Are you, like me, noticing more and more electric vehicles on the roads in the UK? I ended up parking my Renault Zoe next to another one the other day, because that's where there was a space. (picture below).
Excellent masterclass on 9th July, hosted by Oxford City Council - Mai Jarvis (pictured above with Keith Budden from Cenex) and Elizabeth Bohun. Lots of information available about the future technologies coming along for cars and larger vehicles, and those that are here now. Smart grid and local renewable energy generation was seen as an integral part of building a low carbon local economy and creating cities with clean air and less congestion.
Are you, like me, noticing more and more electric vehicles on the roads in the UK? I ended up parking my Renault Zoe next to another one the other day, because that's where there was a space. (picture below).
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Well, it's here at last. My Renault Zoe. My EV. Fantastic to drive - the most brilliant thing about it is it looks, feels and drives like a "normal" car. Now for the travelog bit:
Planetary CFO's log. left home on full charge. Although my day's round trip should be well within the range without recharging, I wanted to test out some charging stations en-route. My first stop was AVDC in Aylesbury. Arrived about 07:40 but found that both charging points were in use by AVDC's own fleet vehicles (on slow charge - 3 pin plug). Before I realised I couldn't charge on a point where someone was already connected (even with an apparently available type 2 socket) , I also discovered that, because of the particular location and design of the bars on a protection railing around the charge point, it was very difficult to put my type 2 connector into the available socket. So, a couple of things to frustrate the EV user. Come on AVDC, you can do better than this. I suggest you: 1) Install a private charging point (or two) for your own fleet vehicles, so that the public charging points are truly for public use, and 2) redesign and modify the charging point protection barriers. Thank you Next stop was Welcome Break Services, junction of M40 and A40. Of the three charging points, it took me a little while, and some reparking, to work out that there was only one point I could use with my vehicle, but on the one bollard there were two type 2 connectors, and two car parking spaces next to it - can two EV users therefore charge on type 2 at the same time from the same bollard? Anyway, after that, with swipe of my Ecotricity card and simple instruction on the charge point's display, I plugged my type 2 lead in at the point and on my car and hey-presto, the car and the charge point did their thing. Took about 20 mins to charge from 75% to 97%. I did learn that, while the car is charging, there are things you can't do, like wind down the electronic windows or run the aircon or press the start button to get either of those going. I tried it early on and the charging stopped, so I had to go back to the beginning, disconnect as if about to drive away, then reswipe, reconnect etc. But, overall, it worked fine, and I could at least have the radio on while charging and play with the R-link functions including satnav settings etc. Next stop was Seacourt Park and Ride in Oxford. Only one EV parking space, between disabled places. Luckily, the space was free. I can see why there's only one space - only one charge point with a type 1 (3 pin) and a type 2 point on the same electronic 'bollard' as you might call them. Slightly frustrating that you have to swipe your card more than once - firstly to pull up type 1 connection authorisation on the screen, then (after a while) second swipe for type 2 authorisation. After that, plain sailing as with the previous stop. Went to work. When I got back, was back to full charge. Drove home. Plugged in at home for overnight charging from 75%, using granny cable because the home charging point being supplied free by British Gas hasn't been installed yet. I get the impression, from dealings with them by phone, that they are very busy. I take that as a good sign that there must be heavy demand. The Renault dealer also said that they're now taking orders for Zoes for delivery in October, whereas mine was delivered just over a month after being ordered. Distance travelled was about 70 miles in the day. Overall conclusion: Good driving. Feels like a normal car to drive. Really enjoying it. Worries: When there are more people like me, will the infrastructure providers lead with capacity ahead of demand, to avoid excessive probability of contention between EV drivers at the electric pumps, or will they wait for us users to have bad experiences, experience travel delays, get angry and complain bitterly before they act to catch up and install more charging points? The Decentralised Energy Forum yesterday in London (organised by Climate Action) was an excellent event. In my capacity as Treasurer of Low Carbon Hub, I was able to fly the flag for the transition to a low carbon decentralised energy system where community-owned renewable energy is a strong element. With my personal hat on, Martin Chilcott (MC at one point in the day) gave me an opportunity to express my frustrations at the potential (if not actual) conflicts between the UK Governmental energy policy priorities of security of supply, minimisation of bills to customers and enhancement of the environment (aka "Natural Capital"). In my humble opinion, there is too much emphasis currently being placed (in the UK and many other countries) on economic growth, and not enough on green growth. I could have been even more controversial and gone on to talk about steady-state economics, where green growth in some sectors would be allowed but degrowth in other sectors would be required in order to keep the whole system in sustainable equilibrium, but I had limited time on the microphone so tried to 'quit while I was ahead'. The best speaker of the day was Julia Groves from Trillion Fund - entertaining, witty, optimistic and inspirational. Like myself (with my former work in BP) she is, in some sense, 'poacher turned gamekeeper' because of her past life in British Airways. All I can say is that she's atoning for her past carbon-emission-sins in great style. Here are a couple of pics from the event. The first features Robert Rabinowitz from Pure Leapfrog. The second (apologies for blurriness) is Julia Groves (Trillion Fund), Malcolm Ball (Green Investment Bank) and Bill Edrich (Bristol City Council). More information (including slides from the presentations) should be available soon at the Climate Action webpage linked here.
I attended a gathering of the Oxfordshire Green Construction Network earlier this week in Bicester. The network's strapline is "Building a Greener Tomorrow - Today" and it does what it says on the tin. It's a network of members who are local businesses in Oxfordshire who all have an interest in the building sector and who want to see more sustainable building design and construction practices. More information will be made available on a website coming soon.
Some details of the gathering can be found via this link (opens in new window) In a Coursera course on Designing Cities, one of the lectures showed some emerging ideas about driverless vehicles and how city spaces could be restructured, without kerbs and other traditional separators between vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians. The artistic representations are visually pleasing, and the idea itself has some attractions. Carbon Brief have published the diagram above, which shows how the Carbon Price Floor, implemented in the UK from March 2013, is expected to provide an incentive to shift to a low-carbon primary energy industry. I think this is a great idea, as the effective price of carbon through the EU ETS has made Europe a laughing stock over the last couple of years when it comes to talking about effective actions for creating a low carbon economy and tackling climate change. The floor price is likely to lead to an effective price of carbon of £30 per tonne by 2020, £70 per tonne by 2030. Now, that's more like it! Here's a link to the original article. Apparently, the consumer group "Which" suggests scrapping the floor price, on the grounds that the measure is too variable in the short-term to incentivise shifts in investment patterns. However, I think it's exactly the sort of measure we need to be in place to overcome the many barriers to creating a low carbon economy. If' like Which, people think it is too variable, then the answer is to strengthen the measure, not scrap it as Which suggests. Carbon Brief have also published in this linked article an excellent infographic (below) which sets out the expected net reduction in average household energy bills in 2020 caused by current policies, compared with the same future without those policies being in place. This is an effective counter to the often ill-informed "this will increase bills" objection to moving to a low carbon economy. Here's a link to the tool.
I've written a short paper attached here showing my use of the tool to explore the use of Solar PV, a technology I'm very involved in at the moment. I noticed these cars on a recent trip to Paris. They're rented out by "Libre Comme L'Air". Here's an article from Treehugger with more info. Several million miles travelled so far since their launch a year or two ago. Boris - your Boris Bikes in London are a good start but you're lagging behind the French when it comes to EVs! In this linked article in ClimateProgress, new designs of wind turbines are described that have some battery storage built into them to reduce the intermittency of their electrical output and enable their operators to sell premium-priced marginal supply to the grid. While, on the face of it, this seems like a good thing (eg if it substitutes for fossil fuel marginal supply such as gas-fired power), it is also potentially sub-optimal for the power system as a whole.
One of the advantages of a grid is that it can be used to transfer electrical energy around very efficiently and cost-effectively. There must be an optimally efficient way of storing energy for a district, region or for a whole country, taking into account the trade-offs between the size of the individual storage facilities and the distances travelled by the energy that is stored there and retrieved later. It is very unlikely that this mathematical optimal pattern, which one might call a 'network of temporary storage nodes', would consist of many small storage facilities at a myriad of wind turbine sites. It's much more likely that it would mirror something like the transport logistics networks for the major road, rail and sea freight businesses, (eg one such model is hub-and-spoke), which operate a relatively small number of large 'temporary storage facilities' (ie warehouses) in strategically placed locations with good access and which minimise typical distances to the places where the contents of the warehouses eventually get delivered to. If this sort of model was deployed for the energy network, the storage facilities could be designed (and located) with optimal efficiency of the whole delivery network in mind. It's quite possisble that a by-product of this sort of design would be a resolution of the intermittency challenge of some renewable energy sources. As a slight digression on this, there are many ways of designing an optimal network, but one intriguing possibility is to learn from the way nature does it. An example is the use of slime mould, as described in this article from 2010. Today, for the first time ever, when I arrived in Oxford, I saw an Electric Vehicle being recharged at a Park-and-Ride car park. "Yippee" I thought. But the next thought was - "hang on, if I had been driving an EV today instead of a petrol driven car, I wouldn't have been able to use that recharging point [there's only one in that car park] - I'd have had to go looking for another one in a different part of Oxford."
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About the BloggerI'm David Calver - an Accountant with a passion for sustainability. Categories
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