. It would require an incredible degree of co operation between car makers, and similarity of car design. Right now it would be nice if there was a common small appliance charging standard, for mobile phones and cameras etc – but instead we have a vast array of different ones. Bringing all car makers together would be far harder.

And then there’s the question of weight, these batteries aren’t light, it’s not likely to be easy to swap such a thing yourself.

Swappable batteries would be very unlikely to work in retrofit electric cars. And retrofit offers huge potential to reuse what we already have.

And finally one of the big advantages of the latest battery technology is you can shape the battery and distribute and fit it into parts of the car where it can assist to optimise weight distribution and centre of gravity – swappable batteries would negate all of that.

I doubt very much that the idea will succeed. It sounds good in principle though.
Cheers.