Driving the length of Britain is an expensive endurance test that’s not very environmentally friendly, but this week I helped make it happen for free, minus the emissions.
A standard Renault 4, the kind of car parked on any suburban street, traveled around 870 miles from Land’s End to John o’Groats without taking a single unit from the network or burning a drop of petrol. Each electron came from the sun. The same journey in a petrol car costs £120.48 worth of fuel (around $160/AU$230), or £240 return (around $320/AU$460), while the Renault bill was nothing.
This was the “Easee Sun Run,” an attempt to drive a standard production electric vehicle the length of the country for the first time on solar power alone. The car was the Renault 4 E-Tech “Plein Sud” worth £27,000 (around $36,190 / AU$52,150). — French for “Plein Sud”, and a bit of a joke given that he was going to be driven very far north. You can order one now, even though it doesn’t feature any solar panels, a fact that has been confusing spectators all along.
The charger is a Ease smart charger that you can install in your home, while this particular Renault also had a secret weapon. In the trunk was a 300 kWh battery built by OnBio from second-life cells, the type taken from damaged electric vehicles before they even reach a forecourt. Think of it as an oversized power bank for devices thirstier than a smartphone.
Here is the sun
Power Logistics, a company that normally keeps the lights on at festivals and Trooping the Color, spent a week filling them from a solar farm before departure. “All the energy we use is free,” its operations director, Ian Peniston, told me. “It comes from the sun.” Charged, the pack contains enough to recharge the little Renault six times.
The man who dreamed up this record attempt is Jeremy Hart, an automotive adventurer who has driven a Land Rover in China, crossed America on land for sport and installed the world’s most remote public charging station in St. Helena.
The idea came to him after finding himself in the Canadian Arctic, charging an electric vehicle at minus 40°C. If solar power worked there, he thought, could it work here with the infrastructure we already have? The hardest part was never the driving. It was about finding solar farms that could promise that the energy powering the car would come from the sun and nothing else, rather than the usual mix that flows from any grid-connected site.
The route also served as a tour of British solar power in action. It all started in Cornwall at Roskilly’s, an organic farm and ice cream parlor that runs on 316kW of panels and sent the car with a unique tub of ‘Easee Peasy Lemon Squeezy’ in the back. In Somerset, the convoy called at JB Wheaton & Sons, a transport company which built the UK’s first commercial solar farm in 2011, a 3.3MW farm which it built not to sell electricity but to wean its own trucks off a fortnightly delivery of 38,000 liters of diesel.
Whaley Bridge Cricket Club in the Peak District have been operating their bar and floodlights on 12kW roof panels since 2021, proudly solar only. County Durham has launched Power Roll, which prints very thin, flexible solar film on a roll, light enough for the millions of roofs that cannot support the weight of glass and silicon.
Solar system
A few miles from Power Roll, the Durham University student team deployed the eighth generation of its solar racing car, four square meters of panels powering a motor that consumes 900W, about half that of a hairdryer.
Give him the stored charge that Renault used to reach John o’Groats and, according to the team, the little racer would almost go around the world. “We are a nation of inventors,” Hart said. “The World Wide Web is ours, the jet engine was British. What happens quite often is that these innovations are taken up by other countries and commercialized.” Solar, designed and printed in Britain, is the piece he wants to keep here.
Determined to grab some of the glory, I headed to Inverness for the final leg, up to the famous John o’Groats signpost, and took my turn behind the wheel. The brief was simple. Eco mode, respect the limits, drive as you would on a school trip. On a red alert day, with the air conditioning on and four adult men on board, the Renault didn’t flinch. We sat on a constant real-world range of 243 miles, about what Renault quotes, while the team averaged around 200 miles.
Hart, who traveled the planet in search of automotive challenges, had strangely never driven his own country up and down. “You realize what a beautiful place the UK is,” he said. “It’s only a thousand kilometers long, but there are incredible roads. And if you can enjoy them in an electric vehicle, that’s great, because otherwise you ruin all the joy of driving.”
Great Scott!
The trip sparked an absurdity. A cattle grid being replaced in Yorkshire took the team 25 miles off course, a reasonable 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 came across a sheep whose head was stuck in a fence. We stopped, untied him and watched him trot back towards two lambs who began feeding as if nothing had happened. At John o’Groats, the welcome was a group of bemused tourists, some from as far away as Hong Kong, and a gang of Czech bikers, most on Harleys, who couldn’t quite figure out what the car had just done.
The entire trip took about six full charges of four hours each, so call that 24 hours of charging versus the 16 hours of driving the route takes. Over the entire journey, the car consumed 276 kWh, with each unit being solar powered. The panels collected 555 kWh along the way, almost double what the car used, so there was sunshine in hand to turn around at John o’Groats and head back to Land’s End.
Gaps are also created by charging speed and not range. The Renault accepts a constant 11 kW, but that’s below what Easee’s three-phase charger could push. Do this on a public network, Hart says, and you’ll get most of that time back. He proved it on arrival, plugging into a 50kW public charger, eating fish and chips and returning with a full battery.
To keep the record clean, the team set itself a rule. They had to arrive with at least as much charge as they held when they first recharged, so that no one could claim that a bit of grid electricity had leaked out before departure. This figure was 20 percent. We arrived at John o’Groats with 28.
On the first morning in Cornwall, sea fog settled over the Lizard Peninsula, the boards barely moved and the whole start was suspended until the sun burned off. You notice your reliance on light when there is no reservoir to rely on. The same trip with a small gasoline car would have released around 78 kg of CO2 into the air, or more in a larger car. The Sun Run produced nothing worth counting.
What stuck with me as I drove through the spectacular Highlands of Scotland was the number of houses with rooftop solar panels. If technology gains its place in a country that spends half its winter in darkness, it gains its place everywhere. While that’s just as well, the record attempt was intentionally timed to take place on the summer solstice to maximize daylight.
Electric feeling
Gareth Simkins, of trade body Solar Energy UK, puts the situation into perspective: one afternoon in April this year, solar power met 46 per cent of Britain’s electricity demand. A pyramid-shaped office in Edinburgh, visited earlier in the setting, generates enough each year to send this Renault end-to-end 135 times.
“Electric and solar vehicles are made for each other,” says Anthony Fernandez, CEO of Easee. “I think this trip proves exactly that.” Its director of innovation, Kjetil Næsje, believes the challenge is to make them “talk better together”, so that the power that reaches your car is the power you choose.
Full disclosure, you can’t go to a solar farm and fill your boots just yet, and Hart is the first to say that. “It’s not yet publicly possible to do what we did,” he told me. “But everyone wanted it to work, and I didn’t meet anyone who said, ‘This is a bad thing.’ Install your own panels and a home battery, and you’re within reach of charging an electric vehicle just from the sun.
This race also comes as the British government seeks to legalize the rechargeable solar kits that Germans have been hanging on their balconies for years, making your quest for sunshine even easier.
There was a beautiful symmetry waiting at the finish. The car arrived at John o’Groats on the night Scotland met Brazil in the World Cup, and the village’s 8 Doors distillery had marked the same event with a limited 28-year-old single malt, Seven Sons ‘Spirit of Brazil’, drawn from a cask filled in 1998 when the two sides last met. It retails for £240 (around $320 / AU$460), the same price as the petrol we didn’t buy. A well-deserved prize, to be collected in person.
Hart has traveled to China and across America and doesn’t feel the need to repeat either. This one he evaluates differently. Driving across the country without paying a dime to move the car, he said, “is crazy.” Hard to argue, standing on top of Britain with a full battery, a bottle of whiskey and nothing on the fuel receipt.
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