Extreme E Is First Sport Powered By ‘Completely Clean’ Energy
Author: James Morris
One of the many challenges when running motor races in inhospitable and remote locations is providing sufficient site power – particularly if your racing cars are electric. Extreme E has made part of its mission to show how this kind of off-grid supply can still be provided in a sustainable way. But as Season 3 opens in Neom, Saudi Arabia, Extreme E is using the event to demonstrate the potential of hydrogen on a much larger scale than just remote electricity supply. In the past two seasons, Extreme E partnered with AFC to provide its off-grid green power through pure hydrogen. But this can be hard to get hold of in some countries, leading to the necessity of a combustion generator backup, so for most of Season 3, Extreme E will be working with Kaizen Clean Energy to use hydrogen transpod to its race locations as methanol. For the Season 3 opener in Neom, however, Extreme E is relying on its existing partnership with ENOWA to supply enough green hydrogen to power the whole event. This has led the racing series to claim that with the start of Season 3, Extreme E has become the first sport to power itself entirely with fully clean energy. For the Saudi Arabian race, the hydrogen will be produced locally in Neom using renewable solar energy from the prodigious amount of sunshine in this part of the world, with desalinated water coming from the nearby Red Sea. “It all starts with sun and water,” says Roland Kaeppner, Executive Director of Hydrogen and Green Fuels, ENOWA. “We're splitting water using renewable energy to produce hydrogen and oxygen. Then, here at Extreme E, we reverse that process, taking green, renewable hydrogen, plus oxygen from the air, to produce energy and water. It's a circular process. The system here can produce one megawatt of power. It's the first of its kind. It's electrifying the whole race, not only to charge the cars, but for the paddocks and everything. The system is also producing 500 liters of water per hour.”