AT&T Williams F1

In 2008, Williams F1 reviewed its community, environmental and charitable activities and the interests and ambitions of its business partners, in particular the sponsors of the AT&T Williams team.

The review was intended to ensure that Williams can contribute more widely to society while also supporting the efforts of its partners. 

The Williams Social Responsibility programme focuses on three areas that are closely related to our core activities of engineering and racing: energy efficiency, education and road safety. Many of these programmes are now delivering tangible results.

1. Energy Efficiency
Williams’ energy efficiency programme has two key components, namely the development of new energy technologies derived from Formula One at both Williams Hybrid Power in the UK and at the Williams Technology Centre in Qatar, and secondly, the active membership of the Carbon Disclosure Project in order to measure and mitigate the carbon footprint of the company’s operation.

In 2008 Williams invested in Williams Hybrid Power  (WHP), a company developing high-power flywheel energy storage technology. Williams’ initial interest in flywheel technology for kinetic energy recovery systems (KERS) was driven by its application in Formula One. A flywheel is an efficient and durable energy storage device that is suited to high-power and high-cycle conditions such as regenerative braking in competition cars as much as hybrid vehicles, while adaptation of this technology also provides a far wider range of industrial and civil applications. The technology is inherently ‘green’, recycling energy that would otherwise be lost.

The technology is particularly attractive to car manufacturers who are seeking new, clean solutions to meet increasingly stringent vehicle emissions regulations. For example the EU requires that from 2015 manufacturers’ new vehicle fleet average emissions must be less than 130g/km – they are currently 159g/km.

Emissions from passenger cars in Europe represent 12% of the region’s total anthropogenic output. Hybrid vehicles using technologies like WHP’s flywheel offer a cost-effective route to achieving reductions in this area. This is one example of competition in Formula One acting as a catalyst to bring technology to market.
 
The Williams flywheel is based on an electrically powered integral motor design. The traditional approach, which integrates the motor/generator into the flywheel, has often meant incorporating the permanent magnets of the motor into the centre of the flywheel, causing many technical issues related to containment in the event of flywheel failure. The lightweight Magnetically Loaded Composite approach radically improves the performance characteristics due to its integrated design. They are an energy storage alternative to heavy and environmentally damaging batteries in hybrid electric vehicles. 18 months after its inception, Williams Hybrid Power publicly disclosed its first live project, as part of a consortium of industrial partners including Ricardo, CTG, JCB, Land Rover, SKF and Torotrak, with UK government funding. The project aims to demonstrate the potential of flywheel-based hybrid systems with the potential for 30 per cent fuel savings (and equivalent reductions in CO2 emissions) at an on-cost of less than £1000, thus enabling the mass-market uptake of hybrid vehicles in price sensitive vehicle applications.

Due to the nature of WHP’s work as a tier one supplier to the automotive sector, many of the company’s other projects remain confidential, but two volume car makers have commissioned hybrid projects, as have a number of government agencies. In addition, scaling the application for mass transit has generated live projects with train and tram builders.

The application and potential of the MLC technology beyond the mild hybrid car market sponsored Williams’ investment in a new technology and R&D centre based at the Qatar Science & Technology Park (QSTP) in Doha. The Williams Technical Centre (WTC) is charged with building on this head start to develop a larger version of the flywheel which is capable of handling greater power. The market for such technology is expected to grow rapidly in areas such as:-
 
Mass-transit – braking of trains approaching stations wastes energy that can be captured and stored in the flywheel and used for future acceleration events. In addition, where the costs of continuous electrification are high, flywheels can provide temporary supply of energy for motive power more cost-effectively. These solutions have wide applicability for trains, buses, trams and light rail. In addition, hybrid trains with a capacity for energy storage can provide a cheaper and more viable solution for discontinuous rail electrification programmes. One of the major roadblocks in moving rail networks away from dependency on diesel power is the cost of electrification of remote or physically challenging areas such as tunnels and cuttings. Hybrid trains store sufficient kinetic energy to self-propel through these problematic sections of railway, thereby significantly reducing the infrastructure costs to move to electric power across an entire network.

EPS – Electric Power Stabilisation using flywheels allows fluctuations in electricity supply from grids to be ‘smoothed’ out. This is a particular need in developing economies where increasing numbers of people and businesses are tied to electricity supply from unstable grids; for electricity customers beyond the reach of grids, flywheels can also reduce fluctuations in the power generated from renewable sources such as wind turbines. Smoothing is also an important consideration for high-dependency power applications, such as data centres and hospitals, where loss of power could threaten business viability or risk life.

In these applications, flywheels provide excellent technical solutions as they excel when short, frequent bursts of intense power are required and in this way have five key advantages over alternative battery technology, namely:-

• Flywheels have smaller physical dimensions.
• Flywheels have a much reduced environmental impact as batteries contain  acidic electrolytes and lead.
• Flywheels require less maintenance by a factor of up to six times.
• Flywheels have faster discharge and recharge times, making them more appropriate for applications needing repeat charge-discharge cycles such as a frequently stopping train.

Flywheels have a longer lifespan, up to 15–20 years, up to four times the life of a comparable battery.

Based on extensive market analysis, it is estimated that the future potential market for the MLC flywheel technology is in the order of US$ 250m in the next three years.

Under the energy efficiency umbrella, Williams F1 has also recently become a full respondent in the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). Since its formation in 2000, CDP has become the gold standard for carbon disclosure methodology and process, providing primary climate change data from 3,700 of the world’s largest corporations.

Williams made its first disclosure to the CDP in 2009 and is now actively working to improve its measurement and reporting of its carbon footprint, but also to develop programmes to reduce its carbon impact.
 
Since 2005, Williams F1 has been monitoring and reporting its carbon footprint. In 2008, a group of four MBA students from Oxford University’s Said Business School conducted a three-month project to help enhance and refine the existing reporting systems to bring them in line with the most widely used carbon reporting framework, the Green House Gas Protocol .

In June 2009, Williams fully disclosed details of its carbon footprint under the CDP. The full 19-page submission was published on the CDP’s website  on 21 September 2009. The submission reveals information that might surprise many, such as the fact that emissions from the team’s race cars account for less than 1%.

No common carbon reporting standards or programmes specific to the sports and entertainment industry currently exist. This makes inter- and intra-sport & entertainment benchmarking and sharing of best practice difficult. It also meanscompanies that engage in sponsorship have no solid mechanism for assessing and comparing the environmental attributes of properties they are considering sponsoring, even though “greenness” may well be an important criterion. The proposed solution is to create a sector-specific Sport and Entertainment CDP (S&E CDP). The S&E CDP will lead to sports teams, leagues, tournaments, touring musical acts, television shows and feature films disclosing their carbon footprints under an common reporting framework. This project will address the challenges described above as well as more broadly promote awareness, transparency and responsibility in this high visibility sector. Building on its disclosure under the existing CDP framework, Williams F1 aims to take a leading role in driving the creation of the S&E CDP.

 
2. Education

Williams has long supported a range of education initiatives, from vocational to academic and from primary to tertiary. The support has been equally varied, from providing financial bursaries (for instance for PhD students at Cranfield University) to assisting with curricula development (Oxford Brookes University) as well as annual vocational placement schemes for secondary school pupils and an active apprenticeship scheme.

In 2009, Williams formed a joint venture with Cambridge University Press, one of the world’s leading and longest established educational publisher. With the combined attractiveness of Formula One to school children and the sector expertise that Cambridge University Press has in educational software, the partnership created Race to Learn, a Formula One-themed teaching product for 7- to 11- year olds.

The product, which uses Formula One as an exciting point of engagement for primary school children, provides cross-curricular learning for Year 5 & 6 pupils providing 12 half-days of teaching support in many subject areas. It uses a range of multimedia content including real Formula One footage to promote individual and group working. Designed for interactive whiteboards, Race to Learn covers key curriculum topics – Science, Maths, Literacy, Geography, PSHE, Design & Technology, Physical Education – with each one linked to the relevant National Curriculum/Framework objectives.

Six months after its domestic launch in the UK, Race to Learn won a major industry award, the British Education & Technology Training (BETT) Digital Content award in the Primary category. It was commended by the BETT award judges as containing “superb activities that are highly engaging for children” and “with helpful teacher introduction and age-appropriate activities, Race to Learn is a well thought through support for cross-curricular learning.”

In addition to industry commendation, Race to Learn has also been wholeheartedly endorsed by the teaching profession and the education media. Reviewed recently in the leading trade title, Teach Primary!, the product scored 10/10 and attracted commendations that included “the activities have been carefully thought out and the children loved them.”

The initial success of Race to Learn has encouraged Williams F1 and Cambridge University Press to expand the project overseas, with foreign language versions currently in development. For more information, see www.racetolearn.org


3. Road Safety

The FIA Foundation, to which Williams F1 is a financial contributor, is a driving force in pioneering the NCAP vehicle safety standards and more recently promoting the Make Roads Safe campaign.

Formula One is one of the best pre-emptive safety environments of its kind with much of this knowledge transferable into everyday motoring. There are more than 1.3 million deaths on the world’s roads every year – more than those caused by malaria. With increasing levels of car ownership in the developing world, this trend is likely to rise alarmingly in the absence of significant and committed action.

The UN’s first Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety took place in Moscow in November 2009. Williams supported the publicity around this landmark event, both in Moscow itself and by helping to drive overseas awareness through events, and TV and radio promotion.

Williams is also progressing its own initiatives. With acute problems in developing countries, the company has focused on Angola, where a charitable foundation has been set up. Its aims include promoting road safety.

Research visits to other countries in the Middle East, carried out with the support of the FIA Foundation, are providing the necessary understanding of road traffic risk factors in order to develop programmes elsewhere in the world. The lessons of Formula One and the engagement of racing drivers combine to provide a unique insight to the younger male demographic (the group most at risk on the road). This creates a strong basis for Williams to lend its identity and support to education and communication programmes in these areas.

For more information, see www.makeroadssafe.org