I did write to our MP in mid February about this subject and as yet have received no reply, but I do support this aim to reduce the use of fossil fuels, but also hope it applies to electricity generation and central heating as well. It is a massive undertaking and just road vehicles will not be enough.
However, there seems to me to be serious issues when it comes to just having electric cars and delivery vans. Lorries will probably have their own transport depots where they can be charged overnight but, just dealing with cars, I wonder how it is intended to manage the following points:
i) There will have to be a dramatic increase in charging points all over the country. Electric cars cannot travel that far and a journey to Scotland or parts of Wales and northern England will not be possible with just one charge. These charging points need to be as frequent as petrol stations are now and also be fast charging.
ii) In historic towns like Rye, and most residential areas within cities, there is on street parking. How are people to charge up overnight? Trailing cables across pavements would not be acceptable would they? Visitors to Rye – how would they charge up as they shop or eat before returning home? We would need charging points within all the car parks and on the street.
In residential areas where cars have to be parked overnight on the street will there be one point per house? In such areas what about people in flats? It will need a huge investment in infrastructure. I have not heard anything about how this is to be financed, or maybe I have missed this announcement.
iii) Many of us in Rye have lock-up garages, are we to install electricity? The answer seems to be, yes. If so who pays? Is it the electricity companies, the government or individuals? It will probably be a mix, but it needs thinking about now, because 2035 is only fifteen years away.
iv) To cope with this increase in electricity usage we will need to increase electricity generation and at the moment we run with almost no spare capacity. This was seen a few years ago when one failure led to power cuts because the capacity for extra power was not there.
At present, I believe, the government is sanctioning gas fired power stations, whilst having cut back support for wind and solar power. This seems very contradictory.
This is a laudable aim, but I see no real strategic planning: is it window dressing? Gas powered central heating is used in the vast majority of homes, and to change this will be difficult and take time. I remember when the country changed from town to natural gas. It was a massive investment and took several years.
Fossil fuels for vehicles are only part of the picture but even this has implications for historic small towns like Rye, with the charging points for both residents and visitors. CPE (Civil Parking Enforcement) has raised the issue of the pay points, and now we will have to manage charging points.
I think we need to start thinking and planning this now, or will it be left until the last few years, or just quietly dropped?
Image Credits: MikesPhotos / Pixabay https://pixabay.com/photos/electric-car-car-electric-vehicle-1458836/ .
I don’t know how many petrol and diesel cars, vans, lorries and motorbikes there are in the UK, but if they cannot be converted to electric it’s going to have to involve one massive scrappage programme.
I wonder how long this would take and how much energy it would consume? Can’t see it being done by 2035 somehow.
I don’t think, Shaun, that all internal combustion engined vehicles will be banned and taken off the road in 2035. The intention is to stop making them and produce only electric vehicles from that date. As i/c cars slowly wear out and are taken off the road, their replacement will be electric. The problem of recharging, however, is still one that has to be solved.
The rush to electrify everything is creating huge environmental problems for the future. Covering nature with concrete and steel (produced at massively negative green cost) plus the carbon fibre blades – environmentally dangerous to produce and reportedly impossible to recycle seems crazy. During an electricity outage last year everything in my home stopped working. My gas boiler will not work without electricity and my fancy phones wont either. At the flick of a switch over a hundred years of human development wiped out – worse, I no longer have an open fire and could not even cook food. I don’t know why we bother with defence spending when to win the next war it will only be necessary to turn off the enemies electricity.
Likewise electric vehicles facing problems of an increasingly finite supply of precious metal and the cost/difficulty of recycling. Added to all that, it seems goods vehicles lack the power necessary to get up steep hills – perhaps we could use horses to drag them up the slopes they cannot manage.
None of this future mayhem is necessary. Rolls Royce, in a consortium with major British construction firms, have announced mini nuclear hub stations that would provide all the energy needed for a city the size of Leeds. Using sewage and other waste to produce clean gas is so environmentally friendly that I’m amazed it is not mandatory. And, vehicles? Hydrogen is an obvious, but so too is the much ignored ethanol. Ethanol can be produced domestically making us fuel self sufficient and provide a huge boost to agriculture and employment. The problems of cold weather starting must have a solution – I recall starting tractors running on TVO by priming with a drop of petrol.
It seems to me that we have been ‘captured’ by the electricity lobby and unless we want to risk going back to open fires and horses, someone had better do some fast strategic thinking and risk analysis.