Tech Talk | Extreme E – off-road racing as a promotion for net zero

The Extreme E off-road racing platform has energy sustainability and emissions reductions as one of its key pillars.

Claimed the first sport to be built out of a social purpose, Extreme E describes itself as an “off-road racing series which showcases electric SUVs and futuristic technologies in some of the world’s most remote and challenging environments”.

In particular, its stated goal is to highlight the impact of climate change in some of the world’s most endangered environments, promote the adoption of electric vehicles to pave the way for a lower carbon future and provide a world-first gender-equal motorsport platform.

Extreme E was built on five pillars – environment, equality, energy, entertainment and emobility – and as its latest sustainability report seeks to show, it is achieving impacts in all of these areas.

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While each of these is equally important, as an energy publication let’s focus on the activities there, all guided by EY as the official sustainability partner.

Extreme E races

But to begin with some background, Extreme E has organised races in each of five locations over its three seasons to date, some repeated from year to year and some new.

For example in 2023 the races – two in each location – were at NEOM in Saudi Arabia, in the southwest of Scotland, in Sardinia and around Antofagasta in northern Chile’s Atacama desert.

Eight teams, each consisting of one male and one female driver, participate in the races in the EVs, the single all-terrain design ‘Odyssey 21’ vehicle built on a tubular frame and offering an impressive performance of 0 to 100km/h in 4.5 seconds from 400kW peak power output driven motors.

Emissions reductions

Extreme E’s assessment of its emissions is that the majority, some 87%, is associated with freight, with the majority of the remainder due to staff travel.

Extreme E’s goal is to reduce emissions across all its activities, for example by racing 100% EVs powered fully by renewable energy, leveraging solar and green hydrogen and innovating battery technology.

Among the achievements recorded in 2023 was the introduction of a newly developed hydrogen fuel cell system from Enowa with an output of 1,000kW at the Desert X Prix and accounting for almost a third of the series’ onsite energy needs during the year.

Another was the introduction of second-life repurposed battery storage systems from Zenobe providing 900kWh of energy storage and in turn, also used to provide the power for the EV chargers.

A third was the expansion of renewable energy infrastructure with a flexible solar panel system from Power Logistics accounting for up to 20% of the series’ energy.

Regarding travel, the approach is rather than air to utilise sea freight, with the refurbished ‘St Helena’ – the once lifeline plying between England and South Africa delivering supplies and other services to the remote South Atlantic island.

In the refurbishment key adjustments included stripping and rebuilding the St Helena’s engine to run on low-sulphur marine diesel and refurbishing the propellers to reduce friction and improve efficiency.

Further opportunities to reduce the emissions output are being explored and a research collaboration has been set up with Neste, Rosberg Philanthropies and Oxford SGD Labs.

Also being explored is an ‘active carbon offsetting’ programme with a pilot in 2023.

This involves collecting daily fuel consumption, which is converted to CO2e and in turn to the carbon credits required for compensation and these are then automatically retired via a blockchain platform providing a transparent and traceable record of each transaction.

A further key initiative to lowering emissions is remote broadcasting with limited on-site fan activity.

All of these activities have contributed to an over 8% decrease in the carbon footprint.

Alejandro Agag, founder and CEO of Extreme E, asserts that its global carbon footprint and sustainable innovations remain envied across motorsport.

“We are continuously measuring and evaluating our carbon output given the locations we travel to, and are putting industry-leading plans in place to ensure monitoring, accountability, and reduction as we continuously enhance our series,” he writes in the 2023 sustainability report.

Some of the plans for the current year include increasing the solar resources and testing wind energy and improving the output of Enowa’s hydrogen fuel cell system to a minimum of 15MWh to allow all event energy to be generated from green hydrogen and renewable sources.

In short, to power Extreme E race events with 100% zero emission clean energy.

As part of the further innovation, Agag points to the soon-to-be-launched Extreme H racing championship, with hydrogen-powered off-road vehicles for which a rigorous testing programme is reported as well underway.

“We cannot wait to see it on track as soon as possible,” writes Agag – and with hydrogen-powered vehicles still to gain much traction globally it should be of much interest to not only motorsport followers but the wider public too.

Jonathan Spencer Jones

Specialist writer
Smart Energy International

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