257 The AW Energy Episode

Gary:

Hi, I'm Gary, and this is episode 257 of EV Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles, and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners. On the show today, we'll be looking at the cheapest 24-7 public ultra-rapid charging in the country. Here's what you can expect on this episode.

My turbine is also connected to the grid, so whatever I'm not putting through the charging station goes out to the grid. So I'm already, whilst I get paid for my export, I'm already paying for a connection, if you like, to export. The charges are slightly different in the way that they're embedded, but essentially, because I'm pushing import and export through the same cable, I'm running it through the same model with the turbine and the charging station combined.

Our main topic of discussion today is AW energy or AW renewables. Now, I know this is a podcast about renewable electric vehicles and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners, but we haven't done a huge amount on renewables so far. This episode, therefore, is something of a crossover.

AW renewables announced last year, just before fully charged live in Farnborough, that they were providing public chem power-based ultra-rapid charging at the incredibly low rate of 39 pence a kilowatt hour. Naturally, when I heard this, my spidey sense started tingling, and I wanted to speak to them and ask the simple question everyone is asking, how? So, I got them in for a chat.

John:

Yes, I'm John Fairley. I'm the Managing Director of AW Energy. We are a renewable energy and charging company based in Bedfordshire, and we develop large-scale onshore wind projects, including for solar, and also, more recently, including for electric vehicle charging stations.

Gary:

Sweet. Would you like to give me a two-minute potted history of AW Energy as a company, please?

John:

Yes. We go back way over 100 years. AW Group, as it is, or Arnold White Estate, is a family business with its roots in sand quarrying. So, across Bedfordshire, the family have quarried silica sand and sharp sands for many, many years.

In the early: 2000

And the family have always been very proactive in looking at new and different ways to utilise that land for the benefit of the wider area, and renewable energy was an absolutely excellent fit. I supported the company through the planning applications for some of those sites and joined the company around three years ago now, primarily to look at further renewable schemes, but also to look at ways of linking our renewables to the consumer. And the standout project that we've been working very hard on over the past few years has been a scheme called Checkley Wood, and that is where we have directly wired a large-scale wind turbine to an EV charging station, and the purpose of that being to bring renewable energy closer to the consumer.

Gary:

I will loop back and talk about Checkley Wood in great detail in a few moments, but Checkley Wood isn't your only charging location, is it? You've got a number of other charging locations. Talk to me a little bit about those, please.

John:

We started in one of our property schemes called Chamberlain's Barn in Leighton Buzzard. We installed a small charging station around, well, I'd say three, four years ago now. That's called Kemsley Drive, and it's only two or three chargers, but the idea of that for us was really as a learning curve to understand how chargers worked, how the market worked, and where the most appropriate places would be to install them.

So we saw Kemsley Drive, as we call it, as a test bed, Checkley Wood being the next major project, and we have planning consent for a third station, a larger station to the south of the A505 in Leighton Buzzard and applications in across the country, the next one being in Buckinghamshire for a large station attached to a housing development, but I'll talk about that a bit more later.

Gary:

Absolutely. Now, Checkley Wood, a fantastic site. You've got the parking, you've got the charging, you've got commercial vehicle charging, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. Starbucks, and of course, that wind turbine, that fantastic wind turbine. Now, it's not a perfect site, and I will come back into that a little bit later, but talk to me about, you've touched on it a little bit, talk to me a little bit more about the thinking behind Checkley Wood as a charging spot.

Was it a case of, well, we've got a turbine, therefore we'll do the charging, or was it a case of, well, we want charging, so let's put a turbine there?

John:

nsent for the turbine back in: 2017

n in, I believe it was around: 2020

One reason is that it allows us to sell a portion of our power directly, so we're not going through the grid, we're going straight to the consumer, and the other part of that is that because we're not going through the grid to the consumer, we can pass some of the savings associated with that to the charging station as well. So the twofold really, we win because we're able to sell directly and the consumer wins because they're getting power directly through a wire rather than via the grid.

Gary:

Now, I know when we've talked about this in the past, you've got a, well, I find it quite a humorous story, but one of the planning objections came from a member of the Landed Gentry. Am I correct?

John:

Oh yeah, the wind turbine, as you can imagine, it's a tall structure, it's visible over quite some distance. When we plan for wind, we have to be careful to ensure that we aren't going to have significant visual effects that are unacceptable.

And yes, one of our objections was from a nearby estate, and they were concerned that if the turbine was visible from that estate, we would have a detrimental effect on the list of buildings within that estate. We were able on this scheme to lower the tip height. So we lowered our tip height by three meters and that ensured that we wouldn't be visible.

Gary:

But it's not just a case of you lowered the tip height, you dug a hole and you put the turbine in a hole, didn't you?

John:

Yeah, we lowered the turbine. You can't buy a 147 meter wind turbine. So you have to buy a 150 meter wind turbine and lower it, yes. So that isn't entirely what we did.

Gary:

That's fantastic. Now you talk about the turbine a little bit, give me some information about the power and the energy output, please.

John:

that has been operating since: 2014

So the rotor diameter is 115 meters as opposed to 87 meters. The difference in that rotor diameter effectively allows you to generate more power. So the double arches machine is 4.4 million kilowatt hours a year. The Checkley Wood machine is 10. 5 million kilowatt hours a year. So it's more than double just because of that larger swept area, bigger swept area, the more power you can extract from the wind. So it's quite incredible, but then it shows turbine technology has moved on a bit like mobile phone technology in a way. The first turbines that went up in the first wind farm in Cornwall, Delabole, was 10 400 kilowatt turbines. And they were around, I can't remember off the top of my head, but sort of about 40, 45 meters to tip. And this turbine, this one machine generates more than those 10 per year. And that just demonstrates how that technology has moved.

And the big advantage of that is that when we look at developing more wind across England, since the onshore wind ban was lifted by the current government, we don't necessarily need large numbers of turbines to achieve the goal. Previously, I'd be developing sort of 10, 15 turbine sites. I can get the same output now from two or three turbines. So whilst the turbines are taller, the amount of landscape they take up is significantly less. Overall, there's a reduced impact on the landscape, but we generate a lot more power out of them. So for developing in England now, we don't need to think necessarily or worry too much about large scale wind farms.

Strategically placed twos, threes, ones in the right location can achieve what we need to achieve.

Gary:

I have relatives who live at Junction 18 off the M1. Now, when I was young, we used to go and visit them. We always knew we were getting there because that was where they had a whole load of radio pylons. And it was the only place in the country where you could actually pick up submarines underneath the North Pole. I noticed recently, they've all gone and they've been replaced by wind turbines. And there seems to be quite a lot of them there. Is it because they're older ones with smaller output? How does that mesh with what you just said about needing fewer turbines?

John:

loped between around the year: 2000

But they took around, what, seven, eight years to get planning consent. So by they got to the point of planning consent, then build, they built what they had connection for and they built what was a good scheme when they started out. But turbine technologies moved on since. So what you will find is a lot of sites are now coming to the end of their normal working life. So generally, a wind farm will be about a 25-year operating life. As those are repowered, they'll be repowered using probably larger machines, but fewer of them. They'll have grid constraints, so they'll not necessarily put the same number of turbines on the site. There'll be smaller numbers of turbines, but larger. So it's just a symptom, I guess, of the planning regime that we were working in at the time in wind and what really we thought was acceptable at the time. I think what you find is that public attitudes have moved on significantly, even in that time. And the acceptability of something that's larger is a lot higher now.

Gary:

So jumping back to Checkley Wood, you've given us some statistics about the amount of power, the amount of energy that you create, etc. How much of that is piped into the charging and how much of that goes back to the grid?

John:

It's down to utilization, but around 90% of the charges that you'd have at Checkley Wood are wind. For the rest of the 10% of the time, when there's not enough wind or there's too much wind, we're not using the wind power. We made the decision, we have consent for batteries on site. So we do have the opportunity to get up to closer to 100% wind on site. But we wanted to see how the scheme bedded in over its first year, get an idea of utilization, get an idea of the amount of kilowatt hours that we'd be shifting through the station as opposed to the grid before making that decision. But the one thing that we did realize very quickly was that price is an incredibly important factor to the consumer. And when we made the decision to reduce the price, utilization increased fourfold. I guess it's the same thing, if you lower the price of beer, people buy more beer. But it's certainly had a very positive effect on the scheme. And we expect to be selling more power over the next year through the turbine as we move forward.

Gary:

So of course, you did bring up the, I was going to talk about this anyway, but you did bring up the whole price issue. Now, if we look at Zapmap, the average price at the moment across the country for ultra rapid charging, which is what you've got, is 80 pence kilowatt hour. And you've managed to come up with 39 pence a kilowatt hour. kilowatt hour for 350 kilowatt hour, sorry, 350 kilowatt Kempower charging at a large hub? And of course, the big question that everybody's going to ask is, how have you been able to bring it so low? Can you talk me through a little bit about the financials behind that, please?

John:

I guess without going in too heavily into the nuts and bolts, when you look at the wholesale cost of power, so generally speaking, it's hovers, it hovers somewhere, depending upon economic circumstances, tends to hover somewhere between 5p and and sort of 10p a kilowatt hour wholesale on the market. And our primary, the primary reason why that power price moves up and down is because of our reliance on gas. And you'll find that as you have a colder winter, or if you have a higher demand, particularly colder winters in China or Japan, the gas price will significantly rise because we ship most of our gas from the States. And as that gas is shipped over, the vessels that transport that gas are like trading ships, they will turn on a pin and go to the market that will pay them the most for their power. So as a result of that, we are in the UK, a bit of a hostage to the international gas market. It doesn't matter if we drill for gas here, it makes no difference because it's an international commodity, it's priced on that basis. So the electricity price hovers, and it hovers anywhere. Before the Ukraine war, it was around 5, 5. 5p wholesale. Now it's somewhere in the region of 7, 8 pence wholesale. And I think during the Ukraine crisis, it even went up as far as at one point it picked up to sort of 30, 40p. It was a huge spike. Now when you're generating on site, you know what your cost of generation is because you've built the machine. We have the wind resource that isn't obviously attached to these international markets. When the wind blows, we take the wind, nobody charges us for that. We know in our model where we stand in terms of the cost of generation. If we are able to then look at, okay, we're selling on the wholesale market for somewhere between 7 and 10 pence, we can put a portion of that through something else, through a direct wire and charge more because we aren't succumbed to that wholesale market. But then of course we need to look at things like grid costs. We need to look at standing chargers. We need to look at the cost of land. We need to look at the cost of the charging station and how much it costs to build. So once you attach all of that together and you then look at the cost of delivering power, we hand on heart looked at it and thought, how can we charge 79, 80 pence? Because the uplift is just too great. Given that we are generating a wholesale cost on site, we prefer to pass that benefit over. Now we took the decision to half it. And when we look at that within the model, because we are combining our standing charges with our generation, we are essentially our own landlord on site. We were able to be quite creative in cost and pass some of that benefit from the wind directly over. So it was a bold move, but we're very pleased that we did it because from the consumer's perspective, we've had people come to us in the charging station and say, look, we made the transition to EV because we can't charge at home for whatever reason, but it's affordable if we come here. And it means that we know that we can come here once a week, we can charge our car. And it's cheaper than the alternative. And that's feedback from people on site.And that feels like the right thing to do. And we're delighted that we've been able to help that transition directly from basically the benefit of onsite renewable generation.

Gary:

That brings up so many questions. So let me go into this. I've spoken several times with charge point operators, one of whom, Ian Johnston, did a particularly interesting podcast with Imogen Bohgal from Fully Charged Show, where he went into detail about some of the costs that are associated with ultra-rapid charging. And you've covered a number of them there. And I'm just trying to work out what are the charges that they've got that you don't. So he has to pay for his wholesale electricity. Now by your own admission there, let's say it's 10 pence a kilowatt hour. Now they're charging 80, 84, 82 pence a kilowatt hour. So we'll knock that down to 72 pence a kilowatt hour. You're still paying standing charges, aren't you?

John:

We are. However, just because you've got a wholesale cost of say nine, 10 pence, you need to add on to that the cost of, and it's not just standing charges, the cost of the network. Electricity generally will come out around anywhere between 20 and 25 pence normally as a business rate. You may be able to get less than 20 pence if you're a high energy user, but yeah. And the wholesale cost is just the cost of the door. You've got to pay then for the cost of getting it all the way through the wires to the right person. And once you do that, you're effectively doubling that cost to get to the end point.

Gary:

Okay. So let me see if I can get this right now. So Ian's always talked about the, what was the phrase he calls it, the non-network price or the non-network charges. And this is the profit that the energy company has to make and capacity charges and things like that. So obviously because you're providing the electricity, you don't have to, there's minimal cost in getting the electricity from the turbine to the charges because they're literally a hundred feet away.

John:

Yeah. I mean, I've got my own network charge, if you like, because I've had to pay for the infrastructure and the like to put that in, but yes, I don't have the same amount that you would have if you put it through the grid.

Gary:

Now I can see how if you just had the turbine and it was just going into the charges, then I think that's fine. But you are connected to the grid because you've said yourself, you get stuff that comes in from the grid on the few percentage of the time when there's no wind or when there's too much wind and you've turned the turbine off. So obviously you're going to get a fairly hefty standing charge. You're going to get capacity charges as well.

You're going to get some of those charges that we've talked about that the likes of Osprey and Fastned and Gridserve going. Are those factored into the 39 pence or is it a case of, well, it's because it only happens a small percentage of the time, we're happy to take that hit when it does occur?

John:

My turbine is also connected to the grid. So whatever I'm not putting through the charging station goes out to the grid. So I'm already, whilst I get paid for my export, I'm already paying for a connection, if you like, to export. The charges are slightly different in the way that they're embedded, but essentially because I'm pushing import and export through the same cable, I'm running it through the same model with the turbine and the charging station combined. helps me to then look at it holistically as a whole to make those savings rather than separating the two and look at them in one piece and that helps a lot.

Gary:

So effectively, if I sort of boil that down, what you're saying is the energy that you're putting into the grid from the turbine is effectively subsidizing the cost of charging to a greater or lesser extent.

John:

Yes, yeah, that's right.

Gary:

So one of the things that we talked about earlier on is you have commercial vehicle charging or you have the ability to charge commercial vehicles. Now when I was there last, that was still fenced off and not open. I understand you're going to be opening that shortly and we'll talk about that in a few seconds but when that starts to come online, I'm hoping that's going to be quite a popular stop for some of the HGV drivers that we've got. Is that going to affect the pricing that you have at that site in any way, shape or form or is that all factored into the price at the moment?

John:

All factored in and when we display the price, our totem sign at the door, rather than putting a digital board out, we fixed it at 39p solidly. So that price is there to stay.

Gary:

Love it. Talk to me a little bit about opening up the commercial side to commercial vehicles, please.

John:

That has been a bit of a journey.

When we designed that area, we were originally envisaging to be running buses from that location. As part of the other part of our company, as I mentioned before, we developed large scale property developments. Through those developments and through section 106 payments, we fund active travel plans across the nearby town and we were hoping that we'd be able to use those bus services that we essentially fund through the section 106 funds. We were hoping to get those electrified and through the charging station. However, the local authority have different ideas and different plans as to how they want to manage the section 106 monies and fundings. So as a result, that area, rather than being a bus depot, has been reconfigured for commercial charging.

As it stands at the moment, we can take what we would call a medium size commercial van. So that would be anything up to 30 tons fixed rigid. To get something like the E-Actros in, it would have to be decoupled, unfortunately, to get through because of the turning circles and areas and things. So the way that we're looking at it is public charging area is basically phase A, up and running, working well. Phase B, the commercial area for long vehicles, people who are towing buses and medium, medium size trucks. Then we have future plans for a phase C now, which would be for larger HGV units. And it allows us to manage and phase the development as well and look at how utilization works and how our power modules across our Ken power system work to make sure that we have enough power for these huge vehicles. We have plugged an Actros in and it's incredible to see the amount of power that it will money launch in half an hour. It's wonderful to see, but we have to be mindful of the fact that we have an operating facility that is there for the public, number one, then the commercial area, then the third one will follow. So our plan is to open the commercial area within the next couple of weeks. We just need to finish some signage work and then we're ready to move on that one. It's been quite interesting, actually, just watching the site. Sometimes we'll just go down and see what's going on. The likes of DPD, Royal Mail, Top Speed, they're all moving towards EV, every, we're seeing every a lot. And we're quite lucky in that when we designed the scheme, we purposefully put in large bays from day one to make sure that we'd be sort of comfortable taking various different types of vehicles and have enough room for disabled access. But we're quite lucky in that a lot of the vehicles that come in can fit in there very easily. But we are conscious that vehicles are getting larger and we'd quite like to get that commercial area moving. So that's our next plan.

Gary:

Just for the listeners, section 106, I believe, is an amount of money which a developer will pay to the local council as part of the planning permission and all the planning and development itself. And it's meant to be used for local infrastructure, because I know we've had a similar thing happening here. Can I just sort of follow up section C, part C of your phase three, whatever it is, of the development.

When you say making that available for HGVs, does that mean adding additional charging or does that mean reconfiguring the layout so that the existing charges can accommodate the vehicles?

John:

That would need... that would need additional charging. So there's a little bit of work we need to do on that with respect to power and cost. And we're busy working on that at the moment. But looking, and certainly we were at the commercial vehicle show last week. It's very interesting to see that a show that is designed for all commercial vehicles was predominantly EV. There was a lot of EV there. It actually surprised me that I was expecting the EV area to be quite distinct, but actually it spread across the entire show.

It just shows that despite the need for policy to encourage a move to EV, manufacturers are going there anyway and consumers are going there anyway. It looks like there's a momentum building up. And if that's the case, we need to make sure we have the infrastructure ready for that. Because how can you make a decision on a large fleet when you need to know your drivers can coincide their rest time with their charging time? You need to get those routes properly planned. So yeah, it's an area of great interest to us.

Gary:

One of the things that helps, and I mean, it very much speaks to what you just said there about coordinating rest times and charging times. One of the things that a lot of companies, particularly on the continent, like to look at is the concept of being able to book a charger. Now is that something that you're looking at for phase B and C, phase two and three, the fenced off area as it is at the moment? Because having a van be able to say, right, I need a charger from two o'clock to 2. 40 or 2. 50 because I've got a two to three break and I need to guarantee that it's going to be there will be an excellent thing. Is booking something you're looking at?

John:

We'll see how it goes. I think it's something that will come, it'll have to come because what we have learned about coinciding charging time, for example, with statutory break times, when you're fueling a truck, that's still classed as working time. So at the moment, I don't believe that charging a truck is Cluster's rest time. And there is another issue in that when you stop your truck and you're waiting for a charger, if that then goes into your rest time, you can't. move it. It's the same if you're on the bay as well and how, if it coincides, you can't move it. Now, it's a bit of an area that needs to be looked at very, very carefully because there are exceptions to that rule. For example, down at Dover, if a lorry is waiting to get onto a ferry and it coincides with a statutory rest time, there are allowances that allows that driver to move on so they don't miss the ferry. So I think we do need to look as a whole as an industry and government need to look at, it's a different environment, it's a different beast working with electricity compared to diesel. There's a lot of learning curve, there's learning curves to follow. And I think that booking will become part of it, but you always have to be aware that you need, if you have a fully booked station, what happens if somebody turns up? You need to have a bit of a stop and go area as well. Otherwise, it's going to become incredibly inflexible. And what happens if a driver misses his slot by 10 minutes?

Where does he go? If there's a pileup on the M1, what happens? So there's quite a lot to think about with that sort of system.

Gary:

Yeah. I know I had a chat with Amy Carter from Daft Trucks when I was preparing an episode on fleets, and she brought up exactly that issue when it comes to driver times. Because at the moment, it's all focused on the diesel refilling. So if you're filling up a diesel and it's going to take 10 or 15 minutes to fill up those huge diesel tanks, that's working time. That's not rest time. But of course, with the charger, it's a different thing. You plug in, takes you 10, 15 seconds to get it all set up, and then you're effectively on rest time. So there is a regulation that needs to change on that. And I believe there's people kind of working on that. So I don't... It's an issue now. I don't think it's going to be an issue moving forward. Although when that gets changed, it's a different thing.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. That would be good news. On the subject of being able to just plug in and get something working very, very quickly.

Gary:

Talk to me about plug and charge. What's the official position of AW Energy on plug and charge?

John:

I would like to see plug and charge happen at our station. At the moment, our back office support doesn't allow for that at the moment. Technically, there are things that need to be done to enable plug and charge on the site. But it's something we'd like to see. And when we spend a lot of time on our site talking to users, and we find that there are still a significant number of people taking up EVs who don't yet understand how to use them, how to charge them, and what it means. What order do you tap and plug? And where do you tap? And where do you put your RFID compared to your credit card? And it does cause confusion, particularly where it's different at every station and every charger type. Plug and charge is the obvious solution to that. Plug it in and you're on your way. It works with Tesla beautifully. I've never seen a confused person at a Tesla station before. But you see plenty of confused people at any charging station that you go to. It's a learning curve. So I'd like to see it happen. At the moment, we haven't got the back office software to allow us to do that. But it's something that we are looking into.

Gary:

That moves very nicely. I've got two sort of questions to sort of finish up with as we're heading towards the end of our time. Now, I love the site. I've been there a number of times. One issue I do have, however, is safety when the coffee shops closed. Now, I turned up there in early January, around 9. 30 in the evening. The place was in complete darkness other than the actual screens on the chargers. And it was a little unnerving because the screen itself was so comparatively bright that I couldn't actually see the scanner, the RFID scanner. I couldn't actually look, even though I knew where it was because I've used the Kenpower chargers before. Just to actually physically locate it because the screen was so bright, everything else was so dark. Talk to me a little bit about the safety aspect and if you're looking to address that kind of an issue, please.

John:

We have actually updated our lighting and how our lighting operates on the site. So now it is reactive. So as you drive into the site, the different lampposts will switch on as you get closer to them so that it is better lit than it was back in January. We do have to have reactive lighting there because we have planning conditions in place in relation to bats and disturbance of bats with bright lights. So we are aware of that, but we've worked on a reactive system now that allows the light level to increase as people come in. So it is a lot better now than it was in January and you can see that. But yeah, we took that feedback quite quickly in the new year and we have been able to deal with it.

Gary:

Now, final question. I know what issue a lot of people have with turbines, especially those who tend to follow that new series, Landsmen, on the TV is that they feel they aren't eco-friendly. They need fossil fuels to build them and they can't operate without hundreds of gallons of lubricating oil, et cetera, et cetera. Can you speak to those points, please?

John:

Oh my goodness. It's wind myths are as many wind myths as EV myths.

pportunity to hit clean power: 2030

Gary:

And do you have a thousand gallons of oil in your turbine keeping it nice and lubricated?

John:

Nope, nope, it doesn't have a gearbox. It's a direct drive machine. It's just like a bicycle dynamo. So it generates DC at the top with a permanent magnet and we have an inverter at the bottom. So yes, you do need some oil for lubrication and I'm not saying that we'd ever live in a world without oil. We need paint, we need gearbox oil and all that sort of stuff, but we don't need to burn it, we need to use it properly and we need to use it for what we need to. But yeah, my turbine doesn't have a gearbox, so it's a lot easier.

Gary:

Is there any final comment you'd like to make?

John:

Other than it's been a very interesting journey going into EV and I think that the greatest learning point around it is that it isn't as simple as plugging a petrol pump into a car and filling a tank. It is insanely complicated. A charging cable in itself has so much inside it, so much tech going on. As an industry, we need to be able to communicate that better, I think, to the consumer. For example, there's a temperature cable in the charging cable that monitors the temperature of the plug and if that plug gets too hot, it will reduce the charging speed.

The battery inside a car, if the cells aren't quite aligned, the car will obviously change the charging speed, whether the battery is preconditioned or not changes the charging speed. The temperature changes the charging speed and we have this, you see people plugging in saying, why haven't I got 150 kilowatts now? And there's a reason for that and generally speaking, it's mostly the vehicle car and the vehicle management, but it is mainly because the process is insanely complicated.

It isn't just putting a liquid in a tank and I think as an industry, that's something we need to work on better because where you find barriers to EV, it's because somebody's hired a car or bought the car, plugged it in and gone, why? And it would be very good if we could get around that and people actually are given the opportunity and the information to understand why. So that's something that our Checkley Wood site, we are going to be effectively creating an information library at the site through various boards that allows people while they're charging to understand the technicalities behind it, understand what it means, how it works and it's something that we hold quite close to us and we'd like to see that communicated more across the industry.

Gary:

Totally aligned with that and I know this is only audio, but Pete, you could see me there, I was dotting furiously when you're talking about education and all that sort of stuff. Anyway, John Fairley, thank you very much for your time, much appreciated.

John:

Not at all. Thanks Gary.

Gary:

A couple of takeaways from this. Cheap ultra-rapid charging is possible if you have the right conditions.

It helps if you can manufacture your own energy rather than pulling it off the grid and if you can use the income from selling energy back to the grid to subsidise the cost of charging. AW Energy have thought about their site design in terms of integrated facilities and commercial charging and they're also looking to expand that to include e-HGV charging in the next phase. The one downside about their model is that it isn't quickly scalable.

The timeline from bare ground to quarry to filling it to building a turbine is, shall we say, not a year or two, it can be 20 years. The good news is they're already working on more sites. I asked them the question and they told me, quote, although AW Group's background is in quarrying and the recycling of despoiled former quarry land, the future for the group includes renewable projects on any suitable sites.

Their e-HGV charging facilities will only be supplied by renewable technologies, but these can and will be anywhere across the UK and won't be limited to former quarry land, end quote. If you're interested in visiting the Checkley Wood site, really easy to find, follow the A5 north towards Bletchley from the M1 at Dunstable and keep your eyes open for a particularly large wind turbine on the side of the road. There you'll find a Starbucks, parking and those sweet Kempower ultra-rapid chargers we discussed.

I was there in early May pulling 140 kilowatts on a Volvo EX40, which are pretty good for that car. And who knows, if you're listening to this in a year or two's time, they might already have implemented plug-and-charge there as well.

It's time for a cool EV or renewable thing for you listeners.

The world's largest fully electric ship, the China Zorilla, was launched in Tasmania and it measures over 420 feet long. Built by INCAT, it can carry 2,100 passengers and 225 vehicles. The 100% electric-powered vessel is equipped with over 250 tonnes of batteries.

INCAT claims that with over 40 MWh of capacity, its energy storage system is four times larger than any previous maritime installation in the world. It will run from Buenos Aires to Uruguay when sea trials are completed later this year. I hope you enjoyed listening to today's show.

It was put together this week with the help of John Fairley and Rachel Kingdon-Saxby from AW Energy. Thanks to everyone who supports me through patreon on a monthly basis, and through Ko-fi.com on an ad-hoc one.

If you enjoyed this episode why not buy me a coffee? Go to Ko-fi.com/evmusings and you can do just that. Takes Apple Pay, too!

Regular listeners will know about my two ebooks- ‘So, you’ve gone electric’ and ‘So you’ve gone renewable’.

They’re 99p each (or equivalent) and you can get them on Amazon

Check out the links in the show notes for more information as well as a link to my regular EV Musings newsletter and associated articles.

I know you’re probably driving or walking or jogging now. But if you can remember- and you enjoyed this episode drop a review in iTunes, please. It really helps me out. If you've reached this part of the podcast and are still listening, thank you.

Let me know you got to this point by tweeting me at Musings EV with the words, it's not a windmill. Hashtag, if you know, you know, nothing else. Thanks as always to my co-founder, Simon, you know, he's really happy that the local council has opened a brand new skate park, an obstacle course for him to ride his electric unicycle around.

He was actually instrumental in putting the layout together for that. Boy, is it big and no wonder, he told me.

John:

When we designed that area, we were originally envisaging to be running buses from that, from that location.

Gary:

Thanks for listening. Bye.