Green Energy

Last month, an engineer at a small power company in Solihull took a call from National Grid. A large gas plant had failed. Could the engineer’s company, UK Power Reserve, start up one of its small gas power units to help?

Without standing up, the engineer sent a text message asking for one of UKPR’s 20MW plants to be fired up. Two minutes later, the plant, a series of gas engines in green containers, each with its own chimney, was up and running.

A few hours later, the large gas power station was back on line and UKPR turned off its unit.

The episode showed how small, flexible power plants are now bridging the supply gaps, especially at a local level, between intermittent renewables and Britain’s fleet of large, but slow-to-fire-up, gas and coal plants.

Although they only generate small amounts of power, these mini units are cheap to build at around £5m for a 6MW plant and nimble to operate. They are increasingly valuable at times of peak demand, such as during last week’s extreme weather, or when the wind does not blow or the sun does not shine.

Proponents of renewable power, which accounted for just over 29 per cent of the UK’s electricity generation last year, argue that battery storage will help smooth out the peaks and troughs.

Sceptics say there will always be a need for baseload generation, large gas or nuclear plants, to ensure the country’s energy security.

And in between, there is likely to be a growing need for low-cost, rapid-response power that can fill in close to where it is needed. “There is a strong need for flexible generation in the GB power market given the continuing growth in intermittent renewables,” said Simon Virley, head of Power & Utilities at KPMG and a former government energy adviser.

The amount of such distributed generation, in terms of installed capacity, has almost doubled in the past six years; it accounted for just 15 per cent of installed capacity in 2011 but rose to 27 per cent or 26GW in 2016, according to National Grid figures.

There is a strong need for flexible generation in the GB power market given the continuing growth in intermittent renewables

Lucrative government subsidies have been a big driver behind the growth of the industry, which also includes diesel-powered generators and storage.

The government’s latest capacity auction last month, through which companies bid for subsidy contracts to deliver power at peak times, saw small new gas plants among the big winners.

UKPR secured 200MW of gas-fired power capacity in the auction. The contract wins will boost the company’s generating capacity past the 1GW mark, equivalent to the output of two large-scale combined cycle gas turbine plants but spread across 40 different sites.

The private equity-backed company, which was founded in 2010 and employs 150 people, now has a turnover of £75m, an increase of 400 per cent over the past two years.

“In the world of the future, with large amounts of intermittent renewables we will see lots of peaks and troughs in electricity generation and you can’t ameliorate these dynamic and complex fluctuations with a product that takes a long time to ramp up,” said Michael Jenner, UKPR’s director of policy and regulation.

Other companies that have been successful in previous capacity auctions include Peak Gen Power, Welsh Power and Alkane Energy, which provides both baseload generation from a portfolio of coal mine methane sites and a network for peak generation assets using bought-in natural gas.

Ofgem, the energy regulator, last year cut the “embedded benefits” payments for small operators generating less than 100MW, arguing it gave them an unfair advantage against developers of larger plants as they do not have to pay hefty transmission charges. But eight of these smaller companies, including Peak Gen, have applied for and been granted a judicial review of the decision.

As some of these companies grow there is likely to be consolidation, especially as many of them are owned by private equity investors. UKPR, which is owned by Equistone Partners and Inflexion Private Equity, is in the midst of a sales process, said Mr Jenner.

“The sector has moved from small niche providers to one that is more like a large utility business which will require a different owner, investor, someone who can bring in scale and invest for the long term,” said Felix Chow-Kambitsch of consultants Aurora Energy Research.

The world’s first commercial floating offshore wind farm, called Hywind, started sending electricity to the grid last October. Since then, the six-turbine, 30MW installation has been working well. Really well. In fact, Hywind has had a 65-percent capacity factor over the last three months according to Statoil, the Norwegian mega-corporation that built the wind farm off the coast of Scotland. (Capacity factor measures a generation unit’s actual output against its theoretical maximum output. A capacity factor of 100 percent means the wind farm would be sending 30MW of power to the grid every minute of every day since it’s been in operation.)

Hywind’s capacity factor exceeds the average capacity factors of many sources of electricity. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), onshore wind installations in the US had an average capacity factor of about 36.7 percent in 2017. Solar photovoltaic installations had an average capacity factor of 27 percent in 2017. Even conventional hydropower only has an average capacity factor of 45.2 percent.

Of course, comparing Hywind’s 65-percent capacity factor in the winter, when wind is blowing at its hardest in Scotland, to the average capacity factor of other renewable installations over the whole year isn’t quite fair—we can assume that Hywind will have a lower capacity factor in months when winds are milder. But Statoil says that similar offshore wind installations achieve a capacity factor of 40 to 60 percent in winter, suggesting that there’s an advantage to be gained in floating wind farms: the turbines can be placed further out to sea where wind is more consistent and stronger.

Hywind in particular was built much like a floating offshore oil drilling rig, with the platform anchored down to the seabed using suction anchors. These eliminate the need to construct expensive fixed structures under water and allow Statoil and others to site the turbines farther out to sea in deeper waters. Hywind specifically is 15.5 miles out from Aberdeenshire, Scotland. At maximum capacity, it can power 20,000 homes.

Despite its “floating” moniker, Hywind is well-equipped to withstand violent storms without capsizing. The system performed as expected during the extreme storms that hit it over the winter. In October, the proximity of Hurricane Ophelia exposed Hywind to wind speeds of 125 km/h (80 mph), and later in December, another storm delivered “gusts in excess of 160 km/h (100 mph) and waves in excess of 8.2 m (27 ft).”

“Whilst the wind turbines shut down for safety reasons during the worst of these winds, they automatically resumed operation promptly afterwards,” Statoil wrote. “A pitch motion controller is integrated with the Hywind turbine’s control system and will adjust the angle of the turbine blades during heavy winds which mitigates excessive motions of the structure.”

Statoil and its partner Masdar are aiming to build more of these as costs come down and wind turbines get more efficient. By 2030, Statoil says, it hopes to bring the cost of floating offshore wind down to €40-60 per MWh ($50-74 per MWh).

Most extrusion screws have hard-surfacing materials welded on the flights to provide longer wear life. When extreme wear occurs in the absence of abrasive fillers, a burr on the flights provides a clue as to what is happening.

A burr on the trailing side indicates a very high side force is causing the flights to gall or even weld to the barrel material, literally pulling the two surfaces apart. This is usually due to “wedging,” which is caused by the screw momentarily plugging with solid polymer at a radial location. If pressure from the plugged channel is not balanced by a similar force on the other side, the screw is pushed with tremendous force against the barrel.

Before screws are rebuilt it’s a good practice to grind the old weld off and check for cracking.

It’s hard to measure this force because it may only last for a fraction of a second. But by calculating the pressure necessary to bend the screw so it can contact the barrel over relatively short lengths, it’s been found that the pressure can be momentarily as high as 25,000 psi. Remember, the screw in the compression section is a double-spiral wedge driven by the full torque of the extruder drive, giving it enormous compressive force. Wedging is basically a screw design issue where the melting rate of the screw is inadequate to match the compression rate.

A burr on both sides of the flights usually indicates a barrel alignment issue whereby the barrel is causing the screw to bend with each revolution to conform to the barrel. Again, because of the power of the extruder drive, this crushes the flights and develops galling, resulting in a burr on both sides.

None of the three images that accompany this article show any evidence of a burr, so it’s unlikely the weld failure is the result of wedging or barrel alignment. More likely, the weld failure was due to improper weld application, resulting in a poor bond between the hard-surfacing material and the base metal. The photo on the left shows a complete failure of a large area of the flight. The pattern on the flight surface where the weld is missing shows the moderate distortion of the weld groove by the welding heat.

But it is very smooth, indicating the weld was simply laid on the flight with little or no bond. The images in the center and right show a lesser— but still catastrophic—degree of weld failure. The areas where sections of the weld have fallen out with no sign of galling on either side is again a sure sign of poor weld bond.

Today almost all screw manufacturers use a technique called plasma transferred arc (PTA) welding to apply hard-surfacing material to the screw flights. PTA is used because it has the least effect on the underlying screw material while creating a strong metallurgical bond because of its extremely high temperature. Other welding processes apply heat for a longer period, with a wider heat-affected area at the weld point. This dilutes the hard-surfacing material with base metal and reduces its anti-galling properties by contaminating the hard-surface material with iron.

Most of the nickel/chrome (Ni/Cr) and cobalt-based hard-surfacing materials fuse at about 2000 F, and the plasma “flame” can generate temperatures in excess of 10,000 F. Being much hotter and much more concentrated than most other welding processes reduces the dilution of the hard-surfacing material.

PTA welding is a surprisingly sensitive process and takes constant operator attention; it requires numerous adjustments related to the position of the torch itself and the position of the weld bead on a round surface. Moreover, there are adjustments for the welding arc, shield gas and amperage. Even a little draft on the arc will disturb the shielding gas and plasma gas and cause a reduction in bonding as well as rapid oxidation of the interface area.

For example, having the PTA torch a mere 1/16-in. too far over center on a small screw will greatly reduce the bond strength. The condition of the base metal before and after welding is also critical. Carbon steel undergoes a phase transformation if held at temperatures below 650 F, which creates a form of steel that is brittle and has a lower density.

This results in cracking of the base metal and transfer of the cracks into the hard surface material, setting up areas for weld failure. To prevent this phase change, the screw must be preheated and held at an elevated temperature through the welding process, and then very slowly cooled to prevent the phase change. Even minor deviations in how the preheating and post-cooling process is handled will cause excessive cracking. Some radial cracking of the hard-surfacing overlay is normal—the overlay usually has a greater coefficient of expansion than the base metal, and upon cooling shrinks more than the base metal, which is relieved by the radial cracking. In fact, if no radial cracking is present with the Ni/Cr alloys it is likely to be in fact some other material. New screws have the weld applied in a shallow trough before the flights are machined, which helps to reduce the sensitivity of torch position and improves welding rate. The trough dimensions are also critical. However, rebuilt screws are welded on a narrow and round surface. As a result, it’s often difficult to obtain the same hardness of the overlay on rebuilt screws, particularly small ones.

Once a screw has been welded with improper preheating and post-cooling, it is difficult to obtain a good rebuild because of the prior cracking and brittleness that extend into the base metal due to the prior phase change. Before screws are rebuilt, it’s a good practice to grind the old weld off and check for cracking, using various metallurgical test methods.

The practice of putting a layer of softer stainless steel on the screw flights under the hard surfacing is sometimes used to “block off” underlying cracking. However, that results in two welds and, if not done properly, doubles the chances of weld failure.

The important thing to remember is that polymers do not wear screws unless filled with hard, abrasive fillers. Only contact between the barrel and screw flights results in wear. By simply observing the “burr,” the cause of wear can generally be determined. Any hard-surfacing failures without evidence of the burr will indicate possible weld-bond issues.

In early 2014, according to local folklore, a man digging a septic tank or a well in his garden in Kasulo came across rocks with a distinctive grey-green sheen: cobalt.

From then on – rather like the find at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 that sparked the California Gold Rush — life for local people was never quite the same again.

Demand for cobalt – vital for batteries powering products from iPhones to Tesla electric cars — is soaring, with world prices tripling in four years.

Miners have moved in wherever a fat seam of the metal can be ripped from the Earth’s grasp, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which last year produced two-thirds of the world’s cobalt.

In Kasulo, a district of Kolwezi in the heart of the country’s mining belt, the impact was seismic.

People rushed to get their share of the boom, wielding picks and shovels to extract the precious ore, which was then sold to middlemen at so-called buying houses.

Known by the French word “creuseurs,” amateur prospectors work in dangerous conditions, often in a miasma of toxic dust, Amnesty International said in a report on DR Congo’s cobalt industry in 2016.

In April 2017, the governor of Lualaba province, former interior minister Richard Muyej, banned artisanal extraction in Kasulo, saying he wanted to “clean up the process of small-scale production.”

At the same time, plans were moving ahead for Kasulo’s cobalt treasure to be exploited by an industrial giant.

In August, a “provincial committee for relocation” was set up.

Complaints

Its task was to oversee the signing of “irrevocable acts of compensation” by around 600 people, whose homes would be knocked down to make way for a Chinese company, Congo Dongfang International Mining (CDM).

Today, grievances about the relocation process are many, according to a member of a local watchdog group called Synergie, which has raised questions about the transparency of the CDM deal.

Complaints focus on alleged railroading of compensation offers, under-valued property and promises about being relocated from Kasulo to Samunkida that were poorly kept.

In one such “act” seen by AFP, a home owner was given just 10 days to demolish his house.

Compensation for each family ranged “between 1,500 and 10,000 dollars (1,200 to 8,200 euros)”, a Synergie member said.

For the authorities, the fuss is exaggerated.

“The Kasulo relocation was a success,” said Ikos Rukal, a spokesman for the provincial government.

“Let those who are not happy come back to the ministry of mines and we will find answers for them,” he said.

The effect of the cobalt rush is being felt in other areas in Kolwezi, in the Bel-Air district, where Ruashi Mining has also concluded “irrevocable acts of compensation” with residents.

In the so-called Gecamines district, the architecture would be familiar to anyone who has seen the streets of former mining communities in northern Europe. The homes comprise small stone houses, built decades ago for executives of the state mining company Gecamines.

Today, this is another community that faces being ripped apart as mines and quarries operated by another Chinese firm called Commus plan to expand.

Former Gecamines employee Robert Mombwe has lived in the same house for 30 years.

But he says he is ready to leave — if the deal is right.

“If you have a four-room house, they have to build you9 a six-room house,” he adds.

Others have decided to sell their house for sums of up to 40,000 dollars so that the machines can move in.

The Argentinian summer Sun beat down on the Buenos Aires city circuit as the cars approached the penultimate turn. It was February 18, 2017, the Saturday of Formula E’s South American weekend, and two cars jostled for first place. But something was wrong. The car in front – emblazoned in red – zipped through the chicane. The second car, though, was being too aggressive. Nearing the corner’s apex, the vehicle misjudged its position and speed. The vehicle slammed into the blue safety walls surrounding the track. Its black, carbon-fibre front wing buckled under the vehicle’s body; a door burst open. As the wreckage crumpled to a stop, a detached wheel rolled freely across the hot asphalt.

The scene was eerie: though the marshals were alerted to the smash, the usual scramble to rush paramedics to the scene didn’t happen. And, as the damaged vehicle lingered, nobody struggled to climb free. Instead, where the helmeted pilot should have been there was an empty space. The cars, built by the UK-based startup Roborace, had been running in fully autonomous mode.

Roborace, established by a Russian serial entrepreneur, wants to create the Formula One of self-driving cars. It envisions a new sport where teams pit their artificial intelligence against competitors. The electric cars will be identical; instead, the differentiator will not be how well competitors can drive, but how well they can code.

The incident in Buenos Aires was one of autonomous racing’s first crashes, and a big setback. Hours earlier, the cars had been flying around the course at 185kph. DevBot 1 successfully detected and dodged a dog that had loped on to the track. But now, photographers and spectators armed with smartphones flocked around the car as it was hoisted on to a flatbed truck and returned to its creators.

The safety wall that the car crashed into protected a sculptural fountain. Made from white marble, Las Nereidas by Lola Mora, features a group of men, struggling to control wildly rearing horses.

In October 2015, Denis Sverdlov, the 39-year-old CEO and creator of Roborace, was on board a long-haul flight from China to Europe. He was sitting in front of Alejandro Agag, the CEO of Formula E; the pair had earlier been at an event in China and debated the future of electric vehicles. But now, travelling at hundreds of kilometres per hour and thousands of metres above the ground at the mercy of the aircraft’s autopilot, the pair discussed how AI could be incorporated into racing.

“The first idea was to make a special mode for Formula E,” Sverdlov recalls. Initially, he believed an autonomous overtaking mode, activated at the press of a button, could assist drivers. But the idea was quickly scrapped in favour of a far more ambitious idea: a completely AI-powered racing competition. Sverdlov registered the roborace.com domain mid-flight using the plane’s onboard Wi-Fi.

The series was officially announced in November 2015, along with a partnership to demonstrate the car’s technology at Formula E’s races. Sverdlov hoped to hold the first races during the 2016-2017 Formula E season and promised the vehicle would be able to travel at up to 300kph. At the time, Roborace didn’t have a single car to its name.

Sverdlov has a shaved head and a light beard, and more often than not wears Roborace-branded polo shirts. When living in Russia, he spent five years as the CEO of mobile broadband firm Yota, where he brokered deals with leading telecoms firms; he was photographed alongside Vladimir Putin. He also invented the YotaPhone, an Android handset with screens on the front and back. After leaving Yota, he spent 18 months working as a deputy minister at the Russian Ministry of Communications and Mass Media.

“We all believe that the future of the automotive industry is going to be electric and driverless,” Sverdlov explains. He hopes that demonstrating autonomous, electric cars at high speeds will prove to sceptics of the technologies that they can be safe on public roads.

Sverdlov hopes to get ten cars and teams competing against each other. The plan is for Roborace to build identical Robocars and a foundation for the AI that controls them; teams will develop their own “drivers”. “We’ll end up with the format where one driver will be compared to another one,” Sverdlov says. Bragging points go to developers that show their artificial intelligence to be superior.

Sverdlov has another motive: his investment firm Kinetik, which owns Roborace, also operates electric-truck firm Arrival, whose vans are being trialled by the Royal Mail in the UK. Eventually, Sverdlov plans to use the autonomous technology developed by Roborace in Arrival’s vehicles. Both companies share a 40-person software-development team that has a base in Russia. The first Roborace event was intended to take place in the 2016-17 Formula E season, but at the close of the championship in July, no teams had been officially announced.

In a high-ceilinged industrial building on the outskirts of Oxford, engineers huddle around a Robocar, their most advanced creation yet. The space is cluttered with racing cars and carbon-fibre chassis in various stages of assembly.

When I visit in July 2017, the DevBots are out testing at one of the various racetracks that Roborace uses to collect data and improve its autonomous systems. The factory’s location is not an accident. The UK has a rich motor-racing history. At its centre is Motorsport Valley, within Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire, the location of the Silverstone race track; F1 teams Williams and Mercedes have bases close by.

The Robocar is barely recognisable as a car. Its body is a torpedo-like shape designed by Daniel Simon, who created the vehicles for the 2010 film Tron: Legacy. At 4.8 metres in length and two metres wide, the Robocar is larger than most family cars. It’s also low to the ground, measuring 85cm in height. Unlike the three bubble-domed DevBots, there’s no space for a human inside. Each car costs £750,000 to build, with its AI system costing an additional £250,000. (The company would not provide a more detailed breakdown, due to the various parts being tested).

Inside the Robocar, there isn’t much room for manoeuvre. Phill Spencer, 69, the car’s build manager, who worked as an engineer for three-time Formula One world champion Ayrton Senna, says that early in the vehicle’s development almost every part had to be removed from the vehicle to access the battery, which sits at the bottom of its slimline body. This 540kW battery powers four 300kW motors, one at each wheel. It’s claimed the vehicle can hit 321kph – although these speeds haven’t been publicly demonstrated yet. When I try to visit its high-speed test track, a mechanical fault prevents the car from racing. The engineers attempted to fix the fault until 10pm the night before, unsuccessfully.

As with the autonomous cars being constructed and tested by Google, Tesla, Uber, Ford and other leading manufacturers, Roborace’s vehicles rely on sensors for navigation. There are two radars, used for detecting objects in the distance, and LiDAR, which fires beams of light in multiple directions before using the reflections to work out where surrounding objects are. These are supplemented by 18 ultrasonic sensors used for close-range detection, two speed sensors and six cameras that use machine vision to give a 360° view around the car. There’s also a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), a form of GPS technology.

“Radar gives you a typically much longer field of view – maybe up to 200 to 350 metres ahead,” says Graeme Smith, the CEO of Oxbotica, a University of Oxford spin-out developing autonomous vehicles. Blind spots in the cars’ field of view are avoided by combining multiple sensors. Radar’s other advantage over LiDAR and cameras is the ability to detect the speed of how fast other vehicles are moving.

Sergey Malygin, director of software at Roborace, is in charge of developing the car’s behaviours, which rely on machine learning and neural networks. “When we see the picture from the camera, we know where the drivable surface is, where a non-drivable surface is and where the curb – a semi-drivable surface – is,” Malygin says. The car is taught where it shouldn’t go. Neural networks are also being used for object detection. The car is learning to make decisions based on “dynamic conditions” it sees in front of it. If an opponent’s car were to swerve into the middle of the road, the AI system has to be able to detect it and apply its brakes or move out of the way immediately.

Malygin’s team constructed a Formula E-style test track at the Millbrook Proving Ground, near Banbury, to help the car learn to negotiate turns and obstacles. (Since I visited, Roborace has moved its headquarters nearby.) Reflecting upon the Buenos Aires crash, Malygin is calm. He says Roborace itself isn’t attempting to create the perfect racing driver, but build a platform that anyone involved can improve.

“My main concern is that everybody is expecting the car will go 300kph in autonomous mode and be fighting with other [vehicles],” Sverdlov explains. “Eventually, we will be there, but it is not our objective. It is not our task to make it.” Eventually, racing teams will be responsible for creating AI that’s able to complete overtaking moves, squeeze seconds off lap times and, if Sverdlov is right, create a spectacle that will enthuse the crowds.

In 2004, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched the Grand Challenge, which tasked engineers to build autonomous vehicles that could navigate through 482km of desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The winning vehicle only travelled 12km, but the contest kickstarted the race to develop autonomous cars.

Today, almost every major car manufacturer is working on bringing the technology to market. Autonomous buses are being tested in locations as diverse as Finland and Nevada. Ford has taught a vehicle to drive itself on snow; Volvo has created autonomous refuse trucks. In 2015, Google’s Waymo took a legally blind man on a fully autonomous, ten-minute journey around Austin, Texas. And in October 2016, Otto, a subsidiary of Uber, delivered 50,000 beers with a single-self driving truck. (Otto is now embroiled in a legal battle with Waymo over allegations that a former executive stole trade secrets.)

Smith’s Oxbotica aims to bring autonomous cars to UK motorways as part of the DRIVEN consortium. By 2019 it hopes to have self-driving vehicles operating along an 88km route between London and Oxford.

Self-driving cars are getting faster. In October 2014, Audi sent a driverless 560-horsepower RS7 vehicle around part of the notorious Hockenheimring race circuit in Germany. Engineers at Stanford University have adapted an Audi TTS to run autonomously around California’s Thunderhill Raceway, hitting average speeds of up to 112kph. Nicknamed Shelley, it has been able to lap the 5km track faster than a champion amateur racer, but Chris Gerdes, the mechanical engineer behind the vehicle, says it hasn’t beaten a professional time yet.

Joshua Schachter, the creator of link-sharing website Delicious, has created his own grassroots track days at Thunderhill for autonomous cars. Anyone is able to enter their autonomous vehicle, but most of them don’t make it round the circuit. During the April 2017 event, only four of the 17 entries – from startups and enthusiasts – completed the 3.3kph course. The four finishers all had times within 15 seconds of each other.

Schachter’s website contains simulators for the track, in which autonomous-car software can be run digitally, and data is collected from the laps of the fastest teams. He compares it to a form of extreme engineering. Schachter is sceptical that autonomous motorsport will catch on. “Every big sport is widely participated in at lower levels,” he says. “If autonomous racing is a new sport, then it has to come from popular support, with other people participating.”

Racing is a natural human instinct. Before cars, we raced on foot and on horses. Since combustion engines were invented, humans have pushed them to their limits. Drivers – along with their courage, wit, personality and skill – are the most entertaining element. Racing fanatics remember Nelson Piquet’s ambitious overtake around the outside of Senna at the 1986 Hungarian Grand Prix, or the infamous off-track rivalry between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg. For Roborace to become successful, it needs to convince people that can be replaced – or even bettered – by machines.

Lucas di Grassi, a Brazilian racing driver and Formula E champion who joined Roborace as CEO in September 2017, hinted at the company’s plans. He said in an interview at the time that Roborace “wants to put its technology in a closed environment and go beyond where motorsport can go”.

Finding an optimal racing line is more complex than just using the shortest route around a corner. According to Chris Gerdes, who is also director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford University, “The best drivers in the world have that path in mind, but they’re constantly adjusting it. They’re making changes to the path with the objective of doing the right thing in the moment.” The difference between top human drivers and machines is that humans can interpret how the car behaves on a corner and instantly adjust their positioning and tactics.

Machine-learning algorithms – essentially pattern-recognition systems – are, as yet, no match for the human brain. Panagiotis Tsiotras, dean of engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, says the human brain is adept at instantly recognising and making decisions about objects. “To go from seconds or minutes to milliseconds [for machines making decisions], which is what the brain does, is very difficult,” he says. “Even if you solve this problem, there’s the issue of executing the decision.”

“As you go faster, knowing accurately where you are becomes more important,” Smith explains. One approach is to start with a simple road and add more complexity as the AI system learns. At Roborace’s current stage, there aren’t any other vehicles on the track to monitor. There are no pedestrians, cyclists or roadworks. Tracks are fenced off, with crash barriers making the environment easier to understand. As the Roboracer improves, the data could help engineers learn what happens when vehicles are travelling at speed; when they try and overtake; when they are out of control.

In May 2016, a Tesla running in Autopilot mode was involved in the first fatal, self-driving crash. Joshua Brown was travelling above the speed limit in Florida. His car warned him seven times to put his hands on the wheel. The National Transportation Safety Board partly blamed the software for his death, as the vehicle let him continue driving unsafely. “What kills you is the abnormal driving, not the normal driving,” Tsiotras explains.

Four men, all in Roborace attire, have their faces pressed up against a mesh fence. Like expectant fathers, they’re waiting for the Robocar. It’s May 2017, a warm day in Paris. Clouds linger over the Eiffel Tower. There’s a tension within the team: it’s the Robocar’s first public demonstration. Preparations have taken three weeks.

Despite the excitement around the Roborace unveiling, progress has been slower than expected. By the end of the Formula E season in July, no teams had been announced. At the start of the 2017-18 season in December, that was still the case. Sverdlov has pitched the series to more than 100 organisations, but industry has been much more careful than expected to commit to an AI racing series. In the same month, DevBot’s best time around Hong Kong’s track was beaten by a human’s attempt in the vehicle. Amateur racer and TV presenter Nicki Shields drove the vehicle around the 1.86km track in 1:26. On its best attempt, DevBot managed 1:34.

Inside a black Mercedes on the Formula E circuit, five Roborace staff are glued to Lenovo ThinkPads. They are monitoring the autonomous car’s temperature, AI systems, suspension and more. (The car also has a remote kill switch.) In race control is Bryn Balcombe, a former F1 systems engineer. At approximately 2pm, before the main Formula E race, the Robocar takes to the track for the first time in public. It’s an eerie sight: there’s no roar from a combustion engine firing into life and its movements are virtually silent. “You just hear the sound of the tyres, the whine of the gearbox and the rush of the air
and that’s it,” Spencer says.

However, those in the Paris crowd expecting a high-speed demonstration were disappointed. The Robocar is in Explorer Mode: to be able to travel at speed it first needs to learn the track. It crawls around the 14 corners of the 2km course, at points snaking along as it constantly readjusts its position. “It knows nothing about the environment and it’s just looking around scanning and working out how can it safely proceed ahead,” Balcombe says.

For prolonged periods it stops entirely while it makes sense of the data. When the AI system has been trained on a course, it can drive at near-human speeds. At the next Formula E race, in Berlin, one of the DevBots completed ten laps in full-speed AI mode, reaching 200kph.

But therein lies the DevBot’s advantage: it still has a drivers’ seat, so a human can jump into the car and complete a lap of the track, gathering the base level of data needed for it to drive autonomously. The Roborace team can then transfer that data to the Robocar. But in Paris, a test driver spun the car, resulting in no training data. So instead, the vehicle crawled along, slowly learning the way.

Flying cars are just starting to inch their way out of science fiction. But that is not stopping some companies from planning for flying taxi services.

A growing collection of tech companies, aircraft manufacturers, automakers and investors are betting that fleets of battery-powered aircraft will give rise to air taxi services, perhaps as soon as the next decade. Some of those taxis, the companies hope, may even use artificial intelligence to fly themselves.

No one can say for certain if these new vehicles will turn out to be a real business. But many companies are already worried about being left behind.

The European aerospace company Airbus said that it was making an investment in Blade, an aviation start-up in New York, and forming a partnership to expand Blade’s helicopter hailing service in more cities around the world. Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s chief executive, said he expected the ride-hailing company to start flying passengers on a service called Uber Air in five to 10 years.

In November, Boeing acquired Aurora Flight Sciences, a company specialising in flight systems for pilotless aircraft, for an undisclosed sum. Before the acquisition, Aurora had been working with Uber to develop a flying taxi.

And Joby Aviation, a start-up in Santa Cruz, California, building its own air taxi, said it had raised $100 million in venture funding from a consortium of investors including the venture capital arms of Intel, Toyota Motor and JetBlue Airways. “This is the natural progression of the vehicles we make,” said Ben Bridge, head of global business for Airbus Helicopters. “We want a seat at the table and a voice in the conversation that is happening.”

Flying cars even played a bit role in the recently settled legal fight over trade secrets between Uber and Waymo, the self-driving car service spun out of Google. In court testimony, Travis Kalanick, Uber’s former chief executive, said he had heard that Larry Page — the chief executive of Waymo’s parent company, Alphabet, who has a side project building new types of aircraft — was upset because Uber was “doing their thing” with flying cars.

Whatever you imagine a flying car to be — stop. What these companies envision is something like a helicopter but much quieter and more affordable. Think of a hobbyist’s drone, but big enough to fit people. It would, in theory, be welcome in urban environments and affordable to more than well-heeled businesspeople.

At least, that’s the dream.

Before there can be too much enthusiasm for these flying taxi services, it’s worth noting that self-driving cars have yet to turn into a notable business for anyone, despite about a decade of research at tech giants like Google and billions in investment from Silicon Valley and the auto industry.

Regulators are just starting to agree on rules for large-scale tests of self-driving cars on public roads. How would they deal with flying taxis? The details of the future service are far — very far — from being ironed out.

Still, there are some reasons for the new enthusiasm. Battery improvements and the wide use of drones have spawned technological breakthroughs. The taxis would take off and land vertically like a helicopter, so they’d take up less room.

Because they would be battery-powered, they would be more environmentally friendly.

For now, Airbus executives hope to gain from Blade’s experience with an app that allows customers to reserve a seat on a helicopter. Airbus is expected to invest up to $15 million in Blade, which would represent about a 10 per cent stake in the company.

Both companies see helicopters as an intermediate step until a new type of aircraft and taxi service hits the market. Rob Wiesenthal, Blade’s chief executive, said a quieter and less expensive alternative to helicopters “opens up a whole new world”.

Airbus said it was preparing for a test flight by year-end for its CityAirbus aircraft, which carries up to four passengers and can reach a cruising speed of about 75mph. It plans to deploy the CityAirbus in 2023.

Uber has said it expects to begin testing of its urban air taxis in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Los Angeles and Dubai in 2020. The company has landed exclusive deals for vertical take-off and landing spots with real estate companies, including in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Uber declared its interest with its Uber Elevate initiative in 2016, forecasting a future when it could offer 15-minute Uber Air rides from San Francisco to San Jose for $20. The 50-mile ride with Uber Pool, its carpooling option, usually takes about two hours in rush-hour traffic and costs $83.

It did not put a date on that future.

In a concept video for Uber Elevate, a woman opens the Uber app, which gives her a choice of taking a ride with Uber Pool, UberX or Uber Air. She enters a nearby building and rides the elevator to the top floor, where she boards an air taxi in Uber Skyport.

Uber is also establishing performance guidelines for its flying taxis, including asking that the new aircraft make only one-quarter of the noise of a small four-seat helicopter. Uber also has supplier deals in place with five manufacturers, including Textron’s Bell Helicopter.

“We believe the best way to get this idea off the ground is to partner with world-class companies and stakeholders that have a diverse set of specialisations,” an Uber spokesman, Matt Wing, said in a statement.

Daniel Wiegand, a co-founder and the chief executive of the German air taxi company Lilium, said investors considered him totally crazy when he pitched the company in 2015.

“It has completely changed,” Wiegand said. Like many of his competitors, he dismisses the phrase “flying cars” because other companies are working on cars that fly as well as drive on the road. In September, Lilium announced that it had raised $90 million from investors, including the Chinese internet giant Tencent.

And then there is Google — or, to be more specific, Page, Google’s co-founder and Alphabet’s chief executive. He has invested part of his personal wealth in Kitty Hawk, a start-up that has demonstrated a personal aircraft that flies using propellers over water. A Kitty Hawk division called Zee Aero is also reportedly working on an air taxi concept aircraft.

Kalanick said he told Page that he believed a flying service “sounds pretty cool”, even though Uber wasn’t building one. But once the aircraft are available, he said, “I will make sure that our 50 million or so customers at the time can push a button and get a flying car.”