In 2012, Rafael de Mestre did something nobody else ever had – he drove around the world in an electric car, an original Tesla Roadster. And now, he’s driving around the world solo again in that same Roadster as a promotional and scouting tour and to recruit other teams to join him for yet another circumnavigation in 2024.
We got a chance to talk to him about his story when he stopped by for a charge during his second solo circumnavigation.
An IT consultant by trade, de Mestre was born in Catalunya and grew up in Germany. Early in his life, he remembers seeing the Citroen DS 21 and really liking it – except for the smell. He asked, why does it need to be so smelly? Isn’t it just going to make everything smelly? The adults told him no, there’s plenty of air; it won’t be a problem.
He wonders, now, what things might have been like if the adults had listened to him. And now, he’s driving around the world – again – to show that all of us can stop stinking up the air without sacrificing mobility, even on the longest and harshest routes.
Past round-the-world trips
The first trip around the world in an EV was in a time before there were many electric car chargers installed anywhere – and certainly no DC fast chargers yet, either. But de Mestre likes to say, “Wherever there is light burning, you can charge your car.” The point is that charging stations are far more available than most people think, and an EV can be charged anywhere that there’s electricity, which covers most of the world (he also saved his charging points in the Electromaps app).
It started as somewhat of a personal challenge – de Mestre had planned in 2013 to be the first to drive around the world once he took delivery of his Model S. However, in February 2012, a Citroen C-Zero took off from Strasbourg, piloted by two French drivers. Deciding he couldn’t let the duo beat him, de Mestre hastily planned a journey and set out from his native Catalunya in the electric car he had available, a Tesla Roadster, hoping to overtake the French team.
Over the next few months, the “race” took the two electric cars across Europe, the US, the Gobi desert, Kazakhstan, the Ural mountains, and Russia. In September, just a few weeks before the end of the trip, de Mestre managed to pass the Citroen and finished the journey around the world as the first electric car to ever make the trip.
Somehow, he found a way to off-road in San FranciscoAn EV making a splash in Kazakhstan in 2012
The whole thing took 127 days – more than the 80 that de Mestre had hoped for, but given the limited time for planning visas and shipping across oceans (and a crash just 600 miles before the finish line), it’s not so bad for a first time out.
In 2016, de Mestre and 10 other teams completed a similar trip but this time with a greater variety of cars and more charger support. That trip involved one Roadster, eight Model S, one Denza, and one electric bus from the Hungarian company Modulo. And this time, they completed it in the planned 80 days.
Another trip was planned for 2020, but needless to say, travel was a bit more difficult that year. So that trip was pushed back and will now occur next year, in 2024.
Current solo circumnavigation – scouting for 2024
In advance of that trip, de Mestre has started on another solo world tour, scouting routes and locations for next year and looking for potential supporters or teams to recruit and join the trip. If you’re interested, check out 80edays to suggest stops or to express interest in becoming a team. It’s not cheap or easy, though; he’s looking for serious applicants.
You can track his location during this trip around the world, which has so far passed through most of the US – with a trip up the west coast remaining – and then will continue through Asia and Europe:
The route so far
This trip started in the US rather than Europe because he needed to get a new battery anyway. The original died after spending years in a museum, so the car was shipped to Gruber Motors, a Roadster repair shop in Arizona. Now, he’s got the upgraded 80 kWh battery, raising his range from the original ~240 miles to ~350.
To get the car to America, de Mestre accomplished what seems to be another zero-emission first – possibly the first car transported across the Atlantic with zero emissions (he couldn’t find any record of another vehicle doing the same, only transfers along the same coast).
For this feat, the car ended up in the cargo hull of the Avontuur, a cargo sailing ship. de Mestre said he was looking for a zero-emission shipping solution, but when he called the Avontuur, they told him they didn’t have enough space for a car. He pointed out that this wasn’t just any car; it was a tiny Tesla Roadster – and after checking the dimensions, they realized the car could just barely fit.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an option for zero-emission transportation across the Pacific – yet. So Seattle to Hong Kong will have to involve fossil fuels for now.
The trip across America has thus far consisted of meeting with various Tesla clubs and longtime electric vehicle advocates and testing the legs on his new battery (he was able to get nearly 400 miles on a single charge once). And while most of the country is in his rear-view mirror at this point, he’s still got the west coast to conquer in the next couple of days. There are a couple of events and meetups planned. Scroll to the bottom of this page to see the most recent updates to the calendar (and expect changes – he’s going around the world in a Roadster, after all).
Looking ahead to Asia, another goal of this trip is to take a different route than before. Previous trips have included significant legs through Russia, which is an easier and more developed route to cross Asia.
But with the war in Ukraine and the stranglehold that Russia has over the European fossil energy supply, de Mestre wants to take another route. He’ll avoid Russia by taking a ferry from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan across the Caspian Sea and entering Europe through Turkey. This will demonstrate how Russia could be cut out of commerce if it’s going to continue its aggressive actions.
He would also like to see more penetration of electric cars into areas outside of Europe, the US, and China and is working to coordinate the installation of charging points along his route. These other parts of the world are “like Europe was in 2012” – there are only a few EVs around, with a small but dedicated group of advocates. (Kazakhstan’s Tesla club has about seven people in it.) If the rest of the world can follow a similar trajectory, albeit delayed a bit, we’ll be on a good path toward easing the climate crisis.
Plans for 2024 and beyond
For the 2024 rally, de Mestre hopes to get 12 teams to complete 40,000 km of electric driving in 80 days – 500 km per day, consistently, for almost three months, even in the face of sometimes-slow charging, border crossings, and reliability issues. He’s planning to certify it as an official world record so that each team involved will have bragging rights that they were involved in one.
He also dreams of eventually completing a trip that involves driving to the Bering Strait and taking an all-electric car ferry across, completing a zero-emission circumnavigation in an electric car.
This is technologically possible, as there are electric car ferries already in use that would be capable of the journey, but none of them (nor any car ferry) travel between Alaska and Russia. So the political question, here, is a greater one than the technological one.
de Mestre’s adapter kitNot a lot of luggage room in the Roadster
This brings up the point that the most frustrating moments of de Mestre’s trips have been at borders: visa troubles, fees, waiting for approvals, and so on. Between these troubles and the international nature of climate change, de Mestre has largely decided that borders are a roadblock to solving many of the world’s problems. When two countries are polluting across borders, rather than working together to solve the problem, what will often happen is that each one blames the other and does nothing to improve the situation – all the while, the global problem continues.
But these dreams are further in the future or perhaps can’t be solved by a single around-the-world trip. In the meantime, he’s focused on planning for next year’s trip, which starts in May. Find out more at 80edays.com, and follow the current trip on Instagram at @80edays_official or on X at @chargelocator.
Electrek’s Take
Some may ask what the purpose of a stunt like this is, thinking that it’s just a waste of time, money, energy, and so on. But this can be asked of many human pursuits, including many that are more useless than this.
There always needs to be someone who’s first to do something, who pushes the boundaries and shows people that something is possible.
And in this case, I am just one person who heard about the first trip way back in 2012 and yet have used it as an example countless times to show people that electric cars are more capable than they might have thought.
Maybe you live in Fresno and think there aren’t enough chargers near you because you aren’t in a huge city like LA… but if a car that can’t supercharge and uses a plug that no modern car does can make it through the Gobi desert, well, maybe Fresno isn’t so difficult after all.
A stunt like this provides an object lesson: if an IT consultant can pick up with little notice and drive an electric car around the world, with as little public charging support (and no supercharging) as there was in 2012, and then 10 more teams can do it again in 2016, and hopefully more teams again in 2024… then why are your circumstances so much more impossible? Maybe it’s not that hard after all.
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On Inauguration Day, President Donald Trump issued an executive order indefinitely halting permits for new onshore wind energy projects on federal land, as well as new leases for offshore wind farms in U.S. coastal waters. The action not only fulfilled Trump’s “no new windmills” campaign pledge, but struck yet another blow to the wind industry, which has been hit hard over the past few years by supply chain snags, price increases upending project economics, public opposition and political backlash against federal tax credits, especially those spurring the fledgling offshore wind sector.
Nonetheless, the nation’s well-established onshore wind industry, built out over several decades, is generating nearly 11% of America’s electricity, making it the largest source of renewable energy and at times last year exceeding coal-fired generation. On April 8, the fossil-fuels-friendly Trump administration took measures to bolster coal mining and power plants, but as the infrastructure driving wind energy ages, efforts to “repower” it are creating new business opportunities for the industry’s key players.
This repowering activity has emerged as a bright spot for the wind industry, giving a much-needed boost to market leaders GE Vernova, Vestas and Siemens Gamesa, a subsidiary of Munich-based Siemens Energy. Following several challenging years of lackluster performance — due in particular to setbacks in both onshore and offshore projects — all three companies reported revenue increases in 2024, and both GE Vernova and Siemens stock have moved higher.
GE Vernova, spun off from General Electric a year ago, led overall onshore wind installations in 2024, with 56% of the U.S. market, followed by Denmark’s Vestas (40%) and Siemens Gamesa (4%).
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GE Vernova stock performance over the past one-year period.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, installed wind power generating capacity grew from 2.4 gigawatts (GW) in 2000 to 150.1 GW as of April 2024. Although the growth rate for launching new greenfield onshore wind farms has slowed over the last 10 years, the U.S. is still poised to surpass 160 GW of wind capacity in 2025, according to a new report from energy research firm Wood Mackenzie.
There currently are about 1,500 onshore wind farms — on which more than 75,600 turbines are spinning — across 45 states, led by Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Illinois and Kansas. Virtually all of the wind farms are located on private land, and many of the largest ones are owned and operated by major energy companies, including NextEra Energy, RWE Clean Energy, Pattern Energy, Clearway Energy, Xcel Energy and Berkshire Hathaway‘s MidAmerican Energy, which generates 59% of it renewable energy from wind, including 3,500 turbines operating across 38 wind projects in Iowa.
A growing number of the turbines are 20-plus years old and nearing the end of their lifecycle. So increasingly, operators have to decide whether to upgrade or replace aging turbines’ key components, such as blades, rotors and electronics, or dismantle them altogether and erect new, technologically advanced and far more efficient models that can increase electricity output by up to 50%.
“What’s becoming clear is that more and more of the U.S. installed base [of onshore turbines] has exceeded its operational design life,” said Charles Coppins, research analyst for global wind at Wood Mackenzie, “and now operators are looking to replace those aging turbines with the latest [ones].”
To date, approximately 70 GW of onshore wind capacity has been fully repowered in the U.S., according to Wood Mackenzie, while an additional 12 GW has been partially repowered. The firm estimates that around 10,000 turbines have been decommissioned and that another 6,000 will be retired in the next 10 years, Coppins said.
Damaged wind turbine that was first hit by a tornado then lightning.
Ryan Baker | Istock | Getty Images
Beyond the fact that aged-out turbines need to be upgraded or replaced, repowering an existing wind farm versus building a new site presents economic benefits to operators and OEMs. To begin with, there’s no need to acquire property. In fact, in certain situations, because today’s turbines are larger and more efficient, fewer turbines are needed. And they’ll generate additional electricity and have longer lifecycles, ultimately delivering higher output at a lower cost.
Even so, “there are some limitations on how much capacity you could increase a project by without having to go through new permitting processes or interconnection queues” to the power grid, said Stephen Maldonado, Wood Mackenzie’s U.S. onshore analyst. As long as the operator is not surpassing the allowed interconnection volume agreed to with the local utility, they can add electricity to the project and still send it to the grid.
Public opposition, Maldonado said, may be another hurdle to get over. Whether it’s a new or repower wind project, residents have expressed concerns about environmental hazards, decreased property values, aesthetics and general anti-renewables sentiment.
RWE, a subsidiary of Germany’s RWE Group, is the third largest renewable energy company in the U.S., owning and operating 41 utility-scale wind farms, according to its CEO Andrew Flanagan, making up 48% of its total installed operating portfolio and generating capacity, which also includes solar and battery storage.
One of RWE’s two repower projects underway (both are in Texas), is its Forest Creek wind farm, originally commissioned in 2006 and featuring 54 Siemens Gamesa turbines. The project will replace them with 45 new GE Vernova turbines that will extend the wind farm’s life by another 30 years once it goes back online later this year. Simultaneously, RWE and GE Vernova are partnering on a new wind farm, immediately adjacent to Forest Creek, adding another 64 turbines to the complex. When complete, RWE will deliver a total of 308 MW of wind energy to the region’s homes and businesses.
Flanagan noted that the combined projects are related to increased electricity demands from the area’s oil and gas production. “It’s great to see our wind generation drive the all-of-the-above energy approach,” he said. What’s more, at its peak, the repower project alone will employ 250 construction workers and over its operating period bring in $30 million in local tax revenue, he added.
In turn, the twin projects will support advanced manufacturing jobs at GE Vernova’s Pensacola, Florida, facility, as well as advancing the OEM’s repower business. In January, the company announced that in 2024 it received orders to repower more than 1 GW of wind turbines in the U.S.
Koiguo | Moment | Getty Images
Siemens Gamesa has executed several large U.S. repowering projects, notably MidAmerican’s expansive Rolling Hills wind farm in Iowa, which went online in 2011. In 2019, the company replaced 193 older turbines with 163 higher-capacity models produced at its manufacturing plants in Iowa and Kansas.
Last year, Siemens Gamesa began repowering RWE’s 17-year-old Champion Wind, a 127-MW wind farm in West Texas. The company is upgrading 41 of its turbines with new blades and nacelles (the housing at the top of the tower containing critical electrical components) and adding six new turbines.
In early April, Clearway announced an agreement with Vestas to repower its Mount Storm Wind farm in Grant County, West Virginia. The project will include removing the site’s 132 existing turbines and replacing them with 78 new models. The repower will result in an 85% increase in Mount Storm’s overall electricity generation while using 40% fewer turbines.
Preparing for ‘megatons’ of turbine recycling and tariffs
Another benefit of repowering is invigorating the nascent industry that’s recycling megatons of components from decommissioned turbines, including blades, steel, copper and aluminum. Most of today’s operational turbines are 85% to 95% recyclable, and OEMs are designing 100% recyclable models.
While the majority of mothballed blades, made from fiberglass and carbon fiber, have historically ended up in landfills, several startups have developed technologies recycle them. Carbon Rivers, for example, contracts with the turbine OEMs and wind farm operators to recover glass fiber, carbon fiber and resin systems from decommissioned blades to produce new composites and resins used for next-generation turbine blades, marine vessels, composite concrete and auto parts.
Veolia North America, a subsidiary of the French company Veolia Group, reconstitutes shredded blades and other composite materials into a fuel it then sells to cement manufacturers as a replacement for coal, sand and clay. Veolia has processed approximately 6,500 wind blades at a facility in Missouri, and expanded its processing capabilities to meet demand, according to David Araujo, Veolia’s general manager of engineered fuels.
Trump’s new-project moratorium isn’t his only impediment to the wind industry. The president’s seesaw of import tariffs, especially the 25% levy on steel and aluminum, is impacting U.S. manufacturers across most sectors.
The onshore wind industry, however, “has done a really good job of reducing geopolitical risks,” said John Hensley, senior vice president for markets and policy analysis at the American Clean Power Association, a trade group representing the clean energy industry. He cited a manufacturing base in the U.S. that includes hundreds of plants producing parts and components for turbines. Although some materials are imported, the investment in domestic manufacturing “provides some risk mitigation to these tariffs,” he said.
Amidst the headwinds, the onshore wind industry is trying to stay focused on the role that repowering can play in meeting the nation’s exponentially growing demand for electricity. “We’re expecting a 35% to 50% increase between now and 2040, which is just incredible,” Hensley said. “It’s like adding a new Louisiana to the grid every year for 15 years.”
GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik recently told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that the growth of the U.S.’s electric load is the largest since the industrial boom that followed the end of the second world war. “You’ve got to go back to 1945 and the end of World War II, that’s the infrastructure buildout that we’re going to have,” he said.
As OEMs and wind farm developers continue to face rising capital costs for new projects, as well as a Trump administration averse to clean energy industries, “repowering offers a pathway for delivering more electrons to the grid in a way that sidesteps or at least minimizes some of the challenges associated with all these issues,” Hensley said.
Capable of delivering up to 1,200 kW of power to get electric commercial trucks back on the road in minutes, the new ABB MCS1200 Megawatt Charging System is part of an ecosystem of electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) that ABB’s bringing to this year’s ACT Expo.
ABB E-mobility is using the annual clean trucking conference to showcase the expansion of its EVSE portfolio with three all-new charger families: the field-upgradable A200/300 All-in-One chargers, the MCS1200 Megawatt Charging System for heavy-duty vehicles shown (above), and the ChargeDock Dispenser for flexible depot charging.
The company said its new product platform was built by applying a computer system-style domain separation to charger design, fundamentally improving subsystem development and creating a clear path forward for site and system expansion. In other words, ABB is selling a system with both future-proofing and enhanced dependability baked in.
“We have built a system by logically separating a charger into four distinct subsystems … each functioning as an independent subsystem,” explains Michael Halbherr, CEO of ABB E-mobility. “Unlike conventional chargers, where a user interface failure can disable the entire system, our architecture ensures charging continues even if the screen or payment system encounters issues. Moreover, we can improve each subsystem at its own pace without having to change the entire system.”
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The parts of ABB’s new EVSE portfolio that have been made public so far have already been recognized for design excellence, with the A400 winning the iF Gold Award and both the A400 and C50 receiving Red Dot Design Awards.
New ABB chargers seem pretty, good
ABB’s good-looking family; via ABB.
ABB says the systemic separation of its EVSE enhances both reliability and quality, while making deployed chargers easier to diagnose and repair, in less time. Each of the chargers’ subsystems can be tested, diagnosed, and replaced independently, allowing for quick on-site repairs and update cycles tailored to the speed of each systems’ innovation. The result is 99% uptime and a more future-proof product.
“The EV charging landscape is evolving beyond point products for specific use cases,” continued Halbherr. “By implementing this modular approach with the majority of our R&D focused on modular platforms rather than one-off products … it reduces supply chain risks, while accelerating development cycles and enabling deeper collaboration with critical suppliers.”
Key markets ABB is chasing
HVC 360 Charge Dock Dispenser depot deployment; via ABB.
PUBLIC CHARGING – with the award winning A400 being the optimal fit for high power charging from highway corridors to urban locations, the latest additions to the A-Series All-in-One chargers offer a field-upgradable architecture allowing operators to start with the A200 (200kW) with the option to upgrade to 300kW or 400kW as demand grows. This approach offers scalability and protects customer investment, leading to Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) savings over 10 years.
PUBLIC TRANSIT AND FLEET – the new Charge Dock Dispenser – in combination with the already in market available HVC 360 – simplifies depot charging with a versatile solution that supports pantograph-, roof-, and pedestal charging options with up to 360kW of shared power and 150m/490 ft installation flexibility between cabinet and dispensers. The dispenser maintains up to 500A output.
HEAVY TRUCKS – building the matching charging infrastructure for commercial vehicles and fleets represents a critical innovation frontier on our journey to electrify transportation. Following extensive collaboration with industry-leading truck OEMs, the MCS1200 Megawatt Charging System delivers up to 1,200kW of continuous power — 20% more energy transfer than 1MW systems — providing heavy-duty vehicles with purpose-built single-outlet design for the energy they need during mandatory driver breaks. To support other use cases, such as CCS truck charging, a dual CCS and MCS option will also be available.
ABB says that the result of its new approach are chargers that offer 99% plus uptime — a crucial statistic for commercial charging operations and a key factor to ensuring customer satisfaction. The new ABB E-mobility EVSE product family will be on display for the first time at the Advanced Clean Transportation Expo (ACT Expo) in Anaheim, California next week, then again at Power2Drive in Munich, Germany, from May 7-9.
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Along with Tennessee Tech, Tennessee-based ultralight aircraft company Whisper Aero has secured a $500,000 grant to help advance the company’s innovative electric jet motor concept off the drawing board and onto the testing phase.
Earlier this month, the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development (TNECD) announced plans to award $500,000 to Tennessee Tech and Whisper Aero through the Transportation Network Growth Opportunity (TNGO) initiative.
“We look forward to using these award dollars to place students in internships working directly with Whisper Aero leaders,” said Tennessee Tech President Phil Oldham. “By learning from an electric propulsion innovator like Whisper Aero, our students will gain invaluable perspective and can take what they have learned in the classroom and apply it right here in Tennessee.”
The grant will see a Whisper Aero glider fitted with a pair of the company’s eQ250 electric-powered jet “propulsors” for UltraQuiet flight. Tennessee Tech faculty and students will carry out copper-bird ground testing to ensure the safe integration of engines, batteries, and controllers, and kickstart Tennessee Tech’s new Crossville Mobility Incubator.
Whisper Aero’s main claim to fame is its innovative UltraQuiet WhisperDrive (above). It’s effectively an electrically spun ducted fan jet engine that uses a large number of stiff composite fan blades inside a lightweight, acoustically treated duct. With so many blades, the Whisper Aero propulsor can push more air than a conventional prop while spinning much more slowly. As such, the “blade passage frequency” moves up to more than 16,000 Hz – outside the range of most human hearing but not, supposedly, high enough to freak out the beagles.
The Whisper Aero ultralight is effectively an Aériane Swift3 glider fitted with a pair of Whisper’s eQ250 propulsors, each capable of up to 80 lbs. of thrust. The Ultralight has a wingspan of over 40 ft with a maximum L/D of 35:1 and can be stressed to a design loading of +6/-4g, making it capable of some pretty impressive acrobatic feats.
The Swift3 glider is designed for a low speed, low power cruising speed of 45–55 knots with “just” 6.5 hp. Power-off glides from a few hundred feet showed a low sink rate, and a climb rate of 1,250 ft/min with full self-launching power (in other words: the Whisper glider doesn’t have to be towed by a launch vehicle, like a conventional ultralight glider).
Quiet cool
Dual WhisperDrive fans deliver ~160 lbf of thrust; via Whisper Aero.
Range under full power is about 109 miles with current battery tech, but it’s expected that range under the latest EPiC 2.0 energy batteries would rise to nearly 170 miles.
Nathan Millecam, CEO of Electric Power System, said, “EPiC 2.0’s leap in energy density and thermal performance has enabled a significant increase in range, a clear validation of our next-gen cell technology. We are impressed by what the Whisper team continues to achieve in advancing electric aviation.”
The press release concludes explaining that flight tests are expected to show that the Whisper Aero glider can be flown, “a few hundred feet away from neighborhoods without any disturbances, while carrying a 220 lbs. payload with full range,” which is all kind of ominous in today’s political climate, but still pretty neat from a purely tech perspective.
With support from TNECD’s Transportation Network Growth Opportunity (TNGO) initiative, Tennessee Tech University and Whisper Aero are partnering to advance next-generation propulsion technology in the aerospace industry. This collaboration will enhance aerospace research and workforce development, ensuring Tennessee remains a leader in cutting-edge mobility solutions.
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Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.
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