Their aim was to demonstrate and promote the recently invented motor car. In addition, they celebrated the new Road Act, which that year raised the speed limit from 4mph to 14mph and removed the need for a man to walk in front of each motor vehicle waving a red flag. Quite a breakthrough for drivers of the day.

The cars taking part that day included those powered by electricity, steam and the internal combustion engine (petrol): back then it was a three horse race, technology wise. The internal combustion engine eventually won out of course. Fast forward to today and we take for granted the quite incredible travelling capability of modern cars. We Britons collectively drive 250 billion miles a year in our 30 million cars – all but 2,000 of which have internal combustion engines.

But the world is changing. Nobody can have missed the twin issues of Climate Change and fossil fuel depletion. Road transport in Britain is responsible for 20% of our CO₂ emissions, the main Climate Change gas. About a third of our oil imports are burned in our vehicles – some 25 million tonnes each year. Two excellent reasons to make a change.

On top of that, and perhaps more importantly for your average motorist – petrol and diesel are escalating in price and will continue to do so as the world runs out of oil. It was only two years ago that we hit the £1 per litre mark, at the time quite a traumatic event – how much further past that are we now – and how much longer before we hit £2 a litre? My guess is less than 5 years.

So we need an alternative to the car as we now know it.

And it’s ‘back to the future’ in fact – with electric cars making a comeback. So far the numbers are pretty small: a little over 2,000 of them in Britain. But all the major motor manufacturers have now either launched a fully electric car, or will do so later this year. You can go out and buy one, they’re just like ‘real cars’ – with some obvious differences.

Upsides and downsides of course. Upsides are a lack of pollution from the exhaust and the possibility of filling your car up at home – even making your own fuel from solar panels on your roof. The main downside is range. Cars hitting the roads this year will have a range of up to 100 miles, and to many of us this sounds like nowhere near enough. There’s even a name for the feeling many people get when contemplating electric cars – ‘range anxiety’.

The fact is we’re all used to driving cars that can cross continents. But we don’t use that capability. In Britain, 99.3% of all car journeys are actually less than 100 miles. Range anxiety is thus misplaced, though still having a very real impact.

People are also concerned about a lack of charging facilities on the road, somewhere to plug in. There’s actually a chicken and egg problem going on – one of the big reasons more people don’t buy electric cars is due to a lack of places to charge-up and companies are not installing places to charge-up due to a lack of electric cars on the road.

And that’s where our Electric Highway comes in. It’s the world’s first national network of charging points – it’s for electric cars and it’s on Britain’s motorways. We’ve completed phase one already, joining up the cities of London, Exeter and Manchester. Phase two will be completed this year and will see ‘top up zones’ at every Welcome Break motorway services in Britain.

They’re currently free to use, all you need – apart from an electric car, van or bike, is to register with us for a free smartcard (to access the chargers). We’ve created the Electric Highway to kick-start Britain’s electric car revolution – because we thought it needed doing.

Later this year we expect to install the first of a new breed of very fast chargers – from flat to full in 20 minutes. At a stroke electric cars will have overcome their only real drawback – their ability to travel great distances, and refill very quickly. It’s an exciting time for electric cars – perhaps on a par with 1896, when the new Road Act made cars suddenly rather more practical as a means of transport.

Nationwide rapid charging will achieve the same thing for the electric car.

[sociable /]

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Half the man I used to be. Well, almost

(How turning vegetarian almost saved my life)

I was always a fairly active kid, as most kids are; enjoying running around, kicking the football and the classic game of cherry knocking. Well, up until about the age of 9 or 10.

I started to become fairly overweight for my age and from about the age of 10 onwards I was struggling to find suitable clothes to fit. I don’t know exactly how big I was but I was certainly bigger than the average 10 year old.

I remember my dad came to watch me at primary school playing football and saying; ’Just get stuck in’. It was hard to do so when all the kids your age were much fitter or slimmer. This only impacted my confidence further and made me less willing to participate.

My parents would always feed me healthy, balanced meals and it was only for the amount of snacking that made me gain weight. It got to the point where my parents used to hide food and lock the freezer to prevent me from eating the treats.

Going into my teens, and moving to ‘big school’ was a huge step for any kid, especially when you’re overweight.

At secondary school every child experiences the stages of puberty; body odour, crazy hormones, spots, and crushes on your teacher (no?). Getting spots didn’t help with my appearance and the bullying soon started. Mainly name calling but also physical bullying – things being thrown, tripping up etc. Many nights would be spent crying, and many meetings with the school and my Mum only came to nothing. It’s something I just tended to accept, this was me and there was only so much other’s could do. ‘I’m James & I’m just a fat kid.’

It was then I started to realise that being overweight was an issue and was starting to cause me problems.

I had adopted an approach of “Every kid gets fat and I’ll lose weight at some point” and this massively impacted any motivation or desire to change the way I was.

At about the age of 15 you have to choose what GCSE’s you’d like to take. Things like maths, English and science are standard. I decided to take drama and sport as my two optional ones. I’d always been fairly loud and flamboyant and so drama seemed like a logical option. Sport, not so.

I remember telling my head of year that I wanted to do sport and she was very shocked. It didn’t make me feel too great but wanted to proceed and try and attain certification in it. Turns out no previous sport experience or desire to be sporty impacted this and I dropped it after about 6 months.

I left school at the age of 16 with some GCSE’s, no A-levels and still overweight. I went straight into work and went through a few jobs before joining Ecotricity when I was 18.

By this time I was very overweight for my age – I don’t know exactly what my BMI was, and to be honest, I dread to think. I didn’t do any exercise and my diet consisted mainly of take-aways and fried food and if I wasn’t inside playing computer games I would be out for dinner. Cost me a fortune!

My standard lunch would consist of; A salad bowl (containing; chicken tika, egg mayo, potato salad/coleslaw, and bacon on top), a cheese topped roll with butter, a pasty of some description, a bag of crisps and a slice of chocolate brownie/cake.
My evening meals weren’t much smaller and part time work at Dominos pizza, and a free pizza every shift didn’t help matters! I didn’t eat breakfast and tended to snack between meals.

In 2009 a few Ecotricity colleagues and I decided to start a weight loss challenge for the summer. The idea being that everybody pays a tenner and the person who loses the most weight at the end of the 4 months wins the cash. I started doing this and managed to lose a couple of pounds until I got ill and pulled out. My colleague Dave won, scooping the 50 quid.

I’d been trying so hard to eat healthy food by this stage but it just wasn’t working. I couldn’t resist the temptation for muck. It was here I decided to turn vegetarian.

I figured by cutting out meat in my diet I would have to think about what I was ordering for lunch. This was one of the hardest things I’ve done. To be a meat eater for 21 years and suddenly stop is a huge shock to my routine. I would say I was a meat addict and I’d never chosen or even looked at the vegetarian section of a menu. I had to have meat.

I remember the last thing I ate was a bacon roll from a local bakery. All I remember was how salty it was.

The summer of 2010 was approaching and I really wanted to do the challenge again. The being vegetarian thing was going ok but I was still craving meat. My diet was still pretty poor however, still having pizzas, chips etc.

It was May. Time for 2010’s weight lost challenge labelled: ‘get buff or get out’. This was my time to shine. This was my time to show everyone at work, everyone from school, my friends, my bullies (of which some are now my friends), my family and myself that I can do it. But I wasn’t expecting the results that were to come!

I realised that not eating breakfast was impacting hugely on the size of my lunch and so I started to eat breakfast. Normally a piece of brown toast or a bowl of cereal. Even if I wasn’t hungry, I’d get it in me. It set me up for the day.

I’d take great care in what was in my food, the amount of saturated fat, and the amount of carbs. My diet changed rapidly – a small bowl of cous cous, or a bowl of soup and piece of brown bread for lunch was the norm now. I’d also given up butter / spread by this stage. No sweets, no chewing gum, no fizzy drinks, not even orange squash. No more chicken or bacon for me! Oh, and no more beer on the nights out (but vodka and slim line tonic was fine – doubles OFC)

Dinner was much smaller too, and mum made everything super low in fat and still keeping everything balanced with a good amount of protein in the meal. The company ‘Quorn’ must love me.

It was the start of week 1 and time to weigh in. 20 years old 17st 7lb’s and a 40 inch waist

Then - 20 years old 17st 7lb’s and a 40 inch waist

I paid my tenner and the challenge had started. I decided to hit it hard.

4 nights a week at the gym, one night a week playing football, low fat food, smaller portion sizes and no meat. It was a huge body shock but I saw the results instantly – first week and 3lbs lost.

Second week with the same routine a further couple of pounds lost. I thought it was a fluke and did not expect to lose much more in the next few weeks. Turns out I did

By week 4 I’d lost just over half stone. Week 5 weight in – I’ve lost a stone! Absolutely over the moon with the progress and I made sure I kept at it.

A few more weeks had passed and by week 9 I’d lost two stone. I was in the lead and loving it.

With only a few more weeks left until the challenge was over I wanted to maintain my lead.

By week 14 I had lost 3 stone. I was absolutely over the moon and didn’t expect to lose any more weight. But sure enough – I did.

The challenge was over by now and it was clear I’d won. I was so happy with myself and didn’t even care about the money. I’m not even sure I got it to be honest.

I made the decision to continue with the challenge myself to see how much further I could get. I maintained the weekly weigh-in’s at work and received huge amounts of support from friends and colleagues – they all said how different I started to look. I kept on at the gym, and eating healthy.

As time went on the weight dropped off at a good rate, along with hundreds of pounds worth of clothes being given away. Without a doubt changing my diet impacted this hugely!

I was a vegetarian for several months now and at this stage I didn’t think being vegetarian was going to be a permanent thing, however, I was getting used to it. It was quite fun actually because I’d tasted and experienced new foods I’d never eaten before. My main worry was that vegetarian food was going to be plain and boring – FAR from it!

By week 20 I’d lost my 4^th stone – overwhelmed and I couldn’t quite believe it. I was feeling fantastic in myself.  I felt more energetic, I was tired when I was supposed to be, and more awake and alert at the right times. I had soon got used to not eating meat, and it had become part of my lifestyle

I continued, and more weight came off – ensuring I kept healthy and balanced and consumed exactly what I needed to.

By week 30 I’d lost another stone! I couldn’t believe this progress but there were concerns.  I was worried that the weight I’d been losing will go back on as soon as I stop the diet – I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

None the less, I kept going and kept working. 7 more weeks had passed and by week 37 I’d lost a total of 6 stone.

I kept going but it was clear that was it. I wasn’t losing any more weight. I’d reached my peak and exceed my own expectations beyond belief.

October 2010 – 21 years old: 11st 7lb’s and a 32 inch waist

Now - 21 years old, 11st 7lb’s & a 32 inch waist

My transformation was shocking. I received, compliment after compliment from friends and family. People who hadn’t seen me in a long time didn’t even recognise me and I was overwhelmed with the way I felt and looked. I felt much healthy, much cleaner, much more alert and I genuinely felt like a different person.

It’s now December 2011, a year on and I’ve only gained a couple of pounds – from working out and building muscle. My main concern had not happened – I’d not re-gained the weight I’d lost. New lifestyle, New diet, New me. Oh, and new wardrobe!

Without a doubt, cutting out meat changed, and potentially, saved my life.

I’ve continued my new lifestyle, I still attend the gym, eat healthily and I have personal training every 2 weeks. There is NO WAY I would have ever imagined myself doing this 2 years ago. And likewise, I can’t ever imagine going back to the way I was – burgers, no exercise and an unhealthy lifestyle.

If you thought, like me, that you’ll never be able to do it – then you can. You actually can – because I did.

I’d proved to my family and to my friends that I could do it. But my biggest achievement was proving it to the bullies from school; proving it to those who did not believe in me, proving it to those who called me ‘fat’, who put me down and had no faith in me. To those who left me out of games and activities.

I proved it to myself.

I’ve never really told anyone this, so thanks.

Cheers,

James.

P.S.  You may have noticed that I turned 21 during these months. And yes, I treated myself to a cheeky piece of birthday cake – you don’t have to cut everything out!

We had three principle aims:

• To give our customers the chance to share in the financial benefits of our work and the green energy revolution generally, without having to put things on their roof tops (which doesn’t work for everyone).
• To cut out the middlemen bankers who generally charge much more to borrowers than they pay to savers.
• And to raise new sources of finance to speed up the rate at which we can build new sources of green energy. Bridging our ‘funding gap’.

And when we launched it this time last year we were both excited and a little anxious, as to how it might be received.

We needn’t have been. It was a smash hit, raising £10 million with ease.

Earlier this year, No 10 invited Ecotricity to a conference to present the ecobond concept to the UK Nordic Baltic Summit, which was attended by Prime Ministers (nine no less!), including David Cameron.

And with the money raised we set about building a windmill to power a solar panel factory (nice one that), the UK’s first major Sun Park later in the summer – and a third windmill to power Ford’s diesel engine factory at Dagenham.

We also carried on with our pipeline of projects – in planning.

And a few weeks ago we found ourselves holding planning permission for another 19 windmills – which needed funding.

So we launched ecobond two, last weekend.

All being well we’ll raise the £10 million that we’re seeking and that will enable us to increase our green energy capacity by almost 50%.

ecobonds are firmly a part of what we do now – each year as we accumulate more projects to build, we hope to be able to launch another ecobond. In doing so, we believe that more people will thus join our work and share the benefits – and together we’ll build more new green energy sources – and do it faster than Ecotricity could alone. People Power.

Cheers.

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Further information & details of how to apply for ecobond two here: http://www.ecotricity.co.uk/ecobond

These seem to be the big three.

Customer Service is perhaps the most overlooked of them all – it’s the one where customers have least data to compare – to actually identify a better service.

Switching for this reason will often be a reaction to bad service with their current provider and at the same time a leap in the dark – often out of the frying pan and into the fire.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Since October 2009 OFGEM has obliged all energy companies to record and report their annual customer complaints in a standardised way – making them easily comparable (potentially).

But most people won’t know this and won’t have seen any figures – because they get buried on individual supplier websites. They take some digging out, truth be told.

You’d think that OFGEM, having obliged all suppliers to record and report this data, would actually present it in one place – one easy to read table perhaps, so that it could be used to judge energy suppliers. What otherwise is the purpose of collecting it?

We thought so, we asked, but OFGEM said no. It’s a stance made all the harder to understand given the regulator’s recent focus on the need for people to switch supplier – as some kind of antidote to high energy bills, and Big Six market dominance.

An interesting statistic in this regard is that only 20% of people use price comparison sites when switching. Maybe price isn’t the big driver it’s often taken to be.

Last year, mystified (by OFGEM’s stance) but undeterred, we did the leg work, assembled the data and published it ourselves – we’re just updating it now as this year’s data comes in. It’s here at the foot of this page.

We’ve presented complaint data as a ratio per thousand customers, in order that the figures are properly comparable between all suppliers, irrespective of size. And that’s not just a requirement to be able to compare small independents with the Big Six – the Big guys themselves vary from 5 million customers to over 15 million. A ratio per thousand allows proper comparison between all suppliers. It’s impossible without it.

The results make interesting reading.

It’s not just a case of small is good and big is bad. Last years table had a small supplier at the top (ecotricity) and another one at the bottom (Ovo Energy). And within the Big Six, two of the smallest of them sat at both the top and bottom of the spread. Both have 5 million customers.

And Ecotricity topped the table, with complaint levels an order of magnitude lower than the next best company (which was EDF at the time).

This year we’ve reduced our complaint levels by another 20% and we top the table again – easily. We’re pretty chuffed with that of course.

As this was written – EDF were the only supplier that looked likely to meet the deadline this year – until this story broke in the media and they all rushed their figures out.

For EDF it was not good news, with a whopping 40% increase in complaints on last year. Something obviously has gone wrong. Useful to know if choosing a new supplier?

With most figures now out the other clear trend from last year is a reduction in complaints among the small guys (that publish) and an increase in the big guys. Interesting.

We think people do care about good customer service; they just need to know they have a choice. That requires a measure (which OFGEM has provided) and publication (which Ecotricity has).

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This is an opinion piece by me that also appeared in Soapbox on Utility Week last Friday (not yet available online)

A bit of Perspective

One of the oft repeated complaints of the anti wind, anti climate change brigade is that green energy gets a lot of subsidies.

It’s a theme taken up recently by sections of the media – like the Daily Mail – claiming that green subsidies are responsible for high energy bills – and silly stuff like that.

But is it true…?

A few weeks ago a customer of ecotricity asked us just how much of his bill money was taken up by other support for green energy, other than that which ecotricity did itself – meaning through the Renewables Obligation (RO). It caused us to take a look at the cost of that per typical household. This is what we found:

The most recent published figures we could find were for the year ended April 2010.

Using data from OFGEM and assuming there are 26.7 million homes in Britain – we came to the figure of £13.84 per household per year to support renewable energy through the RO. Of this, £4.15 was for onshore wind.

Hardly princely sums. Especially if looked at in perspective;

For example – we also calculated the annual cost per household of the nuclear ‘clean up’ – the cost of containing nuclear waste – it’s a rather more significant £34.47 per year, per household.

And then we went looking for the support given to the fossil fuel industry and we found the annual cost per household is an incredible £1,000. That figure comes from the government itself – albeit when they were in opposition.

So we spend £13.84 per household (per year) on clean new sources of energy, nearly three times as much more to clean up the mess the nuclear industry has already made and a comparative small fortune to subsidise fossil fuels. The past and the present (in energy source terms) receive vastly more public support than our energy future.

That’s a perspective the Daily Mail won’t share with it’s readers.

There’s one more piece of perspective worth sharing – In the last twelve months energy bills in Britain have risen by roughly £200 per household (per year) – simply due to fluctuations on global energy markets (fossil fuel markets).

Fossil fuels didn’t suddenly become more expensive to extract or process – this is all about ‘free markets’ and commodity speculators.

That’s £200 we’re all spending on ‘Free Market’ price movements – £35 cleaning up nuclear waste and £1,000 subsidising fossil fuels….. oh and £14 supporting Green Energy.

That’s a perspective I thought worth sharing.

To me the current spending priorities are perverse – let spend that £1,000 year on Renewables – it’s a far better investment for all of us.

Cheers.

——————

Sources

RO data from Ofgem: Renewables Obligation Annual Report 2009-2010

Nuclear decommissioning Authority Budget 2009/10

Household Energy Bill Price Rises Dec 2010 = £1,150
Nov 2011 = £1345

£1000 fossil fuel subsidies – p.390

You may have read about already it in the Sunday Times this weekend. You shouldn’t have, but they broke the embargo on our story three days early for some reason – perhaps they’re a bit keen for stories that don’t involve phone hacking. Bless….

Anyway – Why are we building this Electric Highway? There are after all only some 2,000 electric cars on the road today. In fact that’s a big part of the reason – a lack of demand.

It’s often said that one of the reasons more people don’t buy electric cars is because of a lack of charging facilities – while the reason more charging facilities aren’t built is said to be because not enough people are buying electric cars – classic chicken and egg stuff. We’re hoping to break that impasse.

And at the same time another barrier to the faster take up of Electric Cars – is something called ‘range anxiety’ – the fear of running out of juice when doing any kind of serious distance.

So this is where the Electric Highway comes in, a national network of charging posts, installed on Britain’s motorway network; national facilities for electric vehicle owners – and long distance journeys. We’re hoping it’ll help kickstart Britain’s electric car revolution.

We chose the motorway network for good reason. The big focus to date, with charging posts, has been town and city centres – I think this is actually where they are needed the least. Car use statistics, point to this.

The average car in Britain does maybe 20 miles a day, a distance that most modern electric cars can sustain for almost a week without needing to charge. And most car owners have access to off street parking (70% apparently) – and therefore are able to charge at home, at night. Most cars won’t need to charge, most days. It’s the longer journeys where charging is needed most.

We’ve chosen where the power for this network comes from carefully too. The Electric Highway will be wind powered – and in doing this we’re making a serious point. Britain needs to switch to electric cars as fast as we possibly can – but that alone is not enough. Where the electricity comes from is vitally important. Electric cars need to be running on renewable energy sources, the power of the wind and the sun – only then does their full potential become realised – zero emission driving.

And can we do that as a Nation? Can all of us drive wind powered electric cars. The stats say yes.

There are 30 million cars on the roads of Britain, between them driving 150 Billion miles a year and burning some 20 odd million tonnes of oil. Oh and producing 70 million tonnes of CO2 (12% of our total emissions) in the process. Incredible numbers but we could power all of that with just 10,000 of today’s windmills and 5,000 of tomorrows (they double in size every few years).

And can the grid take it? It would require an increase in electricity delivered through the grid of about 12%, far less than most people think. And for context, pre the credit crunch, grid delivered electricity grew by around 3% a year (so we’re talking just four years normal growth to power all the UK’s cars). And most charging will take place at night, at times of low demand. The grid can easily cope, in fact if Britain switched to EV’s the grid would operate more efficiently.

And consider this. One of the truly revolutionary aspects of electric cars is that we can all be our own oil companies – we can make our own electricity – and power our own cars. A typical 5kW roof top solar system, for example, could provide some 5,000 miles of driving a year – pollution (and fuel duty) free.

Given this, perhaps in due course, the ‘anxiety’ around electric cars will pass from motorists to the oil companies – and maybe the government.

It’s a 1MW installation next door to our existing 16MW Wind Park – making it not just the first proper Sun Park in the UK but the first Hybrid Energy Park.

That’s something we’re pretty keen on, the combination of two intermittent, but complementary, forms of Renewable Energy – we think the likely outcome will be a smoothing effect. The sun and the wind tend to come at different times. Now that it’s up and running we get to test the theory and we’ll keep you posted.

There’s a nice news report here if you’re interested. Credit BBC…

Our press release is here.

We had big hopes, not just for big solar projects, but also for Hybrid schemes like this. And within the boundaries of each Sun Park we planned to create a nature reserve, a habitat for insects, birds and bees.

So last week, with its perfect weather for the opening of a Hybrid energy park (lots of sun and wind), was a bit of a bitter sweet event – great to see this first Sun Park up and ‘running’ (they don’t actually move, which though obvious, once you’ve been staring at them for an hour or two, does kind of impact) – and great to see the evidence already of nature taking back this small piece of farmland (five acres). But of course this will be our last Sun Park due to the governments crazy emergency U-turn on feed in tariffs the other week.

I just wanted to flag up here the extent to which killing off Big Solar really is a false economy, and not just something at odds with a serious green agenda – a point we’ve tried making to the government.

The government’s big issue with Big Solar appears to be its apparent success, the sheer amount of it that might get built – and the cost.

They’ve capped the amount that can be spent, under Feed in Tariffs, at £360M per year (come 2014), making this the only FIT scheme in the world with a cap in the process.

And it’s this cap that then caused their big problem (they say) – the possibility that Big Solar could be successful at the expense of other technologies, funding wise – because funding is suddenly limited. OK that’s the background.

The £360M a year equates to roughly £5 per household per year – not a fortune – roughly 1% of a typical electricity bill.

In contrast – Each time the cost of oil doubles, as it has in the last few years and will do again (and again), electricity bills rise by something like 30% – or £150 a year. Money that goes to energy market traders and speculators.

Far better we think to spend those kinds of sums on indigenous energy sources. We told the government so in our response to the FiT U-turn.

And then, just last week, we had a graphic demonstration.

British Gas announced a price rise of 16% for electricity and 18% for gas – adding £192 a year to a typical dual fuel energy bill with BG – and causing considerable consternation to the government, bless them.

Chris Huhne, the minister who’s department has just felled Big Solar because £5 a year is quite enough to spend on renewables thank you very much – had this to say:

“This announcement will be tough for consumers who are already struggling to meet their bills. The uncomfortable truth is Britain’s consumers are being buffeted by the violent and unpredictable winds of global fossil fuel prices.

“I refuse to stand by and watch this happen.

“I’m pushing the big six suppliers to help their customers overhaul their draughty homes and understand the best tariffs on offer, and I’m backing new entrants to bring more competition to the market.

“But there’s a way out of this. Look at how the French benefit from only relying on fossil fuels for a fraction of their power – bills there are only expected to rise by 3% this year.

“The UK electricity market has to change, so that we escape the cycle of fossil fuel addiction. Alternatives like renewables and nuclear power must be allowed to become the dominant component of our energy mix.

“Only radical reform now will give us the best chance in the long run of keeping the lights on at a price that doesn’t wreck our economy over and over again.”

These are fine words. But they don’t seem to match the deeds. Lots of rhetoric about radical reform of the energy market, when we can’t even have a proper Feed in Tariff. It’s a proper Renewable Energy program we need. Not righteous indignation when the inevitable happens. And keeps happening.

And this is not an isolated price rise – The Guardian reports that British Gas customers have seen their fuel bills rise twice in the last few months – by a total of £258 a year – an almost 25% increase….!

By the time we get to 2014 and the Feed in tariff costs this horrific £5 per household – fossil fuel energy bills could well have risen by £1,000 a year (at this rate), or at least if you’re with British Gas….

That’s £1,000 every year, not just a one off.

It kind of takes our point and makes it rather emphatically.

And it’s not just British Gas, Scottish power energy bills went up 21% (or £239) just last month.

Scrimping on the cost of renewables now, killing big solar because a fiver per house is already too much to bear – is a false economy – one that we will pay for many times over in years to come. We’ll spend far larger sums simply keeping pace with energy market speculators and traders – and that money is wasted, truly, compared to using it to build energy sources of our own.

That’s it, all I wanted to say…..

Cheers.

P.S. The panels for this project are Sharp NU range – made in Wrexham, UK.

We’ve just submitted our response to the government’s ‘emergency FIT consultation‘ – the one that aims to kill off big solar for reasons as yet unfathomed.

I thought we’d publish it here in the interests of debate and in case it’s interesting or useful to anyone.

Cheers.

Ecotricity is a green energy company, we were in fact the first company in the world to offer green electricity. We were founded, as the UK energy market de regulated, in 1996 and are the largest and oldest (and most successful) independent energy company in the UK. We supply around 50,000 customers, homes and business, large and small. Ecotricity shares the Government’s vision of a Green Britain – green energy and green jobs – and is a market leader in Green innovation. Currently around 50% of the electricity Ecotricity supplies comes from renewable sources that it built itself. It is a ‘not-for-dividend’ company and reinvests its profits into new renewable energy projects each year (£50million in wind over the past 7 years). Indeed Ecotricity has invested more per capita in new renewables build, over the last seven years, than any other energy company in the UK.

While it is essential that the Government provides a stable and predictable policy and regulatory environment, the task of greening UK energy should not purely be a government led initiative. As energy suppliers we have a key role to play in working with Government to empower individuals and communities to consume energy in a greener and more efficient manner.

Ecotricity has built 52 wind turbines throughout the UK and will open the UK’s first solar park this summer. The company had plans to build enough solar parks to achieve a 50/50 wind and sun renewable energy mix in as little as two years time, but the proposed change in FiTs would make these plans financially unviable.

Ecotricity introduced the UK’s first Green Gas tariff last year and now supplies its green gas to some 9,000 customers. The income from these green gas bills is being used to build Britain’s first dedicated ‘gas to grid’ plant. Currently 1.4 per cent of our gas supply is green from a sugar beet factory in Holland. This may sound relatively small but still much more than any other company and next year Ecotricity expects to double the amount of green gas it supplies.

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If yes, please state your reasons: No

CHAPTER 1: FAST-TRACK CONSIDERATION OF SOLAR PV GREATER THAN 50 KW

Executive Summary

1. The UK should have a large scale solar industry, whether this is supported by the current FiT scheme or by another mechanism, such as the RO. Many countries in Europe have successful large scale solar industries and the economic benefits that flow from that – all underpinned by robust FiT mechanisms. It’s not just about green jobs and green industry, we need large scale solar as part of the UK’s energy mix, to make the UK more energy independent and as part of our carbon reduction program.

2. If the current FiT structure cannot be maintained in respect of large solar, we suggest that rather than ‘remove’ large solar altogether (which the proposed 8.5p tariff price will do), the government considers restricting its size, so that some large scale projects can still go forwards. Such restrictions could be to reduce the 5MW limit for example – perhaps to 2MW. At least this way the UK would still have some form of large scale solar activity and the benefits that will accrue from that. If part of the government’s concerns are over land use competition with food, it would also be possible to restrict the grade of land that large scale solar projects would be supported on. The UK has sufficient land, suitable for solar but not for food crops, to power the whole country from this source of energy. Such a restriction on land use has already been introduced into the German FiT scheme.

3. If proposed FiT changes are to be undertaken, it is important that proper transitional arrangements are made to reflect the time and money invested in good faith by the industry – in response to the publication of the FiTs last year. This will prevent unnecessary damage to the industry and to government energy policy objectives and its reputation.

• We suggest that, if the proposed change to the tariff is to go ahead, it should not be brought forward to the 1st of August. It should be possible to maintain April 2012 as the cut off date. This would avoid an unseemly rush to change the rules, provide some consistency for the industry and the opportunity to deliver those early projects in the pipeline, while avoiding unnecessary pressure from the solar lobby. It should also improve the government’s standing in any legal action. We believe that there will not be so many large scale solar projects commissioned before April 2012 – so that the worst of the impact the government fears (on small solar) will not occur.

• We further suggest that if the government chooses the early cut off date, it sets the criteria for inclusion in the current tariff scheme to be those schemes in construction – as this is a process which takes six months. And if it chooses the later date (April 2012) it sets the criteria to be those schemes that are commissioned by that date. This will require schemes to be under construction by the end of this summer. It will limit uptake but provide a fair window for those with work in progress.

Q1: Do you agree or disagree that there is a need to limit access to FITs for large scale solar PV installations in order to meet spending review targets? Please give reasons for your answer. If you agree, what do you think is the best way of doing this?

Disagree

Comments:

1.1 While we understand the fiscal constraints placed on the Department by the Spending Review, limiting access to FiTs for large scale solar is unlikely to be of value in the long term. On the contrary, support for large scale solar PV installations is better value for money than micro installations and is more likely to deliver enough renewable energy to meet carbon reduction and climate change targets. As confirmed by Ofgem, support for large solar PV would not be to the detriment of any other renewable technology because there isn’t a limited pot of money under FiT legislation.

• The tariffs for large and small scale solar (within FiT legislation) clearly show (they mandate in fact) that large scale solar delivers three units of green electricity and three units of carbon are saved for every two produced by small scale solar – we get three for the price of two. Large scale solar is 50% more economical, a far better use of money.

Only large scale solar installations are able to generate enough electricity to make solar a serious player in the UK energy mix and provide the long term economic benefits which are evident in Germany where 133,000 people are employed in its solar sector and 17,000MW capacity is already installed in a 10 billion Euro a year industry.

1.2 The introduction of a fixed cap is inconsistent with a price-based mechanism and has not been introduced by any other country that has a FiTs scheme (and there are 50 worldwide). It fatally undermines the efficacy of the FiT scheme as it removes certainty for investors, large and small.

The proposed limit on FiT spending, which it is claimed will ‘save’ £40 million when compared to DECC’s original estimates of the cost of FiTs in 2014/15 – will only save each household in the UK about 50p per year. This figure is based on the fact that the cost of the FiT scheme is spread across all electricity consumption in the UK (domestic and business) and the split of consumption (and therefore costs borne) in the UK is roughly two thirds business and one third domestic. Therefore one third of the 40 million – say £13 million, is ‘saved’ by 24 million homes – making roughly 50p per home.

The costs of the FiT itself, capped at 360 million, is a small sum to spend on something as vital as renewable energy. Using the same approach as above, households will bear one third of this cost, £120 million – which is a bit less than £5 per household per year. This is 1% of a current typical electricity bill, it will be less than that by 2014/15 when the cap bites.

It is perhaps worth contrasting this 1% additional cost, or investment, in renewables – against the costs incurred from movements in global oil markets. When the price of oil doubles, as it has in the last few years, the impact this has on a typical electricity bill is a 30% increase. This far bigger sum is not used to invest in infrastructure, it is a price paid to the speculators of the global energy market. Oil prices will surely double again, it is only a matter of when. It is far better in our opinion to invest now in renewable energy sources, than simply waste money due to the inexorable rise of commodity prices.

It might also be considered that investment in renewables via FiT schemes, or any other method, is analogous to the use of Contracts for Difference – because the price of renewable energy is fixed within such schemes. In contrast to the price of conventional energy which will rise in the future. CfDs appear to be one of the government’s preferred measures to be brought within the proposed EMR. FiTs are a form of CfD. As well as a way of promoting renewable energy development and UK energy independence (and of course climate targets). They represent value for money and will do far more so in the future.

1.3 As the UK solar PV industry is in the nascent phase, tariffs must be retained at the current rate to ensure that there is continued confidence and security for investment in solar. A fast track reduction in tariffs ahead of April 2012 would undermine confidence in the FiTs scheme (and the government) as potential and existing participants cannot be sure that further changes won’t be made to FiTs and other renewable (and non renewable) energy schemes in the future.

1.4 Solar has huge potential as an energy source but if the Government believes that it is inappropriate for large scale solar to receive support through FiTs then it should seek to provide an alternative framework that allows big solar to succeed , through the ROCs scheme for example. Offshore wind already benefits from multiple ROC allocations, it would seem relatively straightforward to introduce a scheme of multiple ROCs for large solar. However the level of support will need to be similar to that of the FiT at this time.

1.5 It has been suggested that a reason for withdrawing support for large scale solar PV is that it runs the risk of arable land being used for ground based solar farms, making it harder for our country to feed itself. However, research undertaken by Ecotricity (the results of which are in the table below) shows that there is enough grade 4 land that could be used to deploy large solar PV installations which could potentially supply enough electricity to meet UK energy demand twice over without having to build on arable land.

Data source:

* Agricultural Land Classification (ALC) Statistics. Natural England 2011

Q2: Do you agree or disagree with the proposed new tariff bands and the accompanying proposed reduction of tariffs for PV installations in these bands? Please give reasons for your answer. If you disagree, please provide evidence to support an alternative.

Disagree

The ideal scenario is for retention of the tariff at the current rate so as to provide a real contribution from solar to our national energy mix and climate change targets as well as security to the industry and potential new investors in the energy sector.

Comments:

2.1 The reduction in tariff for solar PV installations between 250KW and 5MW to 8.5p per KW will effectively kill off investment in large scale solar PV. The Government’s aim of reducing project rates of return to just 5% is misguided, as this level is so low that no projects will proceed. Government should be aware that no renewable energy projects in the UK are built with such a low rate of return, and it is therefore entirely unrealistic to expect this will happen with solar PV. Because of our unique nature, Ecotricity builds projects in the UK at lower rates of return than probably any other developer – we are not in this for the money. If we cannot build projects at a 5% rate of return then we are certain that nobody else can or will.

We suggest that the government might find it instructive to ask DECC what rate of return offshore wind energy projects are expected to provide under the current RO system. We believe you will find they are rates of return in double figures, ie over 10%. A rate similar to that provided under the current FIT scheme for large scale solar.

2.2 The Government has referred to the success of FiTs for solar PV in other European countries, particularly Germany. It has also claimed that the proposed recution in FiT support to 8.5p a unit would merely bring the UK into line with countries such as Germany. This is untrue. As the table below demonstrates, none of Germany, France or Spain has reduced tariffs to 8.5p per KW for installations above 250KW despite all three having more mature markets than the UK. More mature markets of course lead to lower costs.

The table below shows that Germany provides over twice as much financial support to large scale solar PV compared to the proposed 8.5p – the government’s claim to be reducing to German levels is simply untenable. (adjustments for sunlight levels are made in column D, although the difference between UK and Germany is marginal)

Data Source:

†France – http://www.renewablesinternational.net/new-pv-feed-in-tariffs-in-france-and-negotiations-in-italy/150/452/30408/

Germany – http://www.germanenergyblog.de/?page_id=2740

Spain –  Royal Decree 1565/2010

††European Commission Joint Research Centre

2.3 Current tariffs for solar PV provide sufficient income for companies such as Ecotricity to build them. We planned to build ten new installations over the next two to three years which would have generated 50MW of electricity for our customers that otherwise would have come from brown sources. However, under the proposed changes, it will not be financially viable for Ecotricity and other companies to build any new large solar schemes at all and hence the installed capacity of solar will be significantly reduced from what it could have been.

2.4 Cutting the tariff to align with decreases in equipment costs has not been implemented appropriately. The consultation document states that the cost of solar PV hardware has fallen by 30% over the past year, something we would not disagree with, though we feel this was anticipated by the last government in the current FiT tariff rates. However, the proposed 75% cut in tariff for large solar is more than twice the level of the cost reduction which the government says it is addressing. It is hard to understand something so clearly out of step as a claim to be reflecting a 30% cost reduction with a 75% payment reduction.

2.5 The alternatives to the Government’s proposed changes are:
i) Adjust the 250KW -> 5MW tariff band down to a maximum of 1MW or 2MW to reflect the big difference in economies of scale. With the current tariff the rates of return of 1 or 2MW projects are much less than at the 5MW scale. Ecotricity is currently building a 1MW project and would be prepared to share the economic model for that with the government to illustrate this point.

Q3: Do you agree or disagree with the proposed timing of the change in tariffs including the implementation date of 1 August 2011 and that the tariff change will apply to all installations with an eligibility date on or after that date? Please give reasons for your answer. If you disagree, please provide evidence to support an alternative.

Disagree

Comments:

3.1 If the proposed change to the tariff is to go ahead, it should not be brought forward. Leaving April 2012 as the cut off date is unlikely to see much further uptake from large scale solar installations, will ensure consistency in the industry and avoid campaign and legal pressures from the solar lobby.

3.2 If there is a determination to reduce tariffs for large scale solar PV, proper transitional arrangements are required to ensure that damage to the industry’s confidence is kept to a minimum.

3.3 The consultation document notes that changes to the tariff will only impact new entrants and not retrospectively affect existing schemes. However, there is still uncertainty about which installations will be included or excluded – does this refer to those installations that are commissioned or those that are under construction or at the planning stage?

Of course all solar PV installations that have already been commissioned should be allowed to benefit from existing tariffs. However, it takes some six months from start to finish to build, and commission a large solar project, it would be unjust of the government not to reflect this lead time when implementing such a dramatic and sudden rule change. Much of the industry would no doubt wish to see all projects which are at the planning stage allowed to proceed at the current tariff. Although Ecotricity shares that desire, we do not believe this is remotely attractive to the government. We also believe that to draw the line so that projects commissioned or under construction (before the August date) are allowed to proceed on the original basis – would be fair enough. These are the projects for which the greatest commitment and investment (and risk) has been made. If the April 2012 date were chosen then it would be fair enough to choose commissioning as the entry criteria for the original tariff rates.

Q4: Can you provide any further information or evidence on predicted uptake of installations or other insights that you think DECC should be aware of about how the market for PV is evolving in the light of FITs?

Comments:

Our own research informs us that the potential for large scale solar projects coming forwards in the next 12 months has been greatly exaggerated by the media, and to some extent by developers themselves. As we write this we are the only developer in the UK that has started work on a large scale solar project. We have talked to most, if not all, of the other developers that have planning consent – they number only 14 – and without exception none of them have finance in place and the other project essentials, such as grid connections and EPC contracts (for the supply and build of the project). The Government’s widely announced intention to reduce PV tariffs and do so very quickly has undoubtedly had an impact – but this situation (set out above) existed before that announcement was first made. Large scale PV is a new technology to the UK and potential developers of it are finding for themselves that it is considerably harder to deliver then it may appear. Banks in particular are wary of the technology risks.
We believe the government has been misled as to the extent of the uptake of large scale solar tariffs.

CHAPTER 2: STUDY IN THE UPTAKE OF FITS FOR FARM-SCALE ANAEROBIC DIGESTION (AD)

Q5: Do you agree or disagree with the proposed new tariff bands and tariffs for farm-scale AD? Please provide evidence to support your view. We would be particularly interested in quantitative evidence of the capital and operating costs of farm-scale AD schemes.

Disagree

Comments:

Ecotricity’s view is that waste plant matter is better used on farms as fertiliser. By over stimulating the economics of farm scale AD the government risks diverting waste streams that would naturally be used for composting and then as fertilisers (natural ones as opposed those that are made using fossil fuels) to the production of electricity – in effect turning plant matter into electricity on the one hand and therefore having to use more fossil fuel to make fertilisers on the other hand. It also risks stimulating a market for energy crops which would compete with food production. Farm scale AD plants to make electricity are not something that should be promoted, in our opinion.
It is perhaps worth noting that under the government’s view of FiT arrangements, any uptake of AD tariff monies by the farming community will be at the expense of small scale solar.
If the government seeks to provide financial support to the farming community (via enhanced AD support), this is something that large scale solar does very effectively.

Q6: Do you have any other views and associated evidence on the slow uptake of farm-scale AD under FITs to date?

Comments:

The uptake of farm scale AD is entirely comensurate with its contribution to UK energy and climate targets. We do not believe that this uptake is slow.

Q7. Do you consider that controls are necessary to prevent the wholesale expansion of energy crops for AD? If so what do you consider to be the best way to implement these controls to be considered in the comprehensive FITs review?

Agree

Comments:

The way to prevent this is to leave farm scale AD support where it is.

We’re building the UK’s very first Sun Park right now, next to our big Wind Park in Lincolnshire and it should be up and running in April. But it might be the UK’s first and last, if the government delivers on the rhetoric of the last few weeks.

Ecotricity has over 50MW of Wind Parks now, with about 200MW more in planning – it’s taken us fifteen years to get here BTW. We see the potential to build enough Sun Parks to achieve a 50/50 mix of wind and sun – in as little as two years time – because solar projects have none of the planning problems that onshore wind does. And these two sources of energy are complementary, for example you get more of one in the winter and more of the other in the summer. And we’re expecting to learn a lot, as an energy company, from one of the world’s first hybrid Wind and Sun projects (the first project we’re building). It’s very much a Brave New World.

Or rather it was. Along comes the government and says: “We don’t like the sound of solar farms. They’re going to hoover up all the money available from the Feed in Tariffs (FiTs), and harm the market for household solar power” Or words to that effect. But that’s not being strictly honest, because there isn’t a limited pot of money under FiT legislation. We’ve checked our understanding with Ofgem and they agree – there is no pot, and no way that one technology can succeed at the expense of any other.

In any event there have been over 20,000 applications so far for domestic rooftop installations, that’s actually going rather well! While the UK has yet to get it’s first large solar farm. It seems a little premature to be worried, even on the basis of misunderstanding the rules…

There are other bits of government disinformation that need tackling too –

It’s been said that large scale solar projects are taking advantage of a loophole in the Feed in Tariff regulations.

And that the last government never anticipated large scale solar projects taking part in FiTs.

Neither claim bears the slightest scrutiny – the rules of FiTs are clear, big solar is an intrinsic part of it, who in their right minds could think that rules specifically allowing solar projects of up to 5MW (or 25 acres of land) were an oversight or something. On the contrary the last government knew exactly what it was doing. The new government simply wants to change the rules – they should say so.

And then we can have a proper debate on the merits of their plans. For example in these times of serious financial constraints (and big cuts), when we also need to achieve progress towards green energy and carbon reduction targets – more than ever we need value for money in everything (the government even says so) – so how can it make sense to choose to support domestic solar at the expense of large scale solar, when the latter is 30% cheaper (FiT regulations ensure that). We get three for the price of two if we spend our money on big solar rather than small solar – three units of green electricity for the price of two, three units of carbon reduction for the price of two.

It’s hard to fathom. The rules don’t allow one technology to adversely impact any other, FiTs were designed to enable big solar, and it offers far better value for money – so why does the government want to kill it off at birth?

I think it’s about ideology, about the countryside. I just wish the government would be honest with us, and rather than demonize big solar in a series of ministerial announcements (from three ministers now Gregg Barker, Chris Huhne and most recently Charles Hendry) just tell us the truth, big solar might spoil the countryside or something.

Then we can have an honest debate on the facts.

More recently Nick Clegg reiterated their intention/promise that this will be the greenest government ever, while presenting these proposed changes (to kill off big solar) as something in the public interest. It’s hard to see greenness in this policy ‘emergency stop’ though. This government did not create FiTs it inherited them (so no cred there) and rather than enhance them they propose to restrict them by removing big solar from the mix, and capping the total spend. There was no cap before, that’s a coalition government change – presented as a saving, based on the tenuous proposition that the previous government estimated the cost of FiTs to be £400 million (in 2014/15) – and so by limiting the spend to 360 Million, there’s an actual saving…… (the ‘saving’ would be some 50p per household per year BTW – big whoop)

With electricity consumption in the UK split roughly two-thirds business and one third domestic, the £360 million cap equates to £5 per year per household (on their energy bills). Is that really too much to pay. Oil prices have risen sharply recently, and not for the first (or last) time – the impact this has on household energy bills is far (far) greater than £5 a year – better to spend that money (all our spare money in fact) on indigenous energy sources, than pay it to global market speculators (many of whom are banks by the way).

And then there’s jobs; Remember all the talk of new green jobs before the election? Germany has 133,000 people employed in it’s solar sector now and 17,000MW capacity installed – in a 10 Billion Euro a year industry. We in the UK have a measly 60 odd MW.

Brave New World indeed. More 1984 in my opinion, all propaganda and Doublethink. Cuts are boosting renewable energy, capping an estimate is a saving and big solar is the bogey man.

Here’s another example of disinformation – Chris Huhne on Yougen – “The key point is that if people want to do solar PV at scale on the same subsidies which were designed for small solar, we need to be careful as the comparison will not be with small solar, but with onshore wind. In that comparison onshore wind looks much more economic.”

Large scale solar does not get the same subsidy as small solar – it gets 30% less – it gets support designed for large scale solar. To say, or suggest, otherwise is just wrong. And why compare it to onshore wind – if that’s the governments approach they should compare offshore wind to onshore (one costs twice as much as the other) and overhaul their policy on that – there’s no value for money in offshore wind if onshore is the benchmark.

So there it is, a veritable blizzard of ministerial disinformation to soften us all up for the pulling of the plug on big solar. After the consultation process of course, the outcome of which hasn’t been prejudged….

We’re building the UK’s very first Sun Park right now – it may well be it’s one and only. And that looks just plain daft to me.

Cheers.

Late last year Ecotricity launched a new initiative and, as it turns out, a new product. We dubbed it Ecobonds and it was a runaway success.

We set out to raise £10 million and we actually received some £15 million in applications with another £3 million that didn’t make it in on time. It was a huge success.

We’d been considering launching a bond issue for a year or two. We had two main purposes in mind.

The first was to fill a funding gap that we knew would arrive one day. Our model at Ecotricity is to use customer energy bills to build new sources of Green Energy – something we describe as “turning Bills into Mills” and it’s a model that works very well. When we build a new Green Energy project we use a mixture of debt and equity, typically 80% debt and 20% equity. We fund the 20% equity from our own resources, from the money we make. And we’ve always known the day would come when our project pipeline, those consented and ready to build, would outstrip our ability to self fund the equity part. Creating the Funding Gap.

And this is where the Ecobond idea came in, as a potential way to raise that equity proportion as debt – I think that’s known as Mezzanine Debt – and it comes with a hefty interest rate, typically 13 to 15%. Which would kill most of our projects. We looked at it but couldn’t make it work.

Our second main purpose was to give something back to our customers, many of whom over the years had asked how they might be able to get involved in our work, financially. And we also wanted to give people a way to get involved in the Green Energy revolution (financially) – without having to install stuff on their roof tops. Not everybody wants to do that and not everybody can.

Anyway, that’s the background.

In the summer of 2010 we could see our Funding Gap coming for 2011 and we started to flesh out the idea.

We reached out to customers and non customers via our web site, to get feedback on the concept and its main terms. The clear message we got from that was that five years was too long and £1,000 too big a minimum. So two of the eventual key terms of our Ecobond came out of that – a four year term and £500 minimum. The idea was to make this bond issue as accessible to all as we could. Our customers helped us do that.

At the same time – we were also aware that bank rates for savers were at historical lows; despite the fact that banks were asking very high rates from businesses that they were prepared to lend to. It seems like the incredibly low base lending rate (0.5%) is only relevant to savers (what the banks pay) and not to borrowers, strange that. There are probably something like five percentage points difference, between what a bank pays savers and what it charges borrowers like us. We thought that was a bit of a rip off.

And so our Ecobond became a way to ‘cut out the middlemen’ the banks who, post the credit crunch were paying savers very little, while lending to business for much more. We thought Ecobonds could introduce a little fairness into the financial sector.

And funnily enough, that’s exactly how Ecotricity got started. It was back in 1995, I was trying to get a fair price for a new kind of electricity (the green kind), from windmills – and the big electricity companies just laughed at the idea and refused to pay anything like a fair price; without which building more windmills was looking impossible. But since the electricity market had just been liberalised and anyone could set up an electricity company, the monopoly they had been comfortable with was no longer in place.

Ecotricity was set up to ‘cut out the middlemen’ and go direct to the end user of electricity, to get a fair price.

Ecobonds is a very interesting parallel, 15 years later, it’s a way to cut out the middlemen – a way for savers to lend their money directly to us.

That’s our Ecobond then – a power to the people kind of initiative, a novel way to raise finance, for green progress – and to engage with people and get things done between us. It’s innovative, pragmatic, populist and commercial all at the same time…..

We launched it as a four year bond, with £500 minimum and a quite generous 7% interest rate – which we boosted to 7.5% for customers.

And it went down a storm.

With £15 million of applications we had a good and bad situation – we had raised the £10 million we needed, but would have to disappoint some people – and give £5 million back (How awful…. ).

We spent a week modelling outcomes, to try and strike a balance between prioritising customers (for their years of support to us) and at the same time not massively disappointing all those people who were not customers, but clearly willing to support our work.

We ended up allocating about 70% to customers and 30% to others.

In making that choice we also willingly chose to pay more interest than we needed to (customers getting half a percent more). We were chuffed to do that.

We’ve put the money raised straight to work. First project to be funded this way is our windmill powering a solar panel factory in Wales – nice bit of ‘perpetual motion’ there….

And we’ve started work on the UK’s first grid scale Sun Farm – which we gained consent for in December last year. We break ground in a couple of weeks and should be up and running by March.

In total we’ve got 20MW of Wind and Sun projects planned for construction in 2010 – a 40% increase in our capacity – all funded (the gap part anyway) by Ecobonds.

Oh – and I’m off to Number 10 next week to present the Ecobond concept – no really I am…

It seems that we’ve created a way to speed up the rate at which we can build green energy projects (that the UK so badly needs). Good job too since we have about 150MW in the planning system now and another 100MW goes in this year.

It’s a very exciting outcome and opens the way to a big increase in our work.

Ecobonds are set to become a permanent part of what we do – we now have a financial product to offer with a very Eco outcome, alongside energy.

Ecobond Two is in planning and expected launch end of this summer in readiness to fund our build plans for 2012.

Viva the Financial Revolution…….

I’ve been meaning to post something before now, but the last few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind. Here’s a quick heads up, some stuff you might know already from the news, some you probably won’t.

The car arrived in Stroud nearly three weeks ago now (Tuesday the 28th Oct) looking simply awesome. It was the first time I’d seen it in it’s finished form, complete with grey and black union jack paint job and all sorts of other bits and pieces – it really is transformed from the car that was here in the summer of 09 – for a few months.

The day after the car arrived I took the Sunday Times out for a spin. They loved it and published a piece the following Sunday. I haven’t put a link here, because you have to pay to look at it (I guess Murdoch needs the cash to fight the evil BBC).

The Friday of that same week I went for a spin with Robert Llewellyn. That was a bit scary truth be told – never knew he had such a heavy right foot… . Actually, what made it (more) scary was that each time he hit the throttle hard, or came off it, the car twitched, we had a bit of torque steer going on (which was unusual). This turned out to be an early symptom of a problem that would show itself later. Robert made a short video of our spin, which actually was a hoot – you can see that here.

The following Monday (after the Sunday Times piece) I went for a spin with a guy from the Press Association and the torque steer ‘twitch’ under the big right foot of Bobby L, turned into a permanent pull to the right under more moderate acceleration – the problem was developing. I thought it probably something to do with the motor controllers and made a mental note for the engineers to rectify when they next have the car.

And then the next day (fatefully) I went for spin and shot some video with John Vidal from the Guardian. John wrote this piece which appeared in the Guardian the following Friday. And he posted this video on their website.

As you’ll see (or you may know already) the Nemesis broke down……..!

We were on our way to our local windmill to take the final shots of the day, and as we crossed a mini roundabout we just lost drive completely. Had to get out and push, I think he kept filming for a while, in true professional style……

And bless him, he said he wouldn’t use the breakdown as part of the story, didn’t feel the need. I thought that was quite lovely. But the temptation was obviously too much, as you can see or read in the G – it became part of the story.

That wasn’t really a surprise, it was a bit disappointing, but it was understandable. What was a surprise was the stuff that was actually made up – the claim that the Nemesis is known as the ‘Beast of Stroud’, for example – it certainly isn’t, and the first I heard about it was in the Guardian. I think that’s stretching journalistic licence a bit too far.

Anyway, one of our engineers dropped everything to blat to Stroud and take a look (Thanks Bob). The problem was with a small 12 volt battery that drives the motor contactors (the electro mechanical bits that pass the big currents to the motors) – it had gone flat.

Turns out that the diode used the charge the 12v from the main 400v traction battery, had blown. The component was well within design specs, so we suspect a fault in the diode itself – we’ll see. The falling voltage in the 12v battery caused the motor contactors to behave erratically – that’s the working theory. So far it’s holding.

With the problem solved we were off the next day (Thursday) to London for a launch party for the car and for our Ecobonds (I’ll post about ecobonds later, promise).

The party was fab. Probably the best bit for me was that Damon Hill turned up. Here’s a picture.

The next day we were off to Brighton to get ready for the RAC Eco rally, which started the following day (Saturday). The rally ran from Brighton to London, the day before the historic event that runs the other way round. It was fun.

The car park of our hotel was like a spaghetti junction of cables and junction boxes, as the fleet of cars re charged over night – at least in theory anyway. There were obviously some electrical load issues – the Nemesis left that car park after 12 hours of charging, with less in the batteries than we started with……. nice….

But no problem, we still had plenty. We all lined up along Brighton Sea Front and left, kind of race style, at 30 second intervals – somehow we managed to be car 63 of 64.

On approach to the start line an RAC guy came up to the car and said something like ‘can you spin the wheels or something all these Teslas are being really boring’. The wheels won’t actually spin (something we’re looking into, we think there’s some very conservative torque control going on) – but I told him I could ‘boot it’.

And boot it I did. Not too madly, since the start was arranged with a bottleneck of people just in front of it. Short phone video here for your amusement.

And with that we were off to London, my least favourite place in the country to drive to – not sure what I was thinking when I agreed to this.

Before long we found ourselves in the most amusing and frustrating convoy of eco cars. All competing to use the least energy on the drive, which is fine in theory. But in practice it meant these guys would do 30 mph on the flat (in a 60) and when they hit a hill they were doing 20 (not wanting to use the throttle). It was funny to start with but that wore off.

We even saw drivers wiping the inside of their windscreens, because they wouldn’t use their screen demist (we assumed). We had no such problems, the air inside the Nemesis was the same as the air outside (v cold)….

We saw our chance on a long straight and blew off a convoy of eco cars – blimey the Nemesis can accelerate, I was well off the throttle before we reached the lead car…….

Although I can see why the RAC set this event up based on a challenge of efficiency (I think the petrol based cars had to use less than one gallon for example) – I actually think this is the anti message – Eco cars that are not fast or fun, (and if you meet one on the road it’ll be a pain in the arse) but they are economical – it’s the worst possible message, just re enforces the stereotype.

My suggestion for next year would be a balanced approach that requires some semblance of normal road speed and economy – much more of a challenge.

Anyway we got through some hideous traffic and made our way to Regent Street for the line up. And we were mobbed. The Nemesis kind of stole the show. That was fab.

So here we are three weeks later. I just charged the car last night and it was truly plug and play – no laptops needed – just pulled the old three pin plug out of the flap at the back, and that was it – chuffed about that…..

We’re still waiting for the fast charger though, it’s two months overdue now. But we’ve been busy with CAD and have ‘packaged’ the fast charger to fit in the boot – so that all we’ll need for a super fast charge, is a three phase supply. We’ll have no hardware compatibility issues.

After we get the next few weeks of publicity out of the way we’ll draw up plans for the speed record run and for the endurance run – Land’s End to John O Groats, which we’re going to aim to do in less than one day (less than 24hours). That should be a hoot. More on all of that later.

Cheers.

Without an obvious reason, like lightning for example, we were stumped for a few weeks and into that vacuum stepped a number of ideas as to probable cause. And the story grew from there, and flew round the world.

We promised we’d publish the final Health & Safety report as soon as we got it, and this has taken quite an incredible length of time to get – we got it last week. So here it is.

It doesn’t contain any mention of Aliens, Noodle Monsters or Flying Cows, but it does mention ‘classical fatigue breakage loss profile’ quite a lot. It seems to have basically come down to a manufacturing/tolerance issue – or a gap (between the blade flange and blade adapter – where the blade meets the hub). This gap put extra pressure on certain bolts (that hold the blade on), and eventually they broke.

Our best guess is that the blade that fell off, hit another one on the way down – leaving one whole blade on the turbine, one broken and one on the floor (worse for wear). The surviving blade is now on display at the Ecotech Centre in Swaffham (Norfolk) if anyone wants to see it, or run a Geiger counter over it or something….

The speculation was actually great fun, but the fun is over – this report states categorically that:

“The public initial reports and remarks concerning an extraneous cause by third parties e.g. flying objects are already and definitely excluded.”

Sad but true. Unless you think it’s a cover up of course…..

All the other turbines were checked – no gaps found, or loose bolts. This appears to have been a one off. Certainly it hadn’t happened before and hasn’t since.

So not much more to add really, but there’s plenty of detail in the report if you fancy it.

Final report – one page summary (PDF 32KB)
Final Report – full (PDF 2.6MB
Final Report – amendment (PDF 3.9MB)

^{Video production: TWA Productions}

A day at Bruntingthorpe

Two weeks ago now we took the Nemesis to Bruntingthorpe, for it’s first real track day.

We had two purposes, to test safety followed by speed.

The safety aspect was about the stability of the car in the event that one of the motors or belts suddenly quit – having separate rear drives means we have the potential for some considerable torque steer in the wrong circumstances.

So our test pilot took the car down the track at increasing speeds, while the co pilot threw a switch – to disable one motor. The car has a system that responds to the loss of drive on one wheel, we needed to know if it was responding fast enough.

The results were good. In a straight line the impact of losing one motor, even at speeds well in excess of 100mph, was very slight (on the steering).

Later in the day we went on to try the same thing driving hard round bends, and eventually we found the limit and spun the car – but the circumstances it took to pull this off were a long way from real road conditions.

Before that though (while we still had plenty of battery) we did some speed tests…….

Results as follows –

Not bad for our first real test. We reckon the motors are spinning about 10% less fast than they could and we think there’s some torque limit applied by software – because we just can’t spin the wheels…..

We’re looking at both of these and confident there’s quite a bit more in the car yet. Top end and 0 to 100.

While we do that, the car is finally off to the paint shop, we’re packaging a fast charger to fit in the boot (for some distance work) and getting ready to launch on the road in October.

So this is the penultimate episode, our next one should take us right up to the launch.

Finally we’re almost there. It’s a good place to be.

Cheers.

PS – In what must be a sign of the times – there were more EVs and Hybrids on test the day we were at Bruntingthorpe than there were conventional ones. Roll on the day.

So, one night, I was happily drinking my beer and tending to my inbox of endless boring emails that had be answered but were of no real consequence, when Lester, my landsailing buddy texted me a link to fasterthanthewind.org. Lester knows a lot, and if he says this needs my attention, then it gets it. I am not sure if it was how many beers I had had, or simply the inane nature of the quest, but I laughed enough to email all my friends to share the absurdity of their mission. My heart is split between belittling idiots, and saluting eccentrics, and this downwind quest lay somewhere in the middle. These loonies were pursuing a pointless goal, doomed to failure, but there was some genuine merit in the myth and their enthusiasm.

I dismissed it as utterly impossible. Travelling through zero apparent wind, with no stored power? Impossible. Why would you even attempt it? (Though I’m no stranger to that question myself!) But had I been asked to bet at that moment, I would have just lost a lot of money.

A few months later I actually met the idiots in question and, to my surprise and concern we not only have a few mutual friends, but they seemed to be rather technically credible. But, everyone makes mistakes, and I let them off as decent people with a blinkered view of fundamentally flawed engineering….

A few months later they were claiming success and if it was not for another great friend, Bob Dill, advising that they were actually correct, I would have discarded their claim as an April fool. I thought about the possibility that I was wrong, and then considered that as Bob was getting on a bit and had a bit of a shake with his stopwatch finger, maybe it was he who was mistaken. There was, however, a growing momentum of technical people (who should have known better), saying that these idiots have actually proven that it is possible to travel faster than the wind going directly down wind.

Not content, I had to witness this myself. When I heard it was on for the official record at El Mirage, I jumped on a plane and went to check it out.

The video speaks for itself. These guys are not idiots, but sincere, genuine, technical people who took a myth and made it real. It works. It starts from rest, trundles to true wind speed, then powers to a multiple of about 3 times the true wind speed. Bob will confirm the final number I am sure.

To all fellow skeptics, start baking that humble pie, or eat your hat. Your choice

Here’s a video Richard shot on the day he visited.

Check out the Faster Than the Wind site for more info.

ETA: Just in case you are wondering at the strange tone in Richard’s post (and references to ‘idiots’ and such) -- this story has a lot of history, so Richard is referencing the often heated debates about whether this DDWFTTW idea is actually possible or not. As Wired magazines puts it “The concept known as DWFTTW can cause world-renowned physicists to throw their Nobel Prizes in fits of rage.”

You can check out some of those lengthy & heated discussions in the links below:

http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/propulsion/ddwfttw-directly-downwind-faster-than-wind-25527.html
http://forum.mythbustersfanclub.com/index.php/topic,12948.0.html
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=128483

^{Video production: TWA Productions}

We’re getting there….

There was a time when I thought we’d make this car in 12 episodes (actually there was a time when I thought we’d make it in 6)…

But here we are, episode 12 of 6, and I think we’re still a couple of episodes away from completion.

Latest news is that the BMS and the ECUs are both now fitted and the car is back in Norfolk. All that’s left is the pre track and road shakedown testing.

We’re looking mainly at battery temperatures throughout the ‘stack’ to make sure that under heavy load it stays consistent (across the stack) and within the operating range. For me battery temperature and the attendant risk of thermal run away is probably the big risk in the whole car.

But so far so very good.

We’re also going to simulate the loss of one motor at high speed (on a very long straight road) to see if the software can cut the power to the other one (we have one on each rear wheel) fast enough to avoid torque steer and the loss of control that could come with that. This is a very important test.

In more news we’ve finally found a fast charger. It’s been incredibly hard to do so.

But it’s on order now.

I’m hoping to take the car on the Brighton to London Eco rally on the 7th of July. Followed rapidly (I hope) by the track testing (which should be fun) and then the Nemesis should be ‘on the road’.

Then we’ll look at the land speed record….

Hope you enjoy the latest episode and I hope there won’t be too many more….

Cheers.

ETA: This video is also available on Youtube

OK you could have blinked and missed it – but in a Groundhog Day moment, Green Britain Day happened again – yesterday. Although ‘happened’ might be a bit of a euphemism for something that ever so didn’t (happen).

Guessing that response might be poor, we thought we’d help EDF out. So we asked b3ta (a satirical website) to launch an ‘Image Challenge’ – a challenge to produce some alternative creative concepts for EDF’s Green Britain Day.

And what a hoot that turned out to be. We got an awesome response (OK some are a little rude, OK maybe more than a little).

But on the whole – really, very funny.

Here’s a few of our favourites:

You can see the whole set here. It’s well worth checking out, especially if you need a smile…

We also issued a joint press release yesterday with Greenpeace, to try and highlight the hypocrisy of it all (GB day that is) – you can find that here.

Behind the scenes our fight with EDF over the ‘green flag’ they ‘borrowed’ rumbles on. They’ve opposed the trademark for our green flag, claiming that it is not distinctive enough to be a trademark. And at the same time they’ve applied to trademark ‘their own’ green flag – not sure how that works, must be a modern form of ‘double think’. This all comes to a head at a hearing in a few weeks time.

At stake, incredibly, is which one of us gets to use the ‘green flag’ – the (Green British) company that came up with the idea or the (French Nuclear) company that ‘adopted’ it. I’m amazed that it should even be a question or a possibility – but it is.

With astonishing cheek, even for them, EDF tried to trademark the words ‘Green Britain’ – we’ve seen that one off already. But can you imagine a French Nuclear company wanting (or getting) exclusive use of the words Green Britain…..

Of course we’re not against the idea of a Green Britain. We just think it’s a serious subject that deserves to be more than a one day a year CSR jolly from one of the world ‘s biggest polluters. There’s enough cynicism in the world over green initiatives already without fuelling the fire with ridiculous stunts like this. That’s our objection. That and the flag ‘borrowing’ of course.

Anyway, we’re declaring today to be Green France Day. After all one hollow gesture surely deserves another.

Our message to EDF is this:

We Brits can def do more to be green and we’re up for it (I think most of us are).

But you should start closer to home when it comes to greening up.

It’s not like you don’t have plenty to aim at: Is it 29 million tonnes of CO2 you produce in Britain each year? Maybe you could start there…. Any chance?

And maybe you’d like to support our Green France Day…?

Come on it could be fun…

Cheers.

Only slight bummer is that it’s planning permission for a site we don’t own – not yet anyway.

The site is on the way into Stroud (where we’re based) and it’s known as Tricorn House. It’s an ugly brute of a building that’s stood empty and derelict for a decade or so. Actually in architectural terms it’s style is described as ‘Brutalist‘.

Have a wander round (Streetview may take a few seconds to load):

View Larger Map

It belongs to an offshore property developer and he’s been unwilling to sell it or do anything with it himself for a long time now.

So last summer, working with our local council, we tried to Compulsory Purchase it and we fought a public enquiry over that. And we lost. The main reason being that the inspector thought we should have planning permission – to make our scheme more certain. It was an odd decision to say the least. But, unwilling to take no for an answer, as is our way – a few weeks ago we submitted for planning and we got our scheme consented today. That’s an important step.

We’re hoping to be back in the Compulsory Purchase process with the council in a few weeks time.

But what about the building we plan to build?

That’s where it gets exciting. We’ll have to start from scratch. Flatten the site (even with the best eco will in the world it really is beyond redemption) and build from first principles. Maximising the south facing side for passive solar heating (and maybe a little PV) while maximising insulation and minimising windows on the cold sunless north side. Using the height of the building to create air flow for ‘passive air con’ aided by cooling from underground water sources – and maximum use of natural light through translucent walls. We’ll have rainwater harvesting (it’s the moat running round the site) and grey water recycling. And living walls – walls that change colour with the seasons. And more.

Check out the images here, it is an amazing looking place.

The idea is to create a building for say 250 people, that will be as near to Zero carbon in its operation as we can make it. A building that’s inspirational to look at and work in.

The site itself is walking distance from the town centre, right on the major bus routes of Stroud, next to the cycle path and the canal – we may even get to run electric water taxis to town and back. So for getting to work with minimum carbon, it’s ideal.

That’s it – we’re a step further down the road today towards the realisation of a pretty ambitious project. All going well we could own the site by the end of this year and be doing some demolition in early 2011.

We need a name for it though, not sure Tricorn House or New Tricorn House will cut it. Open to suggestions as ever.

Cheers.

Meanwhile, on the car front:

The new lightweight rear end and rear diffusers are both fitted and fully functional.

The rear end is now stiffer, lighter and much easier to get on and off. Also we’ve got the new rear lights installed and wiring complete now as you can see from the picture. The back end of this car is def its best side.

The diffuser (the bit that wraps under the car at the back, with the number plate on) has its twin flaps, either side of the number plate, one for normal and one for fast charge connections.

Our guys have been working on something dubbed ‘the Lobster Claw’ which is a cable retract mechanism. Looks rather cool and is about 90% complete. Basically it allows you to pull a three pin plug (or whatever connection we choose) from the back of the car, pull out as much or as little cable as you need, plug in and when you’re done, snatch to retract – like a Hoover (or should I say Dyson these days).

That may sound easier than it is. The tricky bit is to have a cable that isn’t coiled around a drum, because that would get too hot if you left it partially coiled and ran big a current through it. With a drum approach you’d have to pull all the cable out whether you needed it or not.

So with all this work complete the car left Norfolk yesterday headed back up North for it’s final bits of electronic kit – the VCS or ECUs depending on who you talk to. Either way it’s the bit that connects the throttle pedal, the batteries, the BMS and the motors.

It’s a couple of weeks to fit and then a couple of weeks of shakedown testing and some road testing for the BMS at the same time.

Then the car is coming back to Norfolk for its full on track and road testing, followed by the paint job and that’s it. Several weeks later than I hoped for again, but we are getting there, actually making big strides in what has def turned out to be the hardest part of the whole project – the electronics.

Meanwhile we’re planning some ‘events’.

First is likely to be a crack at the UK land speed record for an EV, for that we’ll need to do 140 mph – should be within the ability of this car. The current record is held by Don Wales, grandson of the great Donald Campbell. Don came up to see me a few months ago and offered to help us with the record attempt, which is really cool of him – then he told me if we do get the record we might not hold it very long as he’s planning another run end of this summer – so it’s on…..

Next event on the drawing board is a run from John o’ Groats to Land’s End, in less than 24 hours if we can. Co-conspirator for this one is Robert Llewellyn (I think he’ll always be Kryton to me… ). Our plan, roughly, is to charge at windfarms and other renewable generators as and where we can, but otherwise use ‘ecotricity’ supplied through the grid and blat down from John o’ Groats to LE just as fast as we can in a non stop (other than to charge) run. We’ll need a fast charger for this of course – that’s currently on our shopping list and proving to be quite tricky.

The aim of this one is to tackle the ‘range anxiety’ that currently exists with EVs. This is a classic British endurance run, no EV has tackled it yet (as far as I know) and it should open some eyes, and minds, we hope.

So that’s it – car a few more weeks away from completion and serious testing (and another video update) – and a couple of record attempts on the drawing board.

Cheers.

Our first ‘Green Gas’ customers are with us now. Me included I’m pleased to say.

While we shake things down we’re limiting the sign up rate to a few hundred a week. If you want to get in the queue to be among the first you can do that here.

The response from Ecotricity customers and non customers, to this idea, has been fantastic.

The response from British Gas has been something else. Odd to say the least.

Just before Xmas we had a series of legal threats from them, about one a week for three weeks in fact.

The first alleged that we were ‘pretending’ to be British Gas. They didn’t like our tongue in cheek “Real British Gas” logo it seems – we’ve tweaked it a bit here to make them feel better. It’s hard to take that seriously – we are so not pretending to be British Gas. Why on earth would we? It was a joke guys.

About a week later we got another legal threat, this time dear old BG claimed we were misleading people by offering Green Gas, when in fact it wasn’t (green). Something we think we’ve been pretty clear about.

As part of this they complained our web site offered ‘free gas’. Well I don’t know what gas they might have been breathing down there in BG’s legal bunker, but there’s no such thing on our web site. Anyway, they threatened to refer us to Trading Standards, that would have been funny – we ignored them, nothing happened.

Then, talk about buses, about a week later we get another legal threat from BG. This time they’re upset because we’re about to publish 2009′s WhichGreen statistics – the ones that show how much each electricity company in the UK spent, in 2009 – building new renewables.

BG didn’t like the number we had for them, which is zero (funnily enough they have a green tariff called Zero – is this what it means… ).

I won’t get into the details of that here as we’ll publish WhichGreen 2009 figures shortly.

So, it seems we’ve miffed BG by announcing our Green Gas plans, they’ve made that pretty clear to us. This string of legal threats doesn’t do them any credit IMO, but maybe that’s just how the Big Six roll.

Meanwhile on the real Green Gas front, we’re moving ahead with plans to build a pilot project. It’s actually fascinating stuff (or maybe I’m sad… ) – looking at volumes of waste required, where to get it, the technology, land requirement, planning issues and the number of homes we might be able to supply Green Gas to, from each ‘GasMill’.

More on this later.

Cheers.

To most people that may have been interesting but not such a big deal. To anybody close to this issue it’s something altogether different.

The article runs under the headline:

Energy firm EDF abandons 2012 Olympics turbine due to ‘lack of wind’

The article doesn’t quote EDF directly but it confidently says:

“French-owned EDF Energy are not bidding to run the 393ft-tall turbine on the Games site as they were concerned about a lack of wind.

The company, London’s largest electricity supplier, said it would not be able to sell enough wind energy from the 2012 Olympic site into the national grid in future years to justify the turbine’s £2 million start-up costs.

This is an Olympic sized ‘Pork Pie’.

EDF actually failed to win the tender to build a Wind Turbine to power the Olympic games (London 2012) – about one whole year ago…!

Why on earth would they claim now that they’ve decided to walk away – from a project that had walked away from them a whole year ago?

Best guess is that EDF got wind (no pun intended, honestly) that an announcement on this project is imminent, and it looked a bit embarrassing for them. London’s largest energy supplier, big games sponsor, (and as we know a very green company… ) can’t win a single turbine contract to power the Games, on their home turf… Yep I can see how that might look.

To me, this story (in the ES) is damage limitation, a cynical attempt to get ‘a version’ out first – only trouble is this ‘version’ is fake, it’s a lie.

Did EDF plant this story or did the Evening Standard forget ‘journalistic standards’ (like having a credible source…) in their rush for a story. I know where my money goes…

It’s a bit worrying though when the company that owns the UK’s nuclear industry appears to play so fast and loose with the truth. It’s not like the nuclear industry has a big reputation for honesty (on safety issues) already.

Olympic Pork Pies are one thing, but……

Cheers.

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.

Just a quick heads-up – Dale is just about to take part in this week’s Guardian Environment ‘You ask, they answer’ Q&A session – could be interesting… If any of you fancy chipping in your 2 penneth, dive on in – the water’s lovely!

EDITED TO ADD: The Q&A session is now closed now but it’s still worth reading.

I couldn’t say much last week except we had something I thought was pretty exciting to unveil in a few days time.  Well here it is now.

Today we’re launching Green Gas.

What’s it all about?

For a number of years we’ve been meaning to offer gas to our customers, partly because so many people use it (it’s a matter of pragmatism) and partly because we thought our customers would rather pay their gas bills to Ecotricity – and see us use that revenue to bring about some environmental gain – than pay the Big Six.

We also thought that it would give us an opportunity to engage our customers in a debate about gas and our need to wean ourselves off it – since it’s running out soon enough.

We thought we’d use the revenue to plant trees or plant more windmills, for a green outcome – the one thing we definitely were not going to do though was to ‘carbon offset’.

Up until recently we’d had bigger issues to wrestle with on the electricity front – basically getting the systems in place to ensure good accurate billing on time and so on – getting it right in electricity, before seriously looking to add gas.

We’ve been running those new systems now for over a year and we’ve achieved an enormous transformation in all areas.

And so we thought it time to look into gas once more.  And we found something very exciting had become possible – the production of gas from renewable sources and its injection into the gas grid.  Nobody is doing it in the UK yet, but it has started in other parts of the world – to be clear I mean the grid injection part – making biogas is not so new of course.

It’s now possible to offer actual Green Gas – renewable gas.  Not just gas with some kind of bolt on outcome.

And it fits perfectly with our green electricity model – we can take gas bills and turn them into Gasmills.  As we do electricity bills into Windmills.

And that’s our plan, to start supplying gas to our customers and to invest the revenue from those bills into the building of Gasmills – changing our fuel mix over time (from Brown to Green) as we do with electricity.

We’ll publish an annual Fuel Mix Disclosure for our gas (known in the industry as FMD), there’s no legislation for that, it just makes sense.

This is the UK’s first Green Gas initiative (it won’t be the last though – we’re sure of that)

And truly Eco Dual Fuel has arrived.

There’s an exciting big picture to all of this.

The UK has the potential to make 50% of it’s own gas needs from this process – Anaerobic Digestion (AD).   We could aim to provide the other 50% through demand reduction, energy efficiency measures and the use of renewable heat sources like solar thermal.  And that gives us the opportunity for, and the vision of, a Britain that’s Gas Independent in the future.

The North Sea supplies run out in about 20 years, we already import 50% or so of our gas from some pretty unstable parts of the world – the answer is to make our own.

We’re going to throw our weight into this.

Some stats if you’re interested.

Making 50% of the UK’s gas from AD would take about 1200 large Gasmills and an investment of about £35 Billion.

For Ecotricity to achieve a 50% FMD in self made green gas, as we have in green electricity – would take an investment of about £50 Million.

And spookily enough that’s what we’ve spent so far, getting to (almost) 50% self built green electricity – about £50 Million.

I’m truly, massively excited about the prospects for this, it’s a real viable solution to a problem that otherwise just didn’t seem to have one.

Ecotricity is in the process of evolving into a green energy company (from a green electricity company) – with gas and electricity both going from brown to green.

It feels like we’ve been a one legged football player, up until now.  We had half the moves.  Now we have the whole.

Oh, nearly forgot to mention, we’re going to price match dear old British Gas and match their dual fuel discount.  Continuing our philosophy of ‘green for the price of brown’.

If you’re interested in having Green Gas – you can register for more information over on the Ecotricity site. There’s also a press release here and an Observer article here.

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.

The ASA said:

” ..we considered that consumers were unlikely to infer from the ads that EDF was a ‘green’ company, we concluded that the ads were unlikely to mislead.”

“..we considered that consumers were unlikely to infer that EDF Energy was a British company. We therefore concluded that the ads were unlikely to mislead.”

EDF had this to say:

“EDF Energy welcomes the decision by the Advertising Standards Authority regarding our Green Britain Day and Team Green Britain advertising, in which neither challenge has been upheld by the authority… We are committed to leading the energy change to bring about a low carbon future and we have led the way among energy companies in making long-term commitments to the environment and to sustainability… EDF Energy is the UK’s largest generator of low carbon electricity.”

Dale had this to say in response:

“To most people a green union jack represents something or someone Green and British. And to most people EDF are neither, being Nuclear and French. And however many sugar coated low carbon blandishments EDF comes out with the truth is in the numbers – they are the world’s biggest nuclear waste polluter, one of it’s biggest fossil fuel polluters and their contribution to new renewable capacity and to green issues in the UK is truly pitiful.

The ASA offer no evidence to back their judgement, which is actually just an opinion dressed up – and one that ignores the hundreds of people who wrote to it to complain the ad was misleading. It makes the ASA look rather ridiculous, but then again they are an advertising industry funded body, not an independent watchdog – should we expect any better?

The funny part is that the ASA have in effect said, in their opinion – ‘nobody in their right mind would believe that EDF are green or British’

OK I paraphrase just a little, or maybe I’m inferring?…

Either way if the ASA are right it’s actually a bitter sweet day for EDF – who’ve poured tens of millions into this – dodging the ASA bullet but at what cost to their ‘green credentials’ ?

How many windmills could they have built instead…

Cheers.”

There’s lots of campaigns focussed on it right now, lots of people trying to show politicians that this is what we all want. And I hope they succeed, I think they probably already have actually. Copenhagen is all over the news and it’s clear that there’s real public pressure for a deal. That’s about the best a campaign can hope for. Now it’s up to the delegates. At least this time the US isn’t being led by an oil man/half wit.

I went to the UN conference in Kyoto, the one that put climate change on the map. A friend of mine got hold of some passes and we just turned up with no idea what to expect. Our plan was to talk anyone that would listen about the role that wind energy has to play in fighting climate change. The message went down well.

Back then hardly anyone had heard of the concept of Climate Change and even fewer people held it to be true. It was more the territory of scientists and ‘hippies’.

Actually, even back then, almost 2,000 of the world’s top scientists (the IPCC) had told the world’s political leaders ‘There is only one responsible choice – to act now.’

And Kyoto was a success. Not because the targets agreed were particularly ambitious but because targets were set at all. It was and still is an important moment in human history. The world had set its first carbon targets.

Much has changed since then. Most people today have heard of climate change and more importantly accept that we urgently need to do something about it. It’s as rarely out of the news these days as it used to be rarely in the news a decade ago.

The Kyoto accord played a vital part in this transformation, many people are hoping that a successor to Kyoto will emerge from Copenhagen. I hope so too.

But Kyoto targets have not been met. So what use are another set of targets? We actually need deeds now not words. Targets are only a small part of the story, the easy part – hitting them will take real commitment.

I’ve decided not to go to Copenhagen, partly because I don’t think I can make much of a difference and can use the time better back here. But also partly because a couple of weeks ago I met somebody here in Stroud that was trying to get there and who, I think, has an important role to play. I’ve decided to help this person get there.

I’d like to introduce her here – her name is Isabelle and she’s been chosen from thousands of applicants to be a part of the UK youth delegation at the talks – the delegation will take part and have the chance to speak. And their voice should be heard. Too often we see people with 10 or 20 years left to live opposing windmills and other initiatives that are essential to the hopes of young people today – to have any kind of decent life. Young people have more skin in this game than the people in power today and those that wield influence at planning – they’ll pick up the tab for our failure. That’s why I think their voice is important.

You’ll be able to follow Isabelle’s progress at the talks here, she’s going to try and find the time to blog for us, it should be a fascinating insight.

With no more ado, here’s Isabelle’s first guest post –

Cheers.

The road to Copenhagen

After nearly 20 years of endless conferences, discussions, and empty promises to cut emissions we have finally run out of time. This December when the world meets in Copenhagen it will be our last chance to agree an effective global deal. It has to be now because we won’t get another shot.

Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft

My name is Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft and I’m from Stroud. I am one of 23 young people travelling to the Copenhagen Climate Conference 2009 this December as part of the UK Youth Delegation, on behalf of the UK Youth Climate Coalition.

Being on the delegation is a big commitment. So why am I prepared to put so much of my time and energy into this? Because climate change isn’t about polar bears, it’s about everyone I know and care for; my friends, my family and our future. As a young person I cannot escape climate change. I can choose to bury my head in the sand and ignore the terrifying world I will have to face later. Or I can stand up and be counted. I can start now, while we still have time, and help to build the better future that I want to see.

In September the UK Youth Delegation met with some of the UK’s core team of UN negotiators at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). They spoke about how mass public pressure on climate change is the only thing that will give them the mandate to push for a strong enough deal at Copenhagen.

The UK has done some good talking on climate change; on paper it has one of the strongest climate change policies on the world. But the action the UK has actually taken so far amounts to rearranging deckchairs on Titanic.

There’s a great deal of passion out there but the most vocal seem to be those who oppose the change we so desperately need – the anti-wind lobby is a perfect example. People need to look at a bigger picture than the view they see from their kitchen window. I am 18 and in 2050 I will be 59. I want the chance to live my life in a world with a safe and stable climate, where there is enough food and water to go around. Is that too much to ask?

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.