Politicians have long championed the electric car.
But now the House of Commons Transport Select Committee has raised serious concerns about their widespread use.
According to these MPs, electric cars could place so much demand on the National Grid that it won’t be able to cope. Huw Merriman MP, chair of the committee, argues that in parts of the country electric cars may even cause blackouts.
In the committee’s report, it says that drivers of ‘Battery Electric Vehicles’ (BEVs) must be able to ‘seamlessly access any charging network in any location at any time.’
To achieve this, they will need to switch to ‘smart charging’. That is, shifting the time of day when they charge their cars – usually to nighttime – to avoid paying a higher tariff for electricity.
But this much-feared spike in demand for electricity has not materialized yet, and it won’t do so for a long time. The electric-car market is still minuscule.
The government has ambitiously decreed that in 2030 it will become illegal to sell new petrol and diesel cars.
The same fate awaits some hybrid cars in 2035. So far this year, however, BEVs (fully electric cars) have made up just 6.9 percent of new car registrations. This is an increase in the figure for the whole of 2020 – 2.7 percent – but BEVs still represent a very small proportion of the overall market.
As for the total number on the road, there were fewer than 200,000 cars fueled purely by electricity in the UK in 2020 – an even tinier proportion of the 40 million total registered vehicles.
What the committee seems to have done is confuse Boris’s electric-car target with actual car sales. Clearly, a paper decree doesn’t guarantee a real result.
The high prices of batteries, charging and the cars themselves would all need to fall substantially for the electric-car revolution to become a reality.
What’s more, car sales fell in 2020 because of lockdowns and a worldwide shortage of semiconductors. This could further delay the day when electric cars become a major presence on British roads.
This means it will be many years before they impose a big enough load on the National Grid to warrant genuine concern.
Yes, the National Grid runs on a very tight margin. But that should spur us to expand capacity by building a lot more nuclear power stations, and quickly – and not just to power new Nissan Leafs or Teslas.
Glistening green policies often hit roadblocks. Their backers get cold feet as they realize the number of resources these ‘sustainable’ projects actually need.
But for the time being, the main barrier to electric cars is not the electricity supply, but their high price. That’s why it could be decades before they are adopted by British motorists en masse.
For now, at least, the electric-car revolution only really exists in its proponents’ heads.
Read rest at Spiked-Online
That is exactly what they are doing. Automobile companies today do not worry if there is gasoline available for their cars, they let the Petroleum industry take care of that. And the same thing if they switch to electric — they assume that the power industry will take care of the demand. Except they can’t, because they are strapped with impractical demands for unreliable “green” energy.
So you are saying that all these massive automobile companies who are now switching over to electric vehicles (many with government incentives) did so without any thought to their fuel source?
Wow! What is the most atounding about that absurdity is that you actually believe it.
Massive industrial companies make massive mistakes. I worked in engineering for 34 years. My most stressful assignments were as an engineer to work on the recovery from such mistakes. The reason that there probably won’t be a power grid problems caused by electric vehicles is the number of families that buy them will be fewer than what the social planners are anticipating.
And another laughably stupid article from Climate Disinformation Dispatch
As of February 2021 there were 77 highway capable electric cars on the market – a 20-fold increase in just 6 years.
BTW, This does not include, trucks, tractors, Indian Put Puts, bicycles, etc etc and so on.
Did you read the article? It said nothing about the number of highway capable models. The issue is how many people will buy them. Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, volunteered in a interview that the average American family can not afford one of his company’s car. Of the families that can afford one, we can be sure not all will buy them. It gets worse if we consider how car ownership works for many families. The middle and lower income families don’t buy new cars but survive with used cars. The need to replace the battery on older electric cars makes them unaffordable for these people.
Not one of the predictions made by the Eco-Freaks back in the 70’s have ever happened but the M.S. Medis still listens to them and spews their lies.The Earth is Not Fragile
It is human nature to assume other people are similar to one’s self. That is the only reasonable explanation for the elite to continue to assume that the average family can afford an electric car. That causes them to do social planning that can not happen.
The issue is larger than electric cars. With the fuel economy mandates that go into effect before the ban on fossil fuel vehicles, the cars meeting these mandate will not be adequate for many applications. It is doubtful that a vehicle getting 54.5 miles per gallon could have met the needs of my family with four kids, especially for going on vacation. We used a full size Suburban.
I just made a poor decision to spend $2,800 doing extensive mechanical repairs on my 1999 Subaru rather than replacing it. With other things going on I don’t want to spend the time and hassle of car shopping. With mandates on fuel consumption and the coming ban on fossil fuel vehicles, the decision that I just made on my Subaru will be common place.
Hi David. I agree – we all assume other people are much the same as ourselves. That’s normal as we are all human after all.
You are right also about having sufficient electricity to re charge EV’s. Here in Australia, we are planning (unknowingly) to shut down our remaining coal power stations and when that happens, we will be having many blackouts. There is no chance we’ll have sufficient electricity to re charge NSW government EV’s (that’s their plan for 2030) or any others for that matter, regardless of how many wind farms and solar farms we install. The power grid is fragile as well and we will lack base load power generators to meet night demand.
We have an old Mitsubishi Triton 4×4 and we recently had the engine rebuilt. That cost AU$4,400 and it goes like new now. To buy a “used” replacement would have cost around AU$10,000 and it was likely to have wear and tear problems at that price. A new 4×4 in Australia would cost around AU$45,000 so that was out of the question for us.
As time passes, I expect more people will come to realise it is cheaper to overhaul older vehicles rather than updating, especially with a new vehicle. In the end, a car / SUV is transport only and we want it to be reliable and affordable. All the talk about EV’s is just rubbish to most normal families paying off a mortgage and educating a few children.
As you said, all their social planning cannot happen. They are kidding themselves because they don’t understand what it’s like to manage a normal family in the 2020’s and these are the same people who want to shut down the cheapest and most reliable power generation currently known to man. That being fossil fuels – coal and gas, while nuclear is literally not permitted is this backward country of mine.
Make all of Hollywood live by the same rules they push upon the rest of us
The population of the world is in the process of being reduced. There will not be that amount of people around to charge there Electric Vehicles.
Also this
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/04/tesla-fire/