The Heart of the Joule

Is the Joule destined for gemstone greatness, or will this be another case of Electric fool’s gold?

On the eve of Earth Hour I’m as energy conscious as everyone else. I’m flying on a milky March day to Cape Town. Once there I consider myself fortunate to snap up the very last rental, a snow white Toyota Yaris. Freshly ensconced in an ICEV [Internal Combustion Engine Vehicle] I cruise onto the N2 and almost crash headlong into a traffic jam that deceptively starts its slow snaking on the downside of a flyover. I’m heading via the traffic snarl towards the CSIR in Stellenbosch where I’ll be meeting the electrical engineer Gerard Swart, one of the four brains that conceived the Joule.

While I’m motivated and excited about my imminent encounter, I’m fully prepared for a wild goose chase. It’s no secret that the concept of the electric car has been in play ever since the first ICE rolled off Ford’s assembly line. Sure, EV’s can be built (in fact, we’re surrounded by a number of low-tech EV’s on a daily basis, from golf carts, to buses, to the occasional milk van or baggage truck) – the problem is they’re not easy to render profitably on a mass scale. If no one has been able to crack into the commercial vehicle fleets at a profit so why should the Joule be any different?

I enter the CSIR building as a veil of thin cirrus swirls in front of the sun. I am the first to arrive and my guns are loaded. Has the Joule solved the battery problem? (EV’s have prohibitively expensive batteries, and these usually have a very limited lifespan). Does the Joule solve the energy problem? (Is there a net energy difference – i.o.w. a difference (a saving) between pouring petrol or liquefied coal into your car compared to converting coal to electric energy used for batteries and then propulsion – if not, the Joule is a dead duck). Finally, will the Joule project have access to a lot of capital to finance a large rollout and world domination?

When Gerhard arrives to set up his laptop I immediately stand up and invite him for an unscheduled quick Q&A session before his presentation. It’s a credit to him that he graciously accepts my invitation while delegates sip wine and chew on carrot sticks outside the auditorium.

First off, Gerhard tells me in unexpectedly soft-spoken and well-enunciated English that he “loves nature” and that he grew up on a farm in Zimbabwe. He refers to pristine environments and “virgin territory” which he says now can only be found on old photographs. I ask him about his background. “Twenty years ago I was at DENEL,” South Africa’s premier defense lab. It’s obviously a mixed bag, hearing that Swart worked on the Rooivalk attack helicopter, specifically the weapons systems. How altruistic is that? I’m wondering.

After Rooivalk, Swart and three colleagues migrated to SALT (Southern African Large Telescope; the largest single optical telescope in the southern hemisphere). Swart tells me that the systems engineering performed on the 11-metre hexagonal mirror array at Sutherland was “at the cutting edge of what is technically possible. Our work at SALT meant we were competing at a very high level and we had a lot of involvement from the best scientists in that field, worldwide.”


While Swart and his colleagues had to employ more brain cells and circuits than ever on SALT, he discovered the move from Gauteng to Cape Town had also precipitated a lifestyle change: “My quality of life immediately increased; you know, to be able to go and climb a mountain and sit on the beach rather than getting into a car for three hours to get to a park somewhere.”

The successful project, which started in 2000, effectively became the Progenitor of another South African milestone, the groundbreaking Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a radio telescope currently in development in the Northern Cape – the Array will be 50 times more sensitive than other systems of its kind.

“So I lived in Sutherland for eighteen months during 2004 until November 2005. It was as rural as it gets. And I shared this lonely experience with Jian Swiegers, Kobus Meiring and Mike Lomberg. And it was then, working on what was essentially a non-defence-project, where information is freely available, that Kobus started talking about giving something back. He said ‘The nature of energy is going to change a lot in the future. I’m at the point in my life where I want to put something back.’ And we all agreed to that.”

My gaze shifts from Gerhard’s face to the sharply focused blue eyes.

“2005 was when energy started coming onto the radar, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, and as our work at SALT was coming to an end, the four of us said: ‘What are we going to do next’? And since we’d worked well together, we decided we wanted to make a positive difference. It’s hard to rationalise your work on defense systems when they’re being sold to other countries, and you don’t know which side they’re selling it to…You come to a point where you feel: ‘This isn’t right.’ That’s why I left DENEL in 1996.”

“So now you’ve gone from building things that destroy other things to building things that look out into the universe to…”

The unstated question is, will this project, this car, subtract from the woes generated by other cars? Woes that include pollution, resource depletion (resources that could be utilised as fertilizers and medicines for generations to come) and a widening systemic collapse that threatens to disintegrate the entire auto-industry.

“In our efforts to make a positive difference, Kobus especially did a lot of research, and we came up with the idea of an electric vehicle. Then we went to the Innovation Fund – a South African Department affiliated to the Department of Science and Technology. We got seed funding for early development; it’s probably the only fund in the country where you can get funds for early development. It took us 18 months to get the money; not because they weren’t convinced of the merits of the project – it’s just a very cumbersome process. We got R5 million for the first year, which was really a feasibility study, a paper study, with a promise of R10 million to follow. While they initially requested we get additional funding from an industrial partner, they later came to believe – as we do – that this was too big to hastily involve someone else. So they gave us their full backing to nurture this project to its completion. And since 2008 the IDC have also started backing us. So the IDC and the Innovation Fund are shareholders in Optimal Energy.”

“I want to know how you guys set about developing this EV. Did you follow other developments or did you go in your own direction? In other words, how distinctive is the JOULE from the EV projects that have come and gone?”

“What we did early on, in fact even before we had funding, we started going to energy and EV conferences specifically. The Electric Vehicle Symposium is in its 24th year this year (scheduled for May in Stavanger, Norway). The automotive industry considers it a fringe conference. In the last few years the automakers have been attending, but prior to that they’d been scoffing at it.”

“Before the Electric Vehicle idea had been fully conceived,” I ask, “had you guys heard of things like Peak Oil?”

“Yes. That’s really to a large extent what triggered this. Firstly we saw that the nature of transport had to change because it’s not sustainable. Carbon-based fuels are at some stage going to run out and obviously liquid hydro-carbons (petrol and diesel) are going to run out sooner. We also looked at the auto-industry and noticed quite a few things that indicated its demise.”

“Such as?”

“Such as General Motors having their Pension Fund payouts listed as their biggest single expense in the company. Their margins over the last 10 years haven’t exceeded around 4%. Those are the high-level symptoms. When you delve in deeper you see that all of us drive vehicles. You know the basic shape and concept hasn’t changed since Henry Ford sent those first vehicles through the assembly lines.”

And now the epiphany begins to ring like a small bell in my ears. Ordinary vehicle technology is very old, and facing its natural obsolescence. Once one accepts this as a fundamental truth, it is easy to move forward. But is there a superior alternative technology available (compared to the dead ends that preceded this project) capable of delivering the right dose of energy for the energy gluttons that we commuters have invariably become?

“We realised, from an engineering point of view, that motoring the way we’re experiencing it is not optimal. That was also one of the reasons why we called the company Optimal Energy. It’s really about optimising things other people have tried to do, but who have become stuck in a particular way of doing it. The transport thing was the first step in this whole energy dream that we had in mind.”

“If you get to the stage where you want to roll this out as a very elaborate project, you know, worldwide, how do you see the credit crisis impacting on your business? Will you be able to get the capital to go into mass production?”

“In the short term we haven’t found the huge investment that is needed to set up our production. When we launched the vehicle at the Paris show last year, we suddenly saw numerous appointments that we’d arranged with major investors fizzle – remember the big crash happened 2 weeks before the show opened. And they told us this: that in two weeks most of their cash had evaporated.

From a longer term point of view it’s been fantastic because people are looking for new answers to the economy and the automotive industry; and have recognised that a fundamental shift is taking place. Our vehicle has been so well-received everywhere we’ve shown it because people are ready for it, and so in a certain sense it’s a growth path laid out for us; a path that we can just get onto and from which we can leverage our way even further into the industry. You know the automotive industry is really struggling to adapt to current conditions.”

In fact GM and Chrysler have consistently failed to adapt. Instead of building smaller, more efficient vehicles and having to compete with the experts at this (the Japanese, Germans and Koreans), they’ve done the opposite. At the time of writing, Obama is speaking on television news that these automakers will not be the wards of government. If they fail to perform (in other words to innovate, to adapt, to optimise) they will be placed in the dustbin of history. Almost certainly, the writing is on the wall, and what will take the place of this giant chunk of obsolete engineering removed from the highways and byways of the world?

“They’ve got so many legacy systems, so many existing designs – for them to make the changes that we’ve just introduced from a fresh start, you know, is just about impossible.”

It’s time to draw my revolver.

“One of the most expensive and troublesome and expensive areas when it comes to EV technology – am I right – is the battery?”

“Yes.”

“Have you guys solved that problem?”

“We haven’t solved it fully, but we’re relying on a trend that has been underway for many years and is set to continue. Batteries have become better and cheaper with increased use. It’s especially due to the lithium ion batteries in cellphones and laptops that this technology has really become more affordable. We’ve been to China and Korea and the United States looking for batteries…”

“The Koreans are quite advanced in battery manufacture,” I say, a mental image of the world’s largest Philips-LG flatscreen flashing to the surface - image courtesy of cycling trips I did north of Seoul.”

“Yes. Our prototype in fact is using Korean batteries. They’re delivering quantum improvements in battery technology. I was there for the first time in August last year, visiting some of these battery companies.”

The puzzle of the Joule is fitting together nicely. Expertise in weapons design courtesy of a stint working in Defense Labs for the government, the super-fine science and engineering of space telescopes and some fortuitous help from abroad in the form of the magic key, the battery. And to think that all of this is happening within the increasingly appropriate economic environment of collapse and systemic reform – not only of automakers, but of energy, banks and perhaps most importantly, our global mindset. While the consumer frenzy has unlocked all sorts of anthropogenic shocks – from global warming to depletion to the extraordinary zenith in technological zeal. One vital benefit has emerged: the development par excellence, and entirely perfunctory, of the ordinary devices all these gadgets run on – lithium ion batteries.

The masters of reinventing, re-engineering, and innovation are the Koreans. They’ve done this with everything from their own economy, to their own vehicle and shipbuilding fleets. It’s not for nothing that a country 10% the size of South Africa, with the same population size, is the world’s 13th largest economy – and they reached this level from being one of the poorest countries, flattened by war in 1953. In Korea, speed is a catchphrase: everything is fast, from the internet to building construction.

But the story, as Gerhard says, is still unfolding.

“Their batteries are really fantastic, but they’re expensive. The Chinese batteries are cheaper, but they’re not as good.”

“So how many of your vehicles are out there right now?”

“None.”

“So what was at the Paris show?”

“A rolling chassis. An undercarriage with a drivetrain, the batteries – that was finished in 2007, and also the outer shell of the vehicle. The model was what was at the Paris show. And since then we’ve been working on a second prototype which is refined, with everything in it, and fully functional. Last week Friday we declared it mechanically complete. It’s still not drivable but everything is there. Now it is just the software and electrical functionality and safety testing that needs to be done.

“Due to the sanctions in then-Rhodesia my father had to be extremely inventive on the farm to actually make things work out; we had to make our own spare parts for tractors. He was an innovator – he could do anything. And that created in me, I think, two things: the realisation, firstly, that perhaps nothing is impossible, that if you really apply your mind you can do many things. And secondly it created an appreciation for the value…of knowing a bit about everything. My function on the Rooivalk and with SALT and Optimal Energy is what they call System Engineering which is basically what the International Council on Systems Engineering [INCOSE] is about – a multi-disciplined engineering; where you bring a whole lot of unrelated things together to achieve a greater purpose. And I think the roots of my interest and my success at that may be found in having learned from my father’s attitude on the farm, and my being involved in what he did.”

During these last statements, where Gerhard really reaches the core of his philosophy, several delegates begin to enter the auditorium and I’m prodded to wrap up. As Gerhard hands me his card, an elegant royal blue that has the corporate feel of a South African Samsung, I say, “Well I think ultimately we’ll be going back to the farm.”

That’s some way off, but in a sense, I realise, this project, Gerhard and his team’s dream of the world’s first mass produced electric car, may well be one of those critical and vital solutions our world needs in this time of converging troubles. Gerhard Swart, I believe, provides cause to celebrate in Possibility, in what may well be the first fundamental shift in our prospects.