The island of St Helena is hoping that better infrastructure will incentivise more people to move away from petrol and diesel-powered vehicles.
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00:00We want to get to 80% from renewable energy, and then the next step is to roll out the
00:16infrastructure so that we are using electric vehicles more and more on the island.
00:21There is a lot of diesel and petrol vehicles primarily, and we want to change that behavior
00:28and start to use more electric vehicles.
00:42There's a lot of myths around EVs at the moment, so it's important to educate people in terms
00:47of what they're capable of. They're seen very much as a city car, but actually they're just
00:51as relevant in rural communities or rural environments as they are in maybe an urban one.
00:59And to be honest, if you can operate a vehicle,
01:02an electric vehicle in this type of environment, then you really can anywhere.
01:10I think that people's attitudes on the island towards the environment are changing.
01:15It's been a long time where we've all just been really reliant on diesel and petrol,
01:20but since the government invested in wind turbines and solar panels to help contribute
01:26towards our electricity generation, it's helped to open up people's minds in terms of what is available.
01:39We're a place just below the equator. We have about 12 hours of sunlight a day,
01:45almost all year round. And because we're a small island in the middle of the ocean,
01:50there's always sort of a wind blowing through. So we do have
01:55really ideal conditions for solar and wind energy.
01:59Because we are so small here on St Helene, and we have a small population and a small
02:04government, I think it's very possible that we can become completely green. We could only have
02:11diesel generation in terms of resilience in case something goes wrong with the renewables.
02:17But it's entirely possible that we can run an entire island from renewable energy.