Speaking on the Formula E movement, Iain Banner says while it’s great to stage an international project like this in Africa, there needs to be a purpose.
“When people say, Mother Nature, the environment, is in trouble. She’s not in trouble; she might be hurting. But, when she’s ready, with one flick of her tail, she’ll wipe us all out and go to sleep for 1,000 or a million years, or however long she chooses, to restore herself, and we, mankind, and humankind will be gone. So, the activities we are talking about are very much about preserving the human race.”
So says Iain Banner, the co-founder of E-Movement, the organisers of the Cape Town E-Prix, the first ever Formula E race to the held in sub-Saharan Africa, that took place in February in Cape Town. The organisers hosted a week of activities leading up to the race that attracted more than 25 thousand race spectators and an economic impact of more than R1-billion rand for the Mother City.
This spectacular Formula E event is expected to return in February next year.
In the 12 years since the conception of the electric version of Grand Prix racing, “the cars are now faster from 0 to 200km. It is the only sporting code in the world that is net zero and has the promotion of sustainability at its very centre,” says Banner.
Putting purpose at the centre
According to Banner, while “it’s great to stage an international project like Formula E in Africa and to shine, I realised very quickly in looking at bringing the race here that it needed to be so much more than a race. It is an example of what can be done at a net zero sustainable level. How is it that you can have these sporting machines, generating 350kW of power and racing at net zero, and it’s all audited. So, looking at that made us made me realise we have to put purpose at the centre of what we are doing.”
Therefore, apart from hosting 25-thousand spectators at the E-Prix (estimated to increase to 40-thousand in 2024), a series of support programmes were created. These included Africa’s Green Economy Summit, which in its first edition had 381 delegates and 77 speakers and the Electric Festival, in which “all things E” were showcased to the public and received 12,500 visitors.
Important initiative: Formula Student Africa
“We also launched Formula Student Africa, which is led by Warwick University in the UK,” Banner continues. “If we are going to address e-mobility in this country, we’ve got to start with our manufacturing sector. It’s 14% of the country’s economy now. We better have young people developing all the skill sets required around e-mobility. We now have nine local universities, so next year, we’ll enter a racing team. And that means setting up a team; Warwick gives the blueprints and support.
This Formula E event means having the “data scientists and engineers; it means having the marketing team. It means having a promotions team and a social media team. It’s a business proposal. And we’ve got nine universities and Technikons on board. So that’s the start of what I think will become an important initiative. That’s one further element of what we staged.”
Go Green Africa
Realising the powerful platform through which to celebrate the net zero activity annually, Banner joined forces with like-minded organisations to create Go Green Africa, to, as he puts it, “partly to help us save ourselves from ourselves.”
He explains: “We wish to accelerate the transition starting in South Africa, but into Africa, into a green economy in a just and inclusive way, which is spoken about a lot these days. But the question is, how do we do that? And the answer is we bring members (our partners) to join us and undertake certain pledges to decarbonise, innovate, educate, inspire and empower, to collaborate and leverage influence and to reach further in their green activities. And collaboration is what it’s all about, and there is no single solution to the challenges that are out there. We’ve got a shared mission with our partners.”
Uber and Eskom are the founding partners, and VUKA Group, Sustnet, The Global Trust Project and Materials Nexus are associate partners, while the Western Cape is the founding region.
Reimagining materials
“One example of the kind of collaboration I’m referring to is with Dr Jonathan Bean at Materials Nexus. Jonathan is a physicist at Trinity College at Cambridge, and he has started a business reimagining materials. He has developed an algorithm driven by AI, which computes at between 200 and 1,000 times the speed of traditional modelling. So, if you’re thinking of an alloy, say 13 different components, how do you establish first and foremost net-zero, tensile strength, weight, etc., you plot through your modelling traditionally, and that can take anything up to 20 years sometimes.
“We all talk about green hydrogen; it’s an exciting medium for the future. And I’ve spoken to Fleetwood Grobler [President and CEO of Sasol], specifically about Sasol. They run their Fischer-Tropsch reactors at Sasolburg, of which they are eight using grey hydrogen, and it costs between $1 and $2 [per kg]. Green hydrogen currently costs between $7 and $8. It is not economically sustainable.
“But apart from that, what people don’t talk about is that when you split the atom, and you separate the hydrogen from the oxygen, you need iridium as part of the process, the rare earth metal iridium. If we look at the green hydrogen that’s spoken about, in the Northern Cape and in Namibia alone, we need 60,000 rugby fields of solar, which is potentially doable. But you need 40 times the iridium that’s been identified to date in order to go through that separation process.”
Just imagine, Formula E and more
“So, Jonathan has come on board and with his machine learning partner at Oxford, they are busy, right now, reimagining green hydrogen with a view to having electrons sitting at the middle rather than iridium. Normally, it would take 20 years, the project is anticipated to take 18 months.
“Just imagine if we, as Go Green Africa, could have helped to bring about change that results in green hydrogen not costing $7 to $8 but costing $2 to $3. When suddenly, a company like Sasol could run green hydrogen, and immediately South Africa, at least, became green, our second largest polluter in Africa. That is potentially what we call impact. That is what Go Green Africa is working on.”
According to Banner, the African continent can solve its own problems: “If Vietnam can generate 9.3GW of power during 2020, how is it that we have an unsurmountable power challenge? We do not. We can solve our problems, and we can do it in a much quicker period, in my opinion, than people are estimating.”
Iain Banner delivered the keynote address at Enlit Africa in May 2023 at the CTICC in Cape Town.