They’re running for the sixth time and its probably the sixth time I’ve mentioned them, but don’t miss the list of winners of Covering Climate Now’s Climate Journalism Awards.

India’s supreme court ruled this year that walking safely in the street is a constitutional right, prompting a new focus on pedestrianisation and questioning the centrality of cars in urban design.

It doesn’t have a presence in the UK as far as I can see, but the Stellantis car manufacturing group has a circular economy car dismantling plant in Italy that supplies refurbished spare parts across Europe. You used to have to visit a junkyard and hope for the best for that sort of thing.

Nothing to do with sustainability, but I love to seek out good books from a wide range of perspectives. I read books by authors from 22 different countries last year, and so I like the look of World Editions’ Read the World A-Z of translated novels.

Recent highlights

• How Fyffes is adopting regenerative agriculture
• Learning to live as a hot country: Madagascar
• Book review: Lifehouse, by Adam Greenfield

Their goal is to roll out their Regenerative Agriculture Framework across all their banana and pineapple farms by 2030. By leading from the front with their own farms, they hope to model sustainable practice across their wider supply chain, so that 40% of their fruit is grown with this approach by 2035.

In practice, protecting the soil on their banana and pineapple farms will involve minimising mechanical disturbance, using cover crops and leaving organic matter on the ground rather than clearing it. This returns nutrients to the soil and reduces the need for chemical inputs, while slowing evaporation and saving water.

Regenerative practice is more agnostic about chemicals than organic farming, which attempts to get rid of them entirely. Fyffes will be looking at using fertilisers and pesticides far less, and using them smarter. This can be paired with more advanced technologies, such as weed control drones that inspect pineapple farms and target herbicides exactly where they are needed. This replaces routine blanket spraying of plantations, and reduces chemical use by 80%.

Smarter irrigation can reduce water use by delivering water when it is needed and where it is needed, and using simple automation such as pausing schedules when rain is expected. Every Fyffes plantation now has a weather station and real-time monitoring.

While there have been some successes already, all of this is a long term project. The targets are for all their farms to adopt the framework, but actually working to the framework will take much longer. The first priority is to set baselines, identify promising techniques and pilot them. The full roll-out will take many years.

Big corporations have often been greeted with scepticism when making these sorts of announcements, and Fyffes is certainly a company with a few skeletons in its old colonial closet. What’s different about such strategies today is that they are actually a matter of survival in a changing climate. A regenerative agriculture strategy isn’t a nice thing to have or a bit of PR gloss. It’s how you safeguard fruit production at a time of increasing heat, disrupted rainfall and erratic global markets. It’s sustainability at its most literal: if you want to still be selling bananas and pineapples in ten years’ time, you’re going to have to learn to farm in new and improved ways.

• You can read Fyffe’s regenerative agriculture framework here.

It’s been a recurring theme of the summer. Some have said it with a concern for justice and care for the vulnerable. Others have said it as a dismissal of climate change and the suggestion that we should enjoy the heat, but both sides agree that things have changed and we need to live differently.

I have certain hesitations over the idea that Britain must ‘think like a hot country‘. It’s not that simple. Hot countries don’t need to think about winter. Britain needs to learn to cope with extremes, and that’s a different challenge. That said, I’m interested in the idea of what we can learn from hot countries because I grew up in one. I’ve often noticed how different my own attitudes to heat and shade are to my fellow Brits. For example, I took my children to a theme park this summer on a day when it hit 36C. Out of the thousands of people there, I was the only person with an umbrella to shade us while we queued for the rides. Even a hat seemed pretty much optional.

My understanding of heat and shade comes from growing up in Madagascar, and so that is where my mind goes first when thinking about what we could learn here in the UK. Let’s see what can learn from some commonplace features of a Malagasy home.

Like everything on the island, Madagascar is doing it’s own thing when it comes to architecture. The first settlers came from the East rather than mainland Africa, and so traditional homes in Madagascar owe more to Indonesian building heritage than African. In the capital and the highlands, this was then blended with Western traditions and techniques.

The example on the left is a common pattern, and my walk to school as a child took me past neighbours houses that looked similar. The ‘Trano Gasy’ is rectangular, with a sloping roof of thatch, clay tiles or metal sheeting. Windows tend to be small and are shuttered, which keeps out the heat. Most people outside of the cities wouldn’t have access to glass anyway.

The bricks are dug from the same earth the building stands on, making the whole thing highly sustainable. Mud has the added advantage of being a dense material that offers real thermal mass. It heats up slowly and then releases that heat at night, helping to maintain temperatures inside.

A distinctive feature is the line of square pillars supporting a balcony and a canopy above it. What this does is create deep shade on the sunny side of the building, and it also creates an airflow across the facade. Sometimes the balcony is screened off to create a more private space that is neither indoors nor outdoors, like these examples. Balcony railings are often brightly coloured or elaborately carved, adding personality and visual interest.

Since much of my work on overheating is in schools, let’s look at this architectural style in a school context, and the Lycee Jule Ferry. There’s a bit more of a colonial flavour here, with some extra wooden panelling creating further shade. Students can move between classrooms out of the direct sun, with deep verandas instead of the hallways and corridors usually found in UK schools.

Malagasy designers continue to use this pattern, such as the up-market version in the header above from the architectural practice Filatex.

There is little point in replicating a house like this in the UK, where our context is entirely different. But for certain periods of the year, our climate is beginning to feel distinctly tropical. Our homes aren’t designed for that, and so it’s worth looking closely at homes that are.

Would it look like to adopt some ideas from the Trano Gasy? How can we use thermal mass better? Can we bring in deep shade in the summer without compromising on winter light?

In the coming weeks I’ll write about architectural traditions in other hot countries, as we investigate how to adapt our homes for a warmer world.

India’s stepwells are a fascinating lost technology and beautiful structures in their own right, so I’m always delighted to see them getting coverage. Here Ankit Mishra writes about how traditional water harvesting methods are being rediscovered, for BBC Futures.

Oil use in China has fallen 9% this year, with the rise of electric vehicles and the instability from Trump’s flailing about in Iran. As Inside Climate News point out, that 9% is equivalent to the UK’s entire oil consumption to date this year.

Also on the oil front, some steps forward in electrofuels recently, one of the possible approaches to decarbonising the tricky aviation sector. Often abbreviated to eSAF (Electro Sustainable Aviation Fuels), it’s been used in a commercial flight for the first time in the US, and a UK start-up called Zero Petroleum has just validated a hydrogen-based ‘replica’ of standard jet fuel.

The summer issue of the Zero Carbon Luton newsletter came out last week, with details of some space-based climate science being conducted from a business park in Luton, and also where to spot highland cattle on a walk this autumn.

Recent highlights

• What are the alternatives to air conditioning?
• The Electrotech Revolution
• Who leads the world in carbon drawdown from forests?

There is no big agenda against air conditoning, though there are some reasons to be cautious about it. It isn’t common in the UK and it would be expensive and disruptive to retrofit it everywhere. Since it moves heat outside the house, A/C in densely populated areas raises outdoor temperatures for your neighbours, which is why installations are restricted in some places.

It also uses a lot of energy if everyone’s running their A/C at once on a hot day, putting extra strain on the grid. That’s fine if we’re using solar on a sunny day, but where the grid is still gas or coal, that creates a vicious circle: burning more fossil fuels to escape the consequences of burning fossil fuels.

Hence the scepticism around A/C as a silver bullet solution to overheating, and why some green campaigners warn against it.

As always, what we need most is nuance and honest conversations, though I don’t think it’s particularly complicated. Air conditioning is a technology for managing internal building temperatures, same as a heating system. The more efficient the building is, the less you need those technologies.

If you can design a well insulated building that keeps the heat in during the winter, you don’t need much heating. If you design a building to keep the heat out in summer, you don’t need any extra cooling technologies.

You wouldn’t turn your heating on and then let all the warmth out through your windows in winter. And you shouldn’t depend on air conditioning while letting the heat in through your windows in summer.

In other words, if we build homes well and live in them sensibly, we might not need much air conditioning. If it turns out some buildings can’t do without it, or that some people need cooling more than others, then let’s fit A/C and not be absolutist about it. But a lot of us might not need it. We can do simpler and cheaper things first, and we’ll save a fortune if we do.

That’s my view, and the approach I suggest to schools that overheat as well. DW Planet A made a video on this subject recently that’s well worth a watch. I’ve mentioned some of these things recently myself, but here’s their take on what we could be doing instead of installing air conditioning.

If this doesn’t seem entirely likely, perhaps you live in the global north, where we get less sun and have the winter darkness to contend with. A glance at a global map of solar potential will tell you that we are the exception.

Drop a projection of global population growth next to it, and you’ll see that we become increasingly exceptional. The fastest growing parts of the world have much greater solar resources than we do in gloomy places like the UK. Every passing year sees an increase in the percentage of the world’s population who will be able to draw all or most of their power from the sun.

With cheap solar power come a series of logical choices that make the most of it, from domestic decisions such as cooking on electric, to electrified industrial processes and infrastructure. Electric vehicles become the obvious choice for both public and private transport.

The energy thinktank Ember summarise this set of technologies as ‘electrotech‘, and argue that it adds up to a historic shift in human development. The first revolution in human energy was the discovery of settled agriculture. Fossil fuels and the industrial revolution was the second, and renewable energy represents a third.

This revolution has been accelerated by digital technologies and “inherits its momentum”, as Ember put it. It can springboard off the rapid advances in battery technology, or the efficiencies made possible through smart meters and internet connected devices. That momentum will be all important if we’re hoping to avoid catastrophic climate change. The Electrotech Revolution will need to move a whole lot faster than previous shifts in energy.

Two things worth noting in the graph above, and Ember have a nice slide-deck if you want to explore more around either of them.

First, there’s a pattern in the history: all these previous revolutions ultimately depend on the sun. Even fossil fuels are the buried legacy of ancient sunlight. In that sense, the story of human progress in energy has been a matter of using the sun more deliberately and more directly. Solar photovoltaic technologies feel like a natural progression in that story.

Second, each of these steps represents an increase in the amount of energy available to humans. This runs counter to the prevailing narrative around the green transition, which is often characterised as using less and saying no. Right-wing opponents of climate policy endlessly reinforce this, and the green movement has traditionally been structured to oppose bad things rather than champion good things. Solar power offers an opportunity to reset. It invites us to say yes. It’s about abundance, because more sunlight falls on the surface of the planet than we can ever need.

If the postmodernists taught us anything it’s to be wary of metanarratives, and I won’t be hanging my hat on the Electrotech Revolution as the solution to all our problems. Other systems are in play beyond energy technology. What I find hopeful however is the growing number of people and organisations who have spotted that something is happening in renewable energy, and solar in particular. We are in the early stages of a process that will unfold over decades. In time, it may turn out to be as significant and transformative as the industrial revolution before it.

Books on climate change have gone through several phases over the last twenty years. There were the awareness raising books, then the alarm ringing ones as those were ignored. Then came the climate grief and anxiety books. On the other side of all three of those previous waves, there’s demand for something practical. Given that we are now living in a disrupted climate, what do we do?

Lifehouse is such a book, as that subtitle makes clear: ‘taking care of ourselves in a world on fire’. It’s written by the urbanist Adam Greenfield and informed by some specific experiences. He was resident in New York during hurricane Sandy, and saw firsthand how communities can self-organise to respond to disaster. He helped out with the grassroots emergency response Occupy Sandy, and it was clearly a formative experience. If a community can organise successfully in a disaster situation, can we do something purposeful in the ‘long emergency’ of the climate crisis?

Occupy Sandy, you may remember, was a spontaneous citizen response to the catastrophic storm that hit New York in 2012. They mobilised some 60,000 volunteers and served 20,000 meals a day across dozens of makeshift centres. They were found to be ultimately more effective than the government’s FEMA response and also the Red Cross. As Greenfield explains, the fact that they had grown out of the Occupy movement was an important part of their success. People brought their principles of autonomy, solidarity, horizontal decision-making and direct action. They could get stuff done without waiting for anyone’s permission. The accusations often levelled against the movement – that they were naive, impractical and utopian – turned out to be entirely false when tested in this context.

The book goes on to describe similar moments from history, stories of “people doing something about conditions of life they had come to find intolerable. We read about Greece during the financial crisis. Another section looks at the Black Panthers and their ‘survival programmes’, activities that have perhaps been overlooked in the wider mythologising of the era. At its height, the Panthers provided a wide range of services to communities that were being neglected, often purposefully. Food programmes such as Free Breakfasts for Children were the largest, but there were others providing dentistry, ambulances, housing, free shoes, plumbing and maintenance, and even medical research into conditions that disproportionately affected black communities.

Greenfield keeps the tone conversational and exploratory, and doesn’t dig too much into theory. One exception is the thinking of Murray Bookchin, who advocated for ‘communalism’ rather than communism, and imagined this a kind of ‘libertarian municipalism’. Strangely enough, his ideas directly inspired the anarchist state of Rojava in Syria, and have been put into practice in its self-government.

Learning from these various stories, Greenfield lands us back in community responses to climate change with the specific suggestion in the title: Lifehouses. This is where you would find a food bank, a tool library, a warm hub in winter and a cool hub in summer. If the power went out, it would be solar powered and the place to go to recharge your phone. The Lifehouse would be a centre for community response and ideally within walking distance for everyone, looking to local needs and coordinating regionally on bigger challenges. Now based in the UK, Greenfield observes that churches are often best placed to be Lifehouses. (Some already are. My own church has a vegetable garden, free books, a tool library, a food bank and the biggest solar array in the neighbourhood, though it would not be able to articulate a philosophy of resilience or mutual aid.)

The author isn’t naive about the limits to these sorts of things. Mutual aid doesn’t come with any legal rights or minimum standards. You can’t appeal to any authority if you’re let down. It’s not going to replace other structures of decison making, but neither should we expect those legacy structures to be adequate. “Stop investing faith and energy in institutions that are demonstrably failing us,” he suggests, and invest in “local self-organised action” where we can.

We need more storytelling like this, more examples to learn from, and the idea of Lifehouses is explored further in the podcast Lifepod. Individualist societies naturally give rise to individualist crisis responses such as survivalism. This extricates the rich and the strong from the crisis, without doing anything to ease the suffering of everyone else. We will all be better off working together and getting started where the opportunities present themselves.

Governments aren’t equipped to deliver what we need, and so no amount of protest will get us very far. The billionaire philanthropists can’t help, and neither should we expect any miracle technologies. In the absence of this climate cavalry, we might want to put our energies behind “faith in the wisdom of ordinary people”.

• Lifehouse is available from Earthbound Books

Carbon Brief recently published an article on why global land use emissions are falling. Among the interesting facts therein is this one: the country that leads the world in carbon removal through forestry is China.

China doesn’t have the most forest coverage, either in land area or in percentage of tree cover. Finland’s forests cover almost three quarters of the country, versus China’s 25%. For size, Brazil, Russia, the United States and Canada all have more square miles of forest. The reason that China pulls in more carbon is that its forest are growing.

That wasn’t the case hundred years ago, with agriculture and the timber industry pushing China’s forests to a historic low by the middle of the last century. This had consequences, including soil erosion, drought, creeping desertification and sandstorms. A series of government programmes were launched to reverse the damage. The most famous is the Three-North Shelterbelt, often called the Great Green Wall, which aims to contain the Gobi Desert. Another project was Grain for Green, which paid farmers to turn some of their crop land back into forest in order to preserve soil integrity.

As this overview describes, some of these schemes weren’t initially successful or had unintended consquences. Projects that relied on monocultures of fast-growing species such as larch or eucalyptus found their quick wins came at the expense of local biodiversity. Over time the guidance has been updated to favour native trees and natural regrowth over tree planting targets. Lessons were learned in stakeholder participation and using local knowledge, or in unlocking co-benefits to use forestry to stop landslides or restore water supplies. Projects are now having to incorporate climate resilience into their planning.

These land restoration programmes were carried out on a scale unmatched anywhere else on the planet. Tree cover has risen from around 12% in the 1970s to 25% today, a startling recovery in the course of a single lifetime. There have been some remarkable regional successes tucked beneath those national statistics, like the Taklamakan Desert. Scientists using satellite data confirmed recently that after millions of years as a sandy desert, it is now a carbon sink.

Young trees pull in more carbon as they grow, which is why China’s massive re-forestation effort has a more positive effect on emissions than some larger mature forests elsewhere. (Those standing forests are storing a lot more carbon, so it isn’t a matter of one being superior to the other.) Restoring degraded forests is also quicker than growing new ones from scratch, which also helps to account for China’s outsized contribution here.

Nobody else is going to have the scale of impact, both positive and negative, on the climate that China has. But we can learn from their successes. As the Rapid Transition Alliance explain, China has proved that land and forest restoration can be done at pace, in ways that include local populations and that don’t hold back development. Plenty of other places could run with this – including the UK.

My home country of England has just 10% forested land, where China was a generation ago. Why shouldn’t that be 25% by the time my children reach retirement age?

Chinese battery maker CATL, the world’s largest supplier of EV batteries, has reached carbon neutrality across all of its 20 factories. It will focus on supply chain emissions next, which are a bigger problem and a trickier one to solve.

I wrote about AI and capitalism recently, which highlighted the reality that AI isn’t good or bad in itself. The important question is who it serves. You can put it to work reducing emissions, or you can put to uses that increase them. Here’s a story about how the oil industry is optimising production with AI tools, which could increase global emissions by 5%. On the other hand, AI is being used to detect and report methane leaks so that they can be fixed faster.

My garden is the colour of straw this summer, after five heatwaves and a drought in the UK. So I noted this article on how rewilded land is proving more resilient to drought. This is about a single project, and I’d be interested to know if the effects are widespread.

Along similar lines, here’s a fascinating study from Washington State that shows how nature restoration can have unexpected linkages: the presence of cougars in the landscape reduces car accidents caused by deer by 76%.

Recent highlights

• Why EV battery swapping matters
• The age of solar power is here
• Positive travel experiences with Flight Free Schools

Like plug-in solar, or the transformation happening in places like Pakistan, it’s further evidence of how solar is establishing itself as the power source of the future. The technology to tap into the free energy of the sun is available to a growing percentage of the world’s population. This cuts emissions from burning fossil fuels and reduces air pollution, but it also improves energy security, lowers energy costs, and rebalances political power. The huge lobbying might of the fossil fuel companies is eroding, and a new geopolitics of solar power is emerging.

This isn’t theoretical any more. It’s happening, and we are in the first chapters of a story that will run for decades to come. We don’t know how it will play out, but a solar economy will not be like the fossil fuel economy. The last 200 years have been based around clawing materials out of the ground and setting them on fire. Control over those resources has been crucial, and a major source of conflict. Scarcity or interruption to supplies can upend economies, topple governments and cause widespread misery and deprivation.

If the sun is the centre of the energy system – as it is already in non-human systems – this looks very different. What happens when energy is essentially free, inexhaustible, and beyond anyone’s control? What does it mean to have more than you could ever need? Where fossil fuels require a huge ongoing project of digging and grinding and burning, solar infrastructure essentially lies down in the sun. Stop and think about this, as the philosopher Oxana Timofeeva invites us to do in her book Solar Politics, and it raises some profound questions.

Imagine a solar economy where energy never runs out and is available to everyone for free. How relevant do terms like ‘consumerism’, ‘capitalism’ or ‘economic growth’ sound in such a context? I don’t ask this to imply some kind of solar utopia, just to point out that our basic understanding of the economy developed alongside the technologies that power it. Modern economic theory has been shaped by fossil fuelled industrialisation, and the widespread adoption of renewable energy will challenge some basic assumptions about what the economy is and how it works.

I look forward to seeing how the possibilities unspool over the rest of my lifetime. In the meantime, Bill McKibben is one of the most articulate commentators on our present moment, and the opportunities of a solar economy. It’s all explained in his recent book Here Comes the Sun, and if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s Bill McKibben’s TED talk from earlier this year:

Out to prove me wrong are Nissan, who recently announced that they are joining a UK government funded collaboration on efficient EV charging, which will include integrated solar.

Meanwhile on the buses, C-40 Cities are celebrating the milestone of 10,000 electric buses on the roads of Latin America. You can see where they are on their e-bus radar.

Shade the UK are running a crowdfunder at the moment to continue their work to prevent overheating – including a project they’re partnering on with us at Let’s Go Zero, and that I’ve been working on for several months. Please do contribute if you’ve got a little to spare. It’s match funded, so you can double your donation for nothing.

The EU has introduced new rules to prevent clothing companies from destroying unsold stock, one of the more perverse aspects of the fast fashion industry.

I’m still in summer mode at the moment, and still working on other writing projects, so it’ll be a little slow for a while longer in terms of new posts. But here are some recent articles in case you missed them.

Recent highlights

• The carbon cost of expanding Luton Airport
• Capitalism, now with AI
• What if we stopped talking about growth?

We’ve seen these sorts of announcements before. The first I’ve come across was all the way back in 1938, a plan for a national EV battery swapping network that was overtaken by the war and never happened. There have been several attempts since in different parts of the world, and some high profile failures.

Why does the idea of battery swapping keep coming around? What do Octopus see in the idea? And what would it take to make a success of battery swapping when others have failed?

There have always been two main ways to recharge a battery electric vehicle. One is to plug it in. The other is to put new batteries in it. Although all our EV infrastructure in the UK is built around recharging today, there’s nothing inevitable about it as a superior technology. Right from the earliest days of electric vehicles in the early 1900s, there’s been a live debate over recharging or swapping batteries. It is not yet settled.

There are advantages to both. Recharging is simpler, and charging points are easier to accomodate. You need a parking space and a grid connection with sufficient capacity, but not much more than that. Once the industry has standardised connectors, all manufacturers can design their cars to use the network. The downside is that charging takes time. That’s fine if you’re charging overnight and not using the car, but it’s a pain when topping up on long journeys. It means waiting around, every long journey takes more time, and on busy travel days there’s the stress of finding a charger.

Battery swapping solves the time problem and gets you back on the road quicker. Despite that obvious advantage, batteries are heavy and the systems for swapping them quickly are complex. It’s far more expensive to develop and build out a network of switching stations than it is to build out a charging network.

Where charge networks just need a connector, you also need car manufacturers to standardise their entire battery system, and the chassis to accommodate it. You need to design the whole car around the idea. That’s a tall order and it’s where the most high profile start-up fell down. Better Place only persuaded one company to use their system, and it burned the best part of a billion dollars in venture capital on its way to nowhere.

On its own, history suggests that the speed factor isn’t enough to justify the expense and complexity of battery swapping for EVs. But the idea has more going for it than meets the eye, and there are some good reasons why it won’t go away.

First, if your car had swappable batteries, then you wouldn’t need to buy one of your own. You would just buy the vehicle, and pay to use batteries that were owned by a charge supplier. Since the battery is the most expensive component of an EV, this makes them much more affordable. This is less relevant at the luxury end of the market. Tesla developed battery swapping, opened just one swap station in 2013 and then closed it down because nobody cared.

The luxury market is, however, small fry in the grand scale of things. Battery leasing is a business model that’s driving sales of electric scooters, motorbikes and three-wheelers in many parts of the world. It’s easy to forget this in the US or Europe, where most road traffic has four wheels, but there are many countries where cars are vastly outnumbered. Motorbikes and scooters dominate in East Asia, and it’s where the growth is in much of Africa. The transition to electric transport is a two-wheeled phenomenon in the Global South.

This is a good match for swappable batteries, because the battery for an electric scooter is the size of a shoebox. You can pick it up by hand and pass it over a counter for a new one. In a tuk-tuk or a micro-car, you might have two or three modular batteries of that size. A battery swapping station can serve hundreds of customers from a unit the size of a shipping container. This is a far cry from a battery swapping station for a car, with its larger land footprint and sophisticated robots to move and install charge packs.

If we shift our perspective from north to south, and from four wheels to two, battery swapping makes complete sense. It is far from theoretical, and is already a thriving industry. See SUN Mobility in India, for example, or Ampersand in Kenya and Rwanda.

There’s another big advantage to swapping networks to bear in mind, and that’s the ability to charge batteries when energy is cheap. Rather than plugging in and charging on demand, battery companies can take advantage of overnight rates or times of surplus, and this keeps costs down for everyone. As a bonus, slow and measured charging is much better for the battery than rapid charging, so batteries may well last longer. It shifts battery power towards a service model, bringing them into the circular economy.

This timing factor explains Octopus’ interest in the UK. They will be serving trucks, which means very large batteries. An electric HGV could have a battery with a capacity of 400 or 500kwh. Every battery swapping station will have a whole stack of these at various levels of charge, and so they will double-up as a grid-level energy storage facility.

What Octopus will be able to do is to charge these battery packs when energy prices are low, either overnight or during periods of high wind or solar production. Users get lower prices, and it will play an important part in integrating variable energy sources into the grid. The system will run in two directions, so that Octopus can sell power back to the grid during demand spikes. This is bread and butter stuff for Octopus, who began as a software company and already have the systems for managing energy storage and smart charging.

There’s a reason why this works with trucks too. Trucking is a more predictable business than individual motoring, and so battery swapping points can be at motorway service stations or at depots. You need fewer of them, and Octopus will be using a platform that’s already proven and profitable in China. Chinese HGV companies are designing for it, and European manufacturers such as Volvo and Scania are moving in that direction.

It’s in the interests of the logistics industry to move towards battery swapping too. They want to minimise the number of vehicles standing idle across their fleet, and the charging time on a 500kwh battery is going to be a major inefficiency. The same would be true of delivery vans, buses and taxis, where battery swapping will help keep vehicles on the road. This too is a proven approach in China and in a handful of other places.

Battery swapping for cars is still a difficult proposition, though possible. One car brand in China, NIO, is making it work already. CATL, the world’s largest battery company, are investing in the Chinese battery swapping market. It’s arguably mainstream already, and in the long term it looks likely that China is going to have the best of both worlds. You’ll be able charge your car at home for everyday use, but swap batteries on longer journeys, and outsource battery ownership to a service company. We’ll see.

For the rest of us, I’m not convinced this sort of hybrid system will be available to ordinary drivers in the UK any time soon, as fast-charging networks are expanding and eroding the case for them. Where swapping really makes sense is with fleets and with vehicles with larger batteries. And at the other end of the scale, it works with smaller vehicles in developing countries and is already playing a role in leapfrogging past fossil fuels.