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’

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.

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.

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.

Here's my take on the 'silent menace' of electric cars. It's nonsense.

Bear with me.

Essentially, it's the drivers responsibility. Okay, you are a driver, sitting in a metal box that weighs close to a ton and you are driving through an urban area with pedestrians who may or may not cross the road in front of you. What is your first reaction?

I'll tell you what mine is, drive very, very slowly. Then, keep an eye on the pedestrians, they may step out without looking, they may assume they can't hear anything coming and step into the road. It happens every day and said pedestrians get hit by cars, busses, trucks and pedal bikes. 

The nearest I've come to a pedestrian accident was when I was driving my Land Rover through the small market town of Cirencester and a young lad with earphones on walked straight across the road in front of me without so much as a glance. Thankfully I was driving my very noisy, very old Land Rover very slowly and I jabbed the brakes. No harm done.

I have discussed the silent nature of electric cars with two blind people, one an old friend who laughed at the idiocy of the sighted worlds assumption that he may stand on the side of a road and if he thinks he can't hear anything, just walk across. He used a lot of bad language so I won't quote him, but his first questions was, 'what about bikes.'

I've had a discussion with another blind man on audioboo and he suggested the situation he faces, walking along a suburban road with his guide dog and someone reversing out of their driveway doesn't see him and he has no audio warning of the cars approach.

That is the most reasonable thing I've heard and I think he has a point there and a reversing beep or warning sound would be very sensible. I have found the most difficult thing in an electric car is reversing out of a parking space in a garage or at a supermarket car park. I have to be very careful, I double check because at those speeds the car is as close to silent as any large moving object can be.

Once an electric car is doing more that 20 miles an hour it sounds exactly the same as any other vehicle, remember modern petrol and diesel cars are incredibly quiete when you think of what's happening inside the engines, thousands of loud explosions every minute. Brillaint and very costly technology has gone into making cars quieter and a good thing too.

So sure, let's have sexy sci-fi car noises on electric cars, but I honestly don't think we really need them.

I suppose you’re going to get all ‘eco warrior’ and ‘green’ about fracking.

I beg your pardon?

Fracking, the extraction of cheap, low carbon natural gas that will transform our economy overnight.

Oh, is that right? I hadn’t heard it was cheap or low carbon. Silly of me.

Yeah, well if you will only read the Guardian of course you haven’t heard the real facts.

Would the Daily Mail be a more reliable news source when it comes to the future of energy?

Naturally.

So how does this fracking work?

Easy peasy. They drill down a bit.

A bit?

Yeah, drill down…

How far?

I dunno, quite deep.

Like what, 10 meters?

Yeah, probably more, I dunno, then…

How about 8,000 meters?

Yes, 8,000 meters, whatever, doesn’t matter.

Doesn’t sound very cheap so far. I mean, the technology required to drill 8,000 meters into the earth, that’s some chunky drilling.

Anyway.

The installation on the surface, say in a field near a village or town, it would be quite substantial, possibly covering a large area with all the toxic water storage needed, plus the drilling rig. Probably bigger than a wind turbine, but anyway, carry on.

Anyway..as I was saying, then they pump some shit down there which fracks the rocks up and hey ho, cheap gas comes out.

So they pump raw sewage into the earth’s crust!

Don’t try and be clever sunshine, no, chemical stuff, I said shit ‘cos it’s some clever chemical stuff.

What chemicals?

Fracking chemicals, it’s fine, they just pump that shit in and out comes the cheap gas. If we burn this natural gas it means we don’t have to burn coal to power your poxy electric car.

I agree we need to stop burning coal, but what chemicals. From what I remember fracking a single well requires up to 7 million gallons of water, plus an additional 400,000 gallons of additives, including lubricants, biocides, scale and rust inhibitors, solvents, foaming and defoaming agents, emulsifiers and de-emulsifiers, stabilizers and breakers. 

Yeah, so?

About 70% of the liquid that goes down a borehole eventually comes up—now further tainted with such deep-earth compounds as sodium, chloride, bromide, arsenic, barium, uranium, radium and radon.

Yeah, but also there’s the cheap gas, loads of it, about 60% of the UK has gas under it so we can drill hundreds of holes, pump that shit in and get loads of cheap gas out. That way, we won’t need to put up any more of your ugly windmills.

I see, so then all we have is billions of gallons of toxic water to deal with plus the odd earthquake.

That’s a myth, it’s been proven to be all mythical, earthquakes my arse.

There have been numerous earthquakes recorded at or near fracking sites both in the UK and the USA, plus the possible contamination of sub aquifers, essentially our drinking water, but, as you say, the gas is ‘cheap.’ Not quite as cheap as the wind which drives wind turbines, and of course the wind turbines don’t create any CO2 or result in massive lakes of toxic waste water.

Yeah, well at least it’s not subsidized like your poxy eco windmills.

Mmm, interesting, as our chancellor George Osborne said …

He’s got it right, that George, very clever chap.

Indeed, he said, and I quote, "We are today consulting on a generous new tax regime for shale so that Britain is not left behind as gas prices tumble on the other side of the Atlantic."

What’s wrong with that? You communist! 

A generous new tax regime is a subsidy, exactly the same as is given to manufacturers and installers of wind turbines. Fracking has to be subsidised because it’s so costly, inefficient and desperate. We’ve already burnt up all the easily retrievable reserves of gas and oil we had and now we’re about to start this insane, last ditch attempt at the final phase of the human delusion that we can drill and burn our way out of the energy crisis.

Whatever.

Oh, I thought you’d have some amazing facts to come back at me with.

George Osborne for Prime minister!

Have you taken your special pills?

I hate you.

I know.

Clarkson is God.

Some interesting links:

Gasland Movie

They have all the best stuff in Berlin, I wish there was something like it in London.

Suitable dramatic pause…. Well, now there is.

Car2Go have just launched in London, You can register free until the end of 2012 at car2go or at the car2go shop in the world’s first pop-up mall, BOXPARK Shoreditch, or at any of Europcar’s stores across London. 

Once you’ve registered, car2go members can locate any available car through the car2go London website, by using a free app or just by walking up to an available car, touching the card reader on the windscreen, getting in and driving off.

At the moment all the cars a smart for 2 petrol, but they are rapidly introducing electric versions over the coming year.

How much does it cost? 35p a minute all in, that includes fuel, road tax, insurance, congestion charge etc, and if you sign up before Christmas you get a free 30 minutes of drive time. Nice.

I’m not being paid to announce this, I have no relationship with car2go, I just happen to think it’s a rather good idea. I also know that in cities where schemes like this have been running, private car ownership tends to decrease. Not very good news for car manufacturers but with 90% of cars doing nothing 90% of the time, it might free up a bit of parking, yeah.

The Prius battery is a sealed Nickel Metal Hydride unit. Yes, it has Nickel in it, Nickel is mined in places like Russia, Canada and Australia. Nickel is used in a wide array of products, the overwhelming majority of it is used making. . . (insert suitable Clarksoneque pause) … alloy wheels.

Far more Nickel is used in manufacturing wheels on Mr Clarkson’s cars that go sideways on old runways again… and again… and again than will ever be used in Prius batteries. The Nickel in the Prius battery has a far bigger impact on reducing CO2 output and reducing fossil fuel use than any number of ultra wide, low profile ‘sexy’ alloy wheels.

So yes, the Nickel is mined in Canada, shipped on a fossil burning ship to manufacturing plants in Europe or the Middle East. This is then shipped to Germany where it’s used to make wheels for the Mercedes Mr Clarkson will then drive. . . .hard . . .powerrrrrr. Wonderful.

All cars use materials and components sourced from all over the world, all cars have a massive carbon footprint when they are manufactured. Some cars, especially the type Mr Clarkson drives use staggering amounts of fuel as their slightly insecure drivers express their masculinity thus vastly increasing the carbon footprint and emissions of toxic and carcinogenic particles over the life of the vehicle.

The Prius uses vastly less fuel and emits far less CO2 and particulates per mile, the batteries last a very, very long time and are then recycled by Toyota. There are over 600 independently verified Prius taxis from around the world that have travelled more than 300,000 miles on the original battery pack which still works just as well as when they were new. I know information like that isn’t sexy, it doesn’t involve a black car sliding sideways on a runway, but it’s true.

Now that there are more than 2 million Prius cars on the road, the combined fuel savings they represent is in the many tens of millions of gallons. The cars have proved remarkably reliable and all the nonsense about the batteries is from one single source. A light entertainer/journalist who is sponsored by Shell.

Wait a minute, gasp, a BBC show sponsored by a major oil company? Surely not!

No, not the TV show, the Top Gear Live stadium shows with a massive banner outside the auditorium proclaiming ’Proudly Sponsored by Shell.’ As it should be, I thoroughly approve.

I am also a light entertainer/journalist sponsored by British Gas and Toyota.

Although I have been sponsored by Toyota in the past, they are not paying me to write this, I have also been sponsored by British Gas, they are also not paying me to write this either.

I’m also sure that Mr Clarkson isn’t paid by Shell to denigrate the Prius on such spurious grounds.  They don’t need to encourage him, he’ll do it anyway, just as I would defend the Prius and other hybrid and electric cars, paid or not.

It’s his shtick and we love him for it. I want him to keep it up, I don’t want him to stop, I fiercely defend his right to say what he pleases, I also defend my right to point out the glaring errors in his tragically popular hypothesis. If I mention the Prius on Twitter I’m immediately flooded with the same spurious ‘facts’ about the batteries. They are not facts, they are a stand up comedy routine. If Lee Evan’s does a funny routine about Parcel Force, we all laugh, we don’t believe what he says.

I don’t believe Mr Clarkson when he drones on about batteries and ‘green morons,’ I laugh. The problem is there are clearly many numpties who do actually believe that what he says has some validity. I just want to quietly state, it doesn’t.