Talking Net Zero

In a special edition, swaps notes with Sara Sloman, who hosts sister-ITT Hub podcast Talking Net Zero. 

This week Sara Sloman swaps notes with Leon Daniels OBE, who hosts the sister ITT Hub podcast Lunch with Leon.

The former MD Surface Transport at Transport for London engages in a wide-ranging, and lively chat in which he talks about the fear of not being able to use your car in Bristol and the topic of forcing people to change their travel behaviour.

Are we too hung up on on-street charging and is the on-street charging issue overblown, they debate, before they chatting about micro-mobility and why people on eScooters are happy. “You never see a jogger smiling,” observes Leon, while Sara explains the importance of how travel makes you feel. “Does it put a smile on your face?”

She explains the enjoyment of a journey, how underrated bus travel is for the ‘pleasure of the journey’ and why sustainable travel ‘gives you your life back’.

Is the solution for certain occasional travel car clubs? Sara and Leon swap tales about their car club experiences which include an egg, rubber gloves and an underground car park….

We also discover Sara’s ‘all-time gripe’ about ‘all-things-green and sustainable’, and find out about the contribution of a bottle of wine!

EV charging is the big topic of the moment as the government pushes for more infrastructure ahead of its 2030 EV deadline.

Sarah Sloman chats with Tom Callow of the electric vehicle charging network BP Pulse. Founded in 2008, as Chargemaster – initially converting petrol cars to electric – it’s grown massively, and in 2018 was bought by BP.

Tom talks about ‘mobility hubs’ – generally known as forecourts, these days – and the new ‘black gold’: It’s no longer oil, but coffee.

He explains how the mobility hub network will change and grow, what the best locations are and why rural areas will not be overlooked. Already, BP Pulse is in mid-Wales, for example.

There will be ‘multiple formats’ in terms of charging, he says, new hubs that are not filling stations and he predicts a ‘huge roll-out’ of BP Pulse’s plans’ over next five years - ahead of 2030 EV deadline.

“We’re going across the country – not just targeting cities – and it’s not just about putting in new, but also upgrading older ‘legacy’ infrastructure,” he tells Sara.

As their chat closes, he explains what the newly-announced partnership with JumpTech’s platform will deliver, and the wider charging options.

Caroline Seton is co-founder of HumanForest, London’s first free sustainable-mobility solution. Her start-up aims to bring the forest to the city “ but a different kind of forest where humans are the trees.”

Aiming to disrupt the eBike space, by make them accessible to people, HumanForest’s e-bikes are beautiful, functional, electric, dockless, and free for the first 10 minutes of each user’s daily journey.

Chatting with Sara Sloman, she talks about how to combat the looming spectre of a post-Covid car-based recovery.

With 1,500 eBikes ready to go onto London’s streets this summer, once the economy re-opens, it follows a pilot last year in the boroughs of Islington and Camden.

HumanForest is, ‘designed to get our great city moving again’ adds Caroline. 

By opting to make their daily journey on a HumanForest e-bike, Londoners signal their commitment to reducing carbon emissions and improving the city’s air quality. Working together they become, in essence, a Human Forest, she adds.

And, Caroline explains why telephone boxes (yes, really) are a key part of the vision….

Getting to net-zero isn’t all about zero-emission vehicles, but wider energy use too. With home heating being the biggest CO2 emitter after transport, this is a key area to target.

Sara Sloman chats with Bill Bullen, founder and CEO of Utilita Energy which is the first, and so far only, pay-as-you-go smart energy supplier.

He explains how Utilita helps households who were being badly served and overcharged. Its mission is simple: to offer consumers better service and a fairer deal.

The use of smart metering to help customers reduce their energy bills is a powerful tool and thanks to having better control, Utilita customers use around 20% less energy than the average bill paying household. 

It’s all part of Utilita’s action to tackle fuel poverty and climate change by reducing energy use, he explains.

Next-level collaboration as we go into space!

 Melissa Thorpe is the Interim Head of Spaceport Cornwall, based at Newquay airport. 

She chats with Sara Sloman about the project which involves Cornwall County Council, the Local Enterprise Partnership, Goonhilly Earth Station and Virgin Orbit.

Due to go into operation next year, Melissa explains what horizontal satellite launch – the purpose of the programme – is and provides an overview of the Spaceport’s sustainability action plan.

Given that county council declared its ‘Climate Emergency’ in January 2019, this was the first major project to go through after then. That process, says Melissa, “was quite an experience for us” and “completely changed our priorities.”

As a result, the project wants to be the most-sustainable launch location in the world. And, it’s become the only spaceport in the World to publish its carbon impact assessment. Listen now to find out about this innovative and exciting project.

You can also find out more at these links:

 

Twitter (project): @spacecornwall

Twitter (Melissa Thorpe) @MelGoodSpace

Who joins up all the dots? This week Sara Sloman chats with Gill Nowell who is one of the key players in unleashing the power of data across multiple organisations and stakeholders, as part of the quest to achieve net zero.

Her infectious enthusiasm encompasses her role as DSO Lead at ElectraLink and a Board Member of EVA England. And, she’s also behind the EVclicks website and blog of free-to-use real-life electric vehicle images.

As someone in the unusual position of working on ‘both sides of the fence’ in funding, she explains the latest developments in smart charging – which are much further advanced than you might think.

Gill also chats about how clever use of data is helping planning ahead for future network reinforcement and working on a system of advance notice of chargepoint installations.

She explains how data can empower decision-making, using examples from public transport experiences this year that revealed important new factors not previously known.

She’s also passionate about having a wider, more inclusive and diverse voice across the industry and sets out how this will be achieved.

This week Sara Sloman talks about cake and infrastructure with Edward Sargent, Director of Business Development at Pivot Power, who oozes enthusiasm about delivering clean transport.

Pivoted out of a battery company, the firm aims to accelerate clean transport by providing 2GW of energy storage in the UK. 

It aims to run 40 sites, with private cable networks from the battery storage locations to places where electric vehicles - initially cars, but also bigger vehicles – are charged.

He explains how Pivot Power’s current project in Oxford, working with the council and other partners, is building an energy super-hub. 

It uses a 50MW battery station in southern Oxford at National Grid’s primary sub-station, then running an 8.5km private cable to a bus-based park-and-ride site on edge of Oxford.

With initial capacity for 20 charging stations, but with ability to grow, it’s also looking at charging buses and other vehicles in the area.

The conversation moves on to how we predict the future for infrastructure, the growth in EVs, their ownership models and what it means.

Set against this are the challenges of the time it can take to put in infrastructure, considering land use around towns and cities and how this fits with transport aspirations.

They also chat about how green transport attitudes will be normalised and what needs to be done to change people’s habits. 

For example, a study in Manchester discovered that 2m car journeys a year are for less than 1km.

The switch of delivery vans from diesel to electric – and how the take up of electric will change driving styles of light commercials - is discussed. And, why vehicles are already being updated in real-time, rather than with model changes.

They discuss the electrification of ships when in port – using shore supplies to avoid the need to run diesel generators – which turns out to be not as simple as just ‘plugging-in’ a ship to shore.

They conclude with mulling over planning issues, decentralised generation, and Edward ends with a strong message to regulators about the speed of change that’s required.

In the first of our latest podcast series – Talking Net Zero - Sarah Sloman chats with Linda Grave, CEO of EV Driver, who has spent more than a decade working in the electric vehicle sector.

She talks about her childhood and relationship with energy – through domestic heating: “We had an open fire so if we wanted heat, we had to chop wood, so one kilowatt meant a lot to me. You’d use more than a kilowatt chopping the wood.”

To make money her parents were into recycling – or upcycling – before it became fashionable, when pine furniture had come back into vogue, by improving items and selling them on.

After leaving school she started work in the banking sector before becoming an entrepreneur, running a fitness business.

From there she moved into plumbing and heating, then solar PV. When customers starting asking about electric vehicle charging, she thought ‘I’d better find out about this’, and EV Driver grew from there.

She talks about building EV charging networks, how we can grow the use of EVs and the networks to support them, alongside the difficulty businesses face finding out about grants for EV infrastructure and how we could make it all much better.