A Hertfordshire man who purchased a £3,200 diesel generator to ensure he could charge his electric vehicle during increasingly frequent power cuts has spent the past fortnight sitting in his driveway trying to work out at which point his journey towards carbon neutrality took an unexpected turn.
Martin Pemberton, 52, bought his Hyundai Ioniq 5 in March after what he describes as “extensive research into doing my bit”, which included watching several YouTube videos and having a lengthy conversation with a man at a dinner party who turned out to sell solar panels. The 6.5kW generator followed in September, after the third time in two months that a local substation failure left him unable to charge the car overnight and facing the prospect of missing his Wednesday morning Pilates class.
“The logic was impeccable at the time,” Pemberton said, standing beside the generator as it chugged through its second jerry can of the morning. “I need the car charged. The grid keeps failing. Therefore, generator. It was only when my neighbour asked why I was essentially running a small diesel power station to avoid using petrol that I began to sense I might have overlooked something.”
The generator, which Pemberton purchased from a agricultural supplier after being turned away from three branches of Screwfix, consumes approximately 2.4 litres of diesel per hour when charging his vehicle. He has calculated that a full charge of his car’s 72kWh battery requires roughly eight hours of generator operation, or about nineteen litres of diesel, which he stores in his garage next to his collection of reusable shopping bags and a compost bin he has been meaning to start using since 2019.
“I mentioned to a colleague that I’d solved my charging problem and he asked if I’d considered just buying a diesel car,” Pemberton added. “I explained that wasn’t the same thing at all, though I did trail off somewhat towards the end of that sentence.”
His wife, Jennifer, confirmed that Pemberton had spent much of Sunday evening working through calculations on the back of an envelope, trying to determine whether his current arrangement might actually be producing more emissions than his previous vehicle, a 2015 Ford Focus he sold for £4,000 below market value in what he described at the time as “a moral imperative”.
“He keeps saying the phrase ‘net zero’ very quietly to himself,” she said. “Though I’m not entirely sure he knows what he means by it anymore.”
The generator, which can be heard from approximately four hundred metres away, has reportedly become something of a talking point on the local residents’ Facebook group. Pemberton no longer checks the group. He has also removed the “I’m driving electric” sticker from his rear windscreen, though he insists this is unrelated and that the adhesive was simply degrading.
At time of publication, Pemberton was researching whether he might install solar panels to charge the battery pack that would power the generator, before realising that he had just invented the concept of plugging things in again, only significantly worse.