Friday 28 July 2017

The Electric Car Problem

Great news that the Government have announced that petrol and diesel vehicles are to be consigned to history on British roads by 2040 but as usual the Government is short on details.
The price of buying an electric vehicle has been tumbling and is now similar to the cost of a petrol one and one in three cars sold in Europe now is electric and by 2040 almost every car sold will not have a petrol tank but a battery.
Dyson, Apple and Google have joined the traditional companies looking to join the car market which should force the price down even further but the problem is the required infrastructure for electric cars.
The Government has announced £100m of funding for car charging infrastructure but that looks a woefully low amount considering what is needed.
With 35 million cars currently in use in the UK, and supposing that the 35 million vehicles will over time convert to electric, that is a very heavy use of devices sucking electricity continuously from the National Grid. 
The National Grid will therefore have to be expanded to accommodate such a substantial rise in demands with the AA saying that the extra electricity needed will be the equivalent of almost 10 times the total power output of the new Hinckley Point C nuclear power station being built in Somerset and that was after years of debate of where to sight it as nobody wanted a nuclear power plant in their back yard.
As well as having to build 10 new power stations at a current rate of £20 billion each to deal with demand, there is also the building of hundreds of thousands of charging points.
Inventing the electric car and announcing the phasing out of cars running on fossil fuels is the easy part because the much needed reshaping and financing of our country's entire electric producing infrastructure will be much harder.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just tax the shit out of everyone. Im surprised i had to tell you. It us usually your go to solution...

Q

Falling on a bruise said...

Even more surprised would be the person who actually does have the go to solution of taxing the shit out of everyone, they must be wondering where their comment went.