^{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}

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}

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.

^{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.

Here’s a short video showing our progress so far:

^{Video production: Tim Walter Associates Limited}

Should be posting one of these a month now as we count down to the day we get this ‘wind powered car’ on the road.

Our first focus was the batteries – where to put them to keep the weight in the car in the right place in terms of centre of gravity and front/rear weight distribution. And how to house them so that we can keep them physically restrained but control their temperature during charging and discharging and protect them from the elements.

We’ve also been working on a ‘transmission box’ to sit at the rear of the car between the wheels. It’s not a gearbox as such just something to slow down the rotational speeds of the motors a bit, to make them more suitable for driving car wheels, and handle reverse as well, a useful consideration….

And we’ve got a transparent rear boot planned so we can show off all this techno stuff, Ferrari style. That could look pretty cool.

We need a name though (‘a hook’ as they say in those Orange cinema ads, which I love).

Best we’ve come up with yet really is the E type or the Zero.

Suggestions welcome.

Cheers.

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…

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.

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.

Has Tesla really killed of the myth of rubbish electric cars as Simon says? And are we just trying to make another Tesla as Peter says?

Tesla’s big success has been to convince so many people that they’ve actually done it. That their car is on the road and does what they say it would. I think they’ve created a new myth (for the few), that the Tesla works. It’s a great piece of PR. Hasn’t killed the old myth though (for the many).

Behind the PR – $150 Million spent so far, running 2 years late, only one car just delivered to the CEO – and this with the ‘gearbox problem’. New plan is to fix this later. Performance will drop. But we knew that, because the numbers don’t add up anyway.

Do we want to make another Tesla, no we don’t. But we share similar goals.

The current myth of electric cars lives on and it will be years before Tesla, or anyone else, gets it together in the UK (if they ever do). So we’re stepping up. It needs doing because it has not been done yet and we don’t actually have any time to lose.

If all cars in the UK were electric (and wind powered) we’d cut CO2 emissions by 12.5%

Cheers.

Transport is one of the really big issues we have to face up to – how are we all going to get around, post oil and post carbon?

I think the answer is electric cars, cars charged using wind energy – in fact I prefer to think of them as wind powered cars.

We’re building one right now – a car to smash the stereotype of looking like something Noddy would drive. An out and out sports car. Capable of 0 to 60 faster than a V12 Ferrari, able to top 100 mph for sure – and do 150 miles on one ‘tank’. All with zero emissions. Cake and eat it. Petrol head meets zerocarbonista.

We’re making this car with technology available in the world today. Throwing down the gauntlet to the big car companies. If we can do it – why (the hell) can’t you?

Work is underway, I expect this car on the road for the summer.

We’re keeping a film record as we go, hoping we might make this into a film for TV, if not definitely for our web site.

Watch this space! And Clarkson beware, or maybe not. I’ve a feeling he might like it…

e2a: check out the little clip of the video intro