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How far can I go?

We are just getting our first experiences of novice users driving the b-bug (electric buggies) as part of the trial we are running this summer.

The first question everyone (inevitably) asks is "how far can I go?" and that is a remarkably difficult question to answer!

In the case of the b-bug, a marketing executive (if The Prospectory included such beings) would tell you "oh, 25 miles for sure". A pessimistic engineer (having summed up your weight, the likely terrain on your chosen run and your probable driving style) might say "15 to be safe". Because with a battery-powered vehicle, it does "all depend".... To be fair, it's not simply an electric car problem, if you always drove your petrol car with only 2L in the tank, it would be very hard for anyone to tell you exactly how much further you could drive.

For the b-bug trial, we have signed up about 20 b-bug charge points in pubs, cafes, tourist attractions, etc across the Brecon Beacons National Park. These places welcome a weary b-bug and will happily plug you in for a 1-2 hour top up which will extend your range by..... um well, that's hard to say because batteries (I'm learning) take on charge at different rates depending on how empty they are (bit like people really). So, we estimate and tell people 4 miles/hr of charging maybe.

Then the problem gets worse - someone has topped up their battery for a "short while" and is now trying to figure out "so how far can I go NOW". It's not too bad if they plan to return exactly the same way as they came but even that's not true if the out journey was mostly downhill but drivers, unlike walkers or cyclists don't necessarily notice such facts! It's a bit like sailing out to sea with a pleasant offshore breeze and then turning and remembering that beating back to windward is much harder work and will take you a lot longer.

So being data hounding Prospectors, we've installed a Cycle Analyst in both b-bugs. This clever device displays every number you can imagine both as you drive along AND at rest - voltage, kWh, Wh/mile, Ampere hours and miles. I didn't even know what an Ampere hour was but now it's my main guide for how much power I might have left for my journey - I know if I've used up 30 Ah, then it's time to turn for home because the batteries can only produce about 60 Ah. It's become part of my everyday travelling vocabulary as have volts as the b-bug and I climb up a long, steep hill.

But the array of numbers seems more likely to bewilder rather than clarify the energy situation for our poor triallists. They weren't expecting to need an 'A' level in physics to get themselves home from a day out in Hay on Wye. Our best shot so far, is an empirical approach. We give them a graph (based on the 30 or more b-bug trips of all kinds we have done) and encourage them to check what the Cycle Analyst says the rest voltage is and read off the miles that has typically taken us (but notice the fact that the points on the graph are somewhat scattered!)

So, the trial IS an adventure and driving the b-bug is great fun. We have to hope that the holidaymakers taking part discover, like us, the thrill of the "epic" 20 mile journey and that they also share some of the fascination of how much energy is actually involved in moving our bodies and vehicles up and down the hilly lanes of the Brecon Beacons. With modern cars, we have no clue.

So, b-bug travel has something for everyone - the countryside lover, the explorer, the engineer, the physicist, the environmentalist or even (like me) the cognitive psychologist.

If you'd like to stay a few days in the Brecon Beacons and take part in the trial, then check out the details here.

Taking the brain on a new route

This summer we are running an experiment in the Brecon Beacons to encourage visitors to ‘do something different’. I borrow that phrase from Professor Ben Fletcher whose work has shown how simply 'doing something different’ can break ingrained habits and set up new thought pathways.

In our case, we hope to entice holidaymakers out of their cars to try travelling around the National Park in a funky, open-air, electric buggy or ‘b-bug’. Green activities are often worthy but rather dull but riding up and down the Welsh lanes in a b-bug with the wind in your hair is both exhilarating and fun.

Dragon Electric Vehicles has designed and built two b-bugs, Boris and Blodwen. They have a top speed of 30 mph and a range of 20-25 miles depending on the terrain and the weight they are carrying. Visitors will have a chance to pre-book a b-bug for 3-5 days with their holiday cottage or hotel room.

The b-bug experiment will explore some ‘green psychology’ questions….

Can we disrupt the car-centric mindset of the outdoor holidaymaker by giving them a fun experience using an alternative form of transport? Here in the National Park, we are fortunate that many of our visitors come here to walk, cycle or canoe, but our research shows they still average 14 miles by car each time they engage in one of those green activities.

Unfortunately, people think of walking and cycling purely as leisure activities and not as a car-alternative to get from a to b. Out of 400 visitor trips we recorded in the Brecon Beacons, only one involved cycling for a functional purpose (shopping) and 75% walkers and cyclists still hopped in the car to reach the local shops or pub only 1 mile away from where they were staying. Could using a b-bug break that automatic ‘hop in the car’ habit?

We are also interested in whether people could embrace the concept of a ‘not-car’ for short local journeys. Mainstream car manufacturers are seeking to develop electric cars which match the comfort, range and performance of a petrol or diesel car. Consequently, these cars are phenomenally expensive (as well as energy intensive) putting them well beyond the reach of the ordinary consumer.

The majority of journeys in Wales are less than 8 miles, could people be persuaded to do some proportion of these in a lightweight vehicle which was slower than a car, didn’t keep them dry but covered those local trips without physical effort and at a fraction of both price and energy consumption – 20 miles in a b-bug uses 3 kWh (roughly equivalent to 3 miles in a petrol car). We want to explore if people will happily make those kind of ‘not-car’ trade-offs.

Finally, driving any electric vehicle brings home the harsh realities of energy consumption. Powerful, modern cars hide the energy consumption involved in climbing hills, stopping and starting around town, driving fast and carrying passengers or heavy luggage. In contrast, driving an electric vehicle up a hill or calculating whether you have enough battery juice to get you back home changes the whole way you think about the energy involved every time you shift your body a couple of miles.

So, book a holiday cottage in the Brecon Beacons this summer and you can try a b-bug and return home with slightly different thought pathways!

The Future of Personal Travel

The Welsh Assembly Government has launched an initiative to try to make personal travel more sustainable, essentially by encouraging us to use our cars less for local travel. Deputy First Minister Ieuan Wyn Jones said:

“Personalised Travel Planning could become an important part of our transport system, challenging all of us to consider how we could benefit from alternative modes of travel other than the private car and contribute to greater accessibility, social inclusion and sustainability.”

The initiative is about finding ways to encourage more of us to walk, cycle, use public transport or share cars for local trips which tend to be no more than a few miles on average. Even here in rural Powys, the vast majority of our car journeys are under 8 miles and it is these short journeys on cold engines that offer the least efficient use of dwindling reserves of fossil fuel.

The sad fact is that most people regard walking and cycling as leisure activities. At other times, we have become used to moving around without physical effort, and short of having a personal chauffeur, the private car offers the most flexible solution in terms of source, destination, and timing, albeit an expensive and unsustainable one in terms of money and environment. The challenge for the government is to tempt us to take alternatives without coercion. They can do that by making sustainable alternatives more attractive, unsustainable alternatives less attractive, or a combination of the two.

The Welsh Government initiative will try to make sustainable local travel more attractive. It should give city-dwellers, those who have access to public transport, and those who live within a reasonable distance of most of their local destinations, a financially attractive alternative to the private car for local travel. But what’s likely to be offered will probably not be viewed by many as very attractive in other respects. If and when the fossil fuel does run out and/or we decide that burning more of it is going to be really hazardous, we will switch, reluctantly, to viable and more sustainable alternatives. But we may not see these as an improvement over what we have now.

The effortless alternatives to the private car are unattractive in three critical respects:

1. They tend not to start from where you are,
2. …they tend not to go to exactly where you want to go, and
3. …they don’t go (and come back) when you want to.

Since these requirements are likely to be unique to each traveller, it is tough for any shared transport system to deliver them. And to a very large extent, the widespread availability of private cars has created this situation as well as just benefiting from it. If we all had the good sense to live near a bus stop or railway station, and to work, shop, and entertain ourselves near a bus stop of railway station, we would only lose the convenience of travelling just when we wanted to. As it is, our private cars enable us to live miles away from anywhere we might take advantage of the economies of scale that a decent public transport system depends on.

So what’s to be done? If the car industry is to survive and prosper, it needs cars to offer a more sustainable solution to the local travel problem, while retaining as many of the benefits that today’s cars delivered. And that is where the electric car are supposed to help, but general purpose electric cars have a very difficult act to follow.

Electric cars are currently being set an almost impossible set of objectives which become more impossible year by year as conventional cars work on the apparent problem –delivering ever more efficient long range vehicles. To make a feeble first stab at replacing regular cars, electric cars are going to cost twice as much as conventional ones for less than half the “performance” as measured by car industry and the consumers it has educated. The only benefit of electric cars – if you ignore (as most consumers will) congestion charging, pollution, and noise – is that they are cheaper to run. And even then they are only cheaper to run than the most efficient conventional cars because of road and fuel tax they don’t pay. It is hard to see why a normal car customer would switch to buying a first generation electric car.

Everyone will wait for the day when improvements to battery technology and refuelling infrastructure enable electric cars to go as far and as fast as current ones, and to be refuelled in a couple of minutes. But although a few generations of electric car development will undoubtedly improve the performance, that day will never come – or certainly won’t come before the fossil fuel runs out. So although I have little doubt that in a hundred years or so (if we haven’t fried ourselves into extinction) we will be moving around in electrically powered vehicles, I am as positive as I can be that they won’t be moving long distances on battery power.

But having said all that, electric power can meet the local travel needs of most drivers today – the same problem that the Welsh Government is trying to address. For journeys up to about 30 miles round trip – 15 miles each way – it doesn’t make much difference how fast you go. And the battery power you need for a local bus speed trip of 15 miles can be replenished quickly enough for it not to inconvenience you. And the simplest electric vehicle that can deliver that in a reasonably weatherproof way can cost much less than a conventional car. It will satisfy most of your local travel needs as well as the auxiliary problem of transporting you to the nearest mass transit hub for longer journeys.

To start with, a vehicle like this will be a useful second car. You’d use it to go shopping, and to eat out. You’d be happy for your kids to use it, and happier to buy them one if you can afford it. Your “main” car would be used for longer trips, to carry more people, or more cargo. Over time, and for many people, a vehicle like this might become the only vehicle they buy for themselves, because it would fulfil all their local travel needs. They would be happy to rely on shared transport systems – either public bus, train or tram, or perhaps a shared car pool – for everything else.

And we’ll be able to experiment with this kind of “car” very soon. The Renault TWIZY, pictured above will launch in France in 2011, and the U.K. in 2012. It looks like fun, and although the price is rather vague at the moment, Renault intend it to be price competitive with a (high end) motor scooter. This could still be quite expensive, but less than a third of the true price of a “full feature” electric car and critically, competitive with entry level conventional cars. And if Renault find they have a winner here, it does not require any major break-throughs in battery technology let alone battery physics to drive that price down - industrial competition should be enough. The Twizy carries two people in “tandem” formation, so we won’t have to wait for a right hand drive version!

Now the Twizy is clearly not a car, so it hasn’t saddled itself with a specification that competes with today’s cars. There will no doubt be a sport version, but the standard model to be sold in France (where you don’t need a licence to drive it) should deliver a 40 to 60 mile round trip for two people at just less than 30mph. It will completely recharge itself in less than 3 hours, and because of the way batteries work, about half its capacity in less than an hour. That electricity will cost about a pound at today’s price.

If you can’t wait to try the Renault Twizy, you can sign up to try one of our b-bugs this summer in the Brecon Beacons. In exchange for your comments and assessment of the concept, you can have one for three days to see if something like this really could meet your local travel needs. The b-bug isn’t quite as weatherproof as the Twizy, but the ride should be more exhilarating!

Happiness in 2010

I am doing some research into sources of happiness in 2010 - it could be things you bought for yourself or were given or things you did or experienced.

If you have 5 minutes, please help by completing this online survey

I will explain the purpose of the study and publish the headline findings on this blog in due course.

Psychological Dilemmas of Community Companies

As well as a Prospector, I’m also a Director of Talybont-on-Usk Energy. We’re a community company with our own 36kW hydro electric turbine which has been running since 2006. We sell the electricity it generates via Good Energy and this provides us with an income of around £25k-£30k which we strive to spend on energy saving and sustainable living projects for the benefit of our small, rural community in the Brecon Beacons.

This has been my first experience of being involved with a community, rather than a commercial, company. It’s very rewarding and enormous fun. At the same time, it creates dilemmas and tensions which are intriguing from a psychological perspective. And these appear to be common in other community companies. For example:-

1. All the Talybont Energy Directors are volunteers - there is no financial remuneration for any of the work done. This is obviously different from my own company, The Prospectory, where we charge for the work we do. But, once my food and housing needs are covered, I find any surplus income is only motivating to me if I can translate it into something else which I value or enjoy. I am lucky, especially as most Prospectory projects are interesting and enjoyable activities in their own right. Similarly, “working” for Talybont Energy on innovative projects which we have dreamed up is both valuable and enjoyable in its own right. It would feel very odd to get paid for it and, once there was any financial remuneration, one might be forced to measure its value in a different way.

2. However, if any of the Talybont Energy Directors were paid or we employed someone in the community whom we paid, then the dynamic instantly changes. Similarly, we are often approached by academic researchers wishing to study us or wishing to do some community research for us. Again the dynamic becomes awkward. The academics are financially rewarded to study us doing work for which we are not paid or, in some cases, they are bidding to carry out research projects in our community which we currently do for free. Arguably, nothing changes for us (we weren’t being financially rewarded anyway) and yet something subtle but powerful certainly changes.

3. Employing people poses other problems too. Deploying our Talybont income on sustainable projects in the community requires ideas, money to fund the projects and energy and time to set them up and run them. At the moment, we have no shortage of ideas and the income to realise a reasonable proportion of them. What we lack is enough energy and time to run all the projects we’d like. One solution, which some communities adopt, is to use their income to employ someone full or part time to run the projects. But people cost money and suddenly a significant proportion of a £25,000/year income disappears as salary. So, you now have the manpower to enable you to do a lot more but, ironically much less money to do it with! What happens? Well, you find that you now need to use the person you have employed to attract more money (in the form of grants or consultancy) in order to still afford to do the projects you had in mind. But now the manhours (which you were paying for to run your projects) are being used up attracting more money to compensate for the project money which has been redeployed on a salary! Hmmmm…
It might sound funny but we have watched this play out in other community groups. They seem to end up in a cycle of employing more people and attracting more money but spending less and less on making actual projects happen!

4. So, Talybont Energy is now exploring an alternative route – offering some proportion of our income as community grants which anyone in the community can bid for to fund a sustainable project they wish to run (as volunteers). But we have to ensure that the projects are all for community (not individual household or business) benefit. And, that creates yet another dilemma – what does “community benefit” actually mean? Almost every project we can think of benefits one segment of the community rather than another. We wonder if this is why so many rundown village halls have been transformed by community companies into all singing all dancing eco centres offering every modern facility imaginable – it’s probably because, in many cases, they are the only asset which is 100% community owned!

Cycling and walking - the greenest of green holidays?

Walking and cycling are highly popular pursuits here in the Brecon Beacons. Visitors flood here all year around with their boots and their bikes ready to head for the lanes and hills. How much greener could you get?

Well, unfortunately, it's not as green as it looks because the irony is that keen walkers and cyclists don't actually use their legs or pedals to replace car journeys. Here in the Brecon Beacons, walking and cycling are leisure activities not a means of transport. The rest of the time they use their cars to ferry themselves to the start of today's walk or bike ride (14 miles average round trip) or to visit the local shops or pubs 1 mile or less down the road. You can read more about the results of our recent research here.

We hope to run some experiments to see if we can change this pattern at all in ways which are fun....