It's Not Always That Easy, But it is Possible...

Due to surprisingly pleasant weather conditions and unusual travel routines, over the last couple of days I have driven 196 miles in my Nissan Leaf using only renewable energy. How do I know? Well, I was the only one to plug it in and I know where and when I plugged it in and for how long.

To explain why this might be interesting I'll brush up on some recent history. 

When electric cars first emerged as a viable alternative to fossil burners a few years ago, ‘range anxiety’ was the chief criticism, along with initial purchase cost and the fact that ‘they look ugly.’

When those reasons got boring, it was suddenly ‘the silent menace,’ the fear that thousands of pedestrians would be mown down by silent electric cars prowling the streets, clearly driven by psychopaths who heard voices in their heads telling then 'kill them all!

Then it was 'after a couple of years the batteries will be useless and will clog up our landfill sites’ which has again been proven to be utterly false. 

More recently it's been ‘the electricity that charges them comes from coal so electric cars emit more CO2 than a dirty old diesel.’

Again this is a fatuous argument that omits out two massive and vitally important things called facts. We burn a huge amount of coal to make electricity that is consumed by oil refineries to produce petrol and diesel, and, because of the efficiencies of an electric motor and the fact that it’s fuel agnostic. An electric motor doesn’t care how the electricity is produced or where it comes from. It can use electricity from multiple sources that, yes, can include coal but as most people charge electric cars at night in the UK when the least amount of coal is burnt the argument collapses in a heap of angry hot air.

So, in the last 2 days as I said, I have driven, 196 miles with no CO2 output, I mean zero, not a molecule.

I drew the power from two sources, firstly, solar PV at home. Normally I charge at night, but last Friday I got home, battery low, didn't plug the car in and waited until the sun came up the following morning. I'd checked the forecast and it was sunny and clear. The car absorbed 14.6 kWh of electricity, the solar panles produced 17.2 kWh on Staurday. I re-charged the car for nothing. Zero fuel cost.

The following day I went to see my old pal Charlie on his boat.

We had lunch, went for a stroll and discussed family, age, death and technological breakthroughs in engineering, materials science and transportation systems. 

On the way home I had to make a detour of almost a mile and then spend 20 minutes topping up the batteries to ensure I has ample range to get home. What with?

Filthy coal power? ‘Natural’ gas power? Imported nuclear power?

No, a bloody blot on the landscape, a ridiculous 'they don't work!’(™ Daily Express) wind turbine outside Stroud in Gloucestershire. This particular monstrosity, among other things, feeds the rapid charger pictured. So I drove 196 miles using the sun and wind as fuel. Nothing else.

Okay, so scream and shout and stamp your feet and bellow about the carbon footprint of the manufacture of car, solar panel and wind turbine. I will lightly tap my stocking foot back and gently whisper, the carbon footprint of the car when it’s made, the oil well, the oil tanker travelling around the ocean (burning the dirtiest oil we can produce) the carbon footprint of the oil refinery, the electricity used to refine it, the carbon emitted to transport said fuel to the gas/petrol station and finally the one tiny part of this massive impact that we actually acknowledge, the CO2 output from the tailpipe/ exhaust.

196 miles producing zero CO2, it’s not common, it’s not always convenient, but it is becoming increasingly possible.

#justsayin’

I was Expunged

I just did an interview with Winifred Robinson for the BBC Radio 4 program You and Yours about electric vehicles. They have already run a trail for tomorrows episode apparently stating 'electric cars, they're just not ready yet are they' or something along those lines. I've had to rely on Twitter for the quote so it may be mildly inaccurate.
After my rather strange experience last week I wanted to be ready. I was interviewed by a charming reporter called Andrew Bomford for a report on the BBC's flagship news show 'PM.'  I was included in the program, albeit very briefly.

However Mr Bomford also wrote a piece for the BBC news website about the topic, he informed me he had included quotes from me in the piece, then sent another e-mail shortly after saying all the quotes had been removed.

I had been expunged, I was a non being.

Who knows the reason, maybe it was just a trim of the piece because it was too long and my stuff was boring.... maybe not.
So now I've done another interview for You and Yours and I wanted to remember to record it myself, as Tony Benn always did when he was interviewed. Of course, in the panic of setting up a Skype call, I forgot. Doh!
Anyway, the show goes out tomorrow morning on Radio 4 at 12 midday.

The Truth Will Out. (Corrigendum)

Just an update on this fascinating tale of sceintific success and massive, embarrasing, old media fail.
Last year a report came out of Trondheim University in Norway giving a very negative take on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of electric cars in comparison to diesel. I read it, got depressed, heard about it on Fox news, got more depressed, heard more about it endlessly on the BBC, got even more depressed. 'Electric Cars Pose Environmental Risk' is the BBC headline if you want to google it.
Then I found a very well researched and damning rebuttal from a scientist in America who suggested the report suddenly may be less than watertight. In fact it was leaking like a rusting hulk. 
Leaving all that in the past, I assumed that would be an end to it. An oil company funded University in Norway publishes a damning report about electric cars, old media has a mass love fest about it, asks no questions about the research, job done.
But enough numpties like me and some actual proper scientists started asking a few awkward questions, the scientists who published the report got a bit defensive as well they might, got more air time, did more interviews on the BBC and now, hey ho, they've done a Corrigendum.
A what? Um, they've made a few 'corrections' to their paper, they've slightly altered their original figures which makes the vast over pumped claims they originally spouted seem just slightly less dramatic.
In fact, the difference, even with their twisted determination to 'prove' electric cars are as dirty as diesel if they are charged by coal burning power alone is yawn inducing in it's bleeding obviousness. 
Interestingly in the same month this much touted report was published, the Union of Concerned Scientists in America also published a report about the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of electric vehicles only it came out with results so startlingly opposite to the Trondheim report , the truth probably lies somewhere between the two. Did Fox news or the BBC ever mention the Union of Concerned Scientists report, did they ever hint at it?
Don't be silly, of course not.

A Gentle Reminder

There are a lot of people from my end of the political spectrum busy reminding those who’ve forgotten, or those who’ve been born since her period of tenure of the many negative things Mrs T did to this country and the world, however, there is one important anomaly I wish to raise among the waves of righteous criticism.

In a landmark speech to the Royal Society, given at Fishmongers Hall in the City of London on September 27 1988, Margaret Thatcher said:

“For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself."

"Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century. This was brought home to me at the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver last year when the President of the Maldive Islands reminded us that the highest part of the Maldives is only six feet above sea level. The population is 177,000. It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s—though we may not have seen much evidence in Britain!"

Again 1989, Thatcher – the possessor of a chemistry degree - warned in a speech to the UN that "We are seeing a vast increase in the amount of carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere... The result is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto." She called for a global treaty on climate change.

To my delight I got the main quote from a Telegraph scream piece hammered out by the rabid climate change denier madman James Delingpole. Some relish must be devoured at the pain this must cause such a clench-fisted loon as Mr Shouty. Yes, she later recanted once the nutbags in the ‘it’s all lefty nonsense’ were able to poison her ear, but she wasn’t Prime Minister then so it didn’t matter.

What matters was, a British Prime Minister and a leading world politician who was also a scientist saw the peer reviewed scientific papers that were the result of millions of hours of research and understood how the conclusion was reached. She wasn’t at that stage influenced by the siren voices of the oil industry and the ultra-short-sighted bully-boy tactics of the extreme right that Mr (tragic) Delingpole and Lord (scary) Monkton represent with such fury.

The Renault Zoe: A non Review

There are plenty of places you can read detailed reports about the technical intricacies of the newly launched Renault Zoe,  here's a good one.

I’m not going to write a review as such, more my opinion of what this new car might represent.

Over the last 3 years or so an increasing number of large car manufacturers have seen the writing on the wall and started developing new electric cars, the best known being the Tesla Model S and the Nissan Leaf.

I pick those two because you can’t buy a Tesla Model S ‘V8 petrol’ or a Nissan Leaf  ‘turbo diesel.’ They have been designed and built as electric cars, not converted from existing models. As other manufacturers see these vehicles they start to get anxious, now BMW, VW, Ford, Toyota and many others are about to launch battery electric vehicles.

The next of these to appear is the Renault Zoe, (available from 7th June) although Renault have launched no less than 4 new electric cars in the last year I think the Zoe is the most important.

Last year they launched the Twizy, although brilliant isn’t really a car, it’s a quadricycle that is absurdly fun to drive (if it’s not freezing cold.) The other two are essentially conversions of existing vehicles, the Kangoo, a local delivery van that’s easier to use, quieter and cheaper to run than a clunking old diesel sitting in a traffic jam all day, and the Fluence, a large saloon car and I have to say my least favourite of the range.

The Renault Zoe uses many of the components found in the Renault Clio but it’s been completely re-thought from the tyres up. It’s very easy to drive, goes a long way on one charge, is absurdly cheap to fuel and of course it can use electricity from a wide variety of sources. (This is an important point, unlike a fossil burner you CAN charge an electric car from coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind or solar, I’m just saying)

However, the thing that will mark it out is it’s not absurdly expensive to buy.

(£13,995 after a £5,000 UK Government Plug-in Car Grant) So how did Renault manage to produce an electric car for pretty much the same price as a similarly fitted out petrol one?

The answer is the battery, when you buy this car, you don’t buy the battery. You lease the battery and how much your lease costs depends on how far you drive each year.

If you drive 7,500 miles a year you’ll be paying £70 a month on a 36 month rental agreement. Push that to 12,000 miles a year and the rental goes up to £93 a month.

Every time I mention this to people some serious head scratching starts and they grab their phones and open the calculator app. ‘Hang on a minute, that’s a bit steep isn’t it. £93 a month is £1,116 a year, that’s enough to buy 183 gallons of petrol!’

Indeed, and 180 gallons of petrol is enough to drive a Renault Clio (same size car, similar purchase price etc) just under 10,000 miles. Not 12,000 miles but close.

So with the Zoe you rent the battery, but then you’ve got the cost of the electricity.

To drive 12,000 miles in the Zoe, the electricity will cost you about £170, less if you charge at night and less if you use a lot of public charging which is currently free.

So to clarify once again, 12,000 miles in a Renault Zoe electric, I’ll be generous, £1,250, (battery rental plus electricity) and 12,000 miles in a Renault Clio is about £1,930 in fuel. I’m being very generous because I’m not including road tax. On the Zoe, it’s free as in all pure electric cars, I’m not including servicing, no need for oil change, replacement oil filters or any number of the other things our lovely old ICE engines need to keep them going. Plus I’m not including real world MPG which is always 20-30% lower than advertised. Drive a small internal combustion car on a cold morning with the heater on up a slight hill and your MPG drops to SUV levels. Oh yes, the same as an electric car’s reduced range in the winter, who’d-a-thunk-it.

But that’s not all, the battery rental agreement gives owners a preferential rental deal to use conventionally fuelled cars for long journeys. They will deliver the car any time of the day or night meaning it could easily work for a one car household.

It’s very hard to guess how much a Renault Zoe would cost if you could buy the battery and the car at the outset, judging by other electric cars it would certainly be over £20,000, but the battery rental model puts a whole new spin on the debate.

You have to remember this is being written from the perspective of someone who’s driven battery electric cars for over 40,000 miles. The Nissan Leaf I’m currently driving has done 26,000 miles and I haven’t noticed one scintilla of battery depreciation. True, by the time it gets to 75,000 miles or even 100,000 miles I may be massively depressed but I somehow doubt it.

The cost in electricity to drive that 26,000 miles is around £400, the cost to drive an equivalent car, say a VW Golf bluemotion the same distance is around £2,800 so that’s a saving of £2,400. Multiply that by 4 to give 100,000 miles and you save £9,600 on petrol.

I really liked the Renault Zoe, it’s an excellent car to drive and would be more than adequate for 90% of car journeys, as are all other electric cars. My only concern is that the subtext of the battery rental option is Renault sort of saying; ‘We’re very confident about this car, it has a 5 star NCAP rating and wonderful handling, brilliant on board electronics and state of the art accessories, don’t worry about the batteries, they might fail, they might break, they might do all the things Big Jezza has suggested so we’ll look after them.’

I hope I’m wrong, I hope lots of people take the leap and buy this car, find the battery lease model is brilliant an I end up looking like a fool. I’m okay with that, I’m very used to it.