Driving across Britain is an expensive endurance test that’s not terribly environmentally friendly, but this week I helped make it free, minus the emissions.
A standard Renault 4, the kind of car parked on any suburban street, has traveled the approximately 870 miles from Land’s End to John o’Groats without taking a single unit off the grill or burning a drop of petrol. Every electron came from the sun. The same journey in a petrol car costs £120.48 in fuel (around $160 / AU$230), or £240 return (around $320 / AU$460), while the bill for the Renault was nothing.
It was the ‘Easee Sun Run’, a bid to drive a standard production electric vehicle across the country for the first time solely with solar energy. The car was the £27,000 (around $36,190 / AU$52,150) Renault 4 E-Tech ‘Plein Sud’. —French for ‘Due South’, and a bit of a joke given that I was going to be driven so far north. You can order one now, although it doesn’t come with its own solar panels, a fact that baffled onlookers all the way.
The charger is a ease smart charger that you can place at home, while this particular Renault also had a secret weapon. In the trunk was a 300 kWh battery pack built by OnBio from second-life cells, the kind removed from electric vehicles that are damaged before reaching the gas station. Think of it as an oversized power bank for devices thirstier than a smartphone.
here comes the sun
Power Logistics, a company that normally keeps the lights on at festivals and ‘Trooping the Colour’, spent a week filling it up from a solar farm before the start. “All the energy we use is free,” its chief operating officer, Ian Peniston, told me. “It’s from the sun.” Once loaded, the backpack has enough capacity to fill the little Renault six times.
The man who masterminded the record attempt is Jeremy Hart, an automotive adventurer who drove a Land Rover to China, crossed the United States overland for sport, and installed the world’s most remote public charger on St. Helena.
The idea came about after finding himself in the Canadian Arctic, charging an electric vehicle at -40°C. If solar power worked there, he reasoned, could it work here with the infrastructure we already have? The difficult thing was never driving. It was about finding solar farms that could promise that the energy going into the car came from the sun and nothing else, rather than the usual mix that flows from anywhere connected to the grid.
The route also served as a tour of British solar power in operation. It started in Cornwall, at Roskilly’s, an organic farm and ice cream parlor running on 316 kW panels, and shipped the car with a tub of “Easee peasy Lemon Squeezy” in the back. In Somerset, the convoy stopped at JB Wheaton & Sons, a transport company that installed the UK’s first commercial solar farm in 2011, a 3.3MW array it built not to sell power but to take its own trucks offline and dispose of a 38,000-litre supply of diesel each fortnight.
Whaley Bridge Cricket Club in the Peak District has installed its bar and floodlights with 12kW roof panels since 2021, proudly powered solely by solar power. County Durham introduced Power Roll, which prints a crisp, thin, flexible solar film on a roll, light enough for millions of roofs that can’t support the weight of glass and silicon.
Solar system
A few kilometers from Power Roll, the team of Durham University students presented the eighth generation of their solar racing car, four square meters of panels that power a motor that consumes 900 W, about half that of a hair dryer.
Pass the stored cargo that the Renault used to reach John o’Groats and, by the team’s calculations, the little racer would almost circumnavigate the globe. “We are a nation of inventors,” Hart said. “The World Wide Web is ours, the jet engine was British. What happens very often is that those innovations are adopted by other countries and commercialized.” Solar, designed and printed in Britain, is the part you want to keep here.
Determined to take some glory, I joined the final stretch, Inverness, to the famous John o’Groats sign, and took my turn behind the wheel. The report was simple. Eco mode, stay on the limit, drive like you would at school. On a red alert day for a heat wave, with the air conditioning running and four adult men on board, the Renault did not complain. We had a consistent real-world range of 243 miles, about what Renault quotes, while the team averaged around 200 at all times.
Hart, who has crisscrossed the planet in search of automotive challenges, curiously had never driven his own country from top to bottom. “You realize what a beautiful place the UK is,” he said. “It’s only a thousand miles long, but there are some incredible roads. And if you can enjoy them in an electric vehicle, that’s good, because otherwise you’re wasting all the pleasure of driving.”
Great Scott!
An absurdity arose from the trip. A cattle grate being replaced in Yorkshire caused the team to go 25 miles out of their way, a good detour to get around a hole in the road.
Meanwhile, the east coast of Scotland was bathed in sunshine and somewhere along it we even stumbled upon a sheep with its head stuck in a fence. We stopped, let him go, and watched him trot back toward two lambs who began feeding as if nothing had happened. At John o’Groats, the welcome was a group of bewildered tourists, some from as far away as Hong Kong, and a gang of Czech bikers, most of them on Harleys, who couldn’t take in what the car had just done.
The entire trip took about six full charges of four hours each, so call it 24 hours of charging versus the 16 hours of driving the route takes. During the entire trip, the car consumed 276 kWh, each solar unit. The panels accumulated 555 kWh along the way, almost double what the car used, so there was sun on hand to turn around at John o’Groats and drive all the way back to Land’s End.
Gaps are also created by charging speed, not range. The Renault accepts a constant 11kW, but it is below what Easee’s three-phase charger could drive. Do this on a public network, Hart says, and you’ll get most of that time back. He proved it in the end, plugging into a 50kW public charger, buying fish and chips and having a full battery again.
To keep the record clean, the team imposed a rule. They had to arrive with at least as much charge as they had when they did their first recharge, so that no one could tell that a little power had leaked from the grid before departure. That figure was 20 percent. We arrived at John o’Groats at 28.
On the first morning in Cornwall, sea mist covered the Lizard Peninsula, the panels barely moved and the whole party hung by a thread until the sun burned down. You realize your dependence on light when there is no tank to fall back on. The same route in a small gasoline car would have released around 78 kg of CO2 into the air, more in any larger vehicle. The Race of the Sun produced nothing worth telling.
What stuck out to me as I drove through the endlessly spectacular Scottish Highlands was how many houses had solar panels on their roofs. If technology makes a living in a country that spends half of the winter in darkness, it will make a living anywhere. Although better, the record attempt was intentionally timed to take place on the summer solstice to maximize daylight.
electric sensation
Gareth Simkins, of trade body Solar Energy UK, puts the bigger picture in perspective: on an afternoon in April this year, solar energy covered 46 per cent of Britain’s electricity demand. A pyramid-shaped office in Edinburgh, visited earlier, generates enough each year to ship this Renault from start to finish 135 times.
“Electric vehicles and solar energy were made for each other,” says Easee CEO Anthony Fernandez. “I think this trip demonstrates exactly that.” Its innovation director, Kjetil Næsje, believes the challenge is to get them to “speak better together”, so that the power that goes to your car is the power of your choice.
To be honest, you still can’t walk into a solar farm and fill your boots, and Hart is the first to say so. “Actually, it’s still not publicly possible to do what we’ve done,” he told me. “But everyone wanted this to work and I didn’t meet a single person who said ‘This is a bad thing.'” Install your own panels and a home battery and you’ll be within reach of charging an electric vehicle with sunlight alone.
The race also comes as the UK government seeks to legalize solar plug kits that Germans have hung on their balconies for years, making your search for the sun a little easier.
There was a neat symmetry waiting at the end. The car arrived at John o’Groats on the night Scotland faced Brazil in the World Cup, and the town’s 8 Doors distillery had marked the same match with a limited 28-year-old single malt, Seven Sons’ “Spirit of Brazil”, drawn from a full cask in 1998 when the teams last met. It sells for £240 (around $320 / AU$460), the same as the petrol we didn’t buy. A worthy award, collected personally.
Hart has driven to China and all over the United States and doesn’t feel the need to do it again either. This one qualifies it differently. Crossing the entire country without paying a cent to move the car, he said, “is crazy.” It’s hard to argue with you standing on top of Britain with a full battery, a bottle of whiskey and nothing on your fuel bill.
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