THE PROJECT

PAST PROJECTS

Stuart McBain has been an electric car owner and enthusiast for many years. He is passionate about sustainability transformation, from using fossil fuels to using renewable energy sources. With more than 40 years involved in sustainability and finding economically environmental solutions to business issues, he was the first man to drive around both the UK and Iceland in an electric vehicle. He is an enthusiastic advocate of the theory of ‘environmentally sustainable, economically viable’ which helped inspire his previous ‘Charge Around’ adventures.

CHARGING AROUND BRITAIN

– 17th March 2017 to 8th April 2017

Charging Around Britain was Stuart’s first ‘Charge Around’ challenge. Known at the time as Adventure #1, this approximately 4,000-mile-long drive around the coast of Britain in his own Tesla Model S electric car, started and finished in Liverpool. 

The epic journey over 23 days relied on electric vehicle-friendly charging points and Tesla’s own Supercharger network, and visited people, organisations and accommodation at the cutting edge of sustainable business, including Whitelee Windfarm near Glasgow, Scotland run by Scottish Power Renewables and the Centre for Alternative Technology in Powys, Mid-Wales. Stuart covered 3,932.1 electric miles at a total fuel cost of just GBP 7.50 – quite an achievement.

CHARGING AROUND ICELAND

– October 2017

In October 2017, Stuart and his team, including his 81-year-old mother Anita, embarked on their second challenge. Charging Around Iceland used two electric cars, a Nissan Leaf and a Kia Soul, to drive around the 1,332km circuit of the country’s Highway 1 ring road, before attending the Charge Energy Branding conference in Reykjavik.

This may not sound too challenging, but with no network or infrastructure of charging points, numerous mountains to negotiate and often more than 100km between villages along the way, it was very different to driving around the coast of Britain. Many would find this a greater challenge in an electric vehicle due to much more remote and sparsely populated routes increasing what has become known as ‘range anxiety’.

Nevertheless, the team successfully made it around the dramatic landscape, across glaciers and over mountains, including passing through regions considered to be so out of this world that NASA has trained astronauts for Apollo missions there to prepare them for moon landings!

Listen to Stuart’s diaries
from previous Charging Around trips

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