I had an electric car once. The range was pathetic... the
cord only stretched about 50 feet. An oldie but nevertheless still illustrative
of a truism, that although electric cars may be the future, it will be a future
quite different from the one advertised. There may yet be inductive charging
while in motion, kerbside hook-ups every fifteen feet and the opportunity for
some to charge up for free at work, but the electricity has to be reliably generated
somewhere.
And about that reliability thing: until we get 24/7
sunshine, or constant, not-too-weak/not-too-strong wind we have to generate
that electricity by, you guessed it, fossil fuel, because much of the world has
turned against nuclear. So, the real power behind electric cars is not clean,
fresh, free-to-harvest renewables, but good old coal and gas. Add in the cost
of mining all that toxic cadmium and other expensive, exotic metals and it is
almost certain you can show that cough for cough, electric cars are more environmentally
harmful than diesel
But long before we get to the stage when environmentalists
begin to campaign against electric cars we need to spend a whole bunch of cash
just to make electron-propelled transport viable. Where do you live and where
do you work? Do you have a nice driveway where you can recharge? Or, like far
more of the population, do you need to park across the road, in the next
street, or just in a different spot every evening because, muh, congestion?
Who is going to build all the power stations needed? It
has been widely reported that China builds a new coal-fired power station about
every three seconds, yet in the UK we get one new nuclear plant every fifty
years. And how is all that electricity to be distributed; who is going to build
the infrastructure? You guessed it, not us. The Germans and the French already
seem to own our power market anyway, so hey, let’s throw more of our capital away
in pursuit of what still seems, to me, to be an improbable dream.
Why the push for all-electric transport then? Well,
obviously it is whatever form of climate change we are trying to reverse this
week. And if energy usage is the bogeyman, why increase it? Turning fossil fuel
into motive power, heat, light, etc is more effective if you cut out the middle
man of costly (to build, maintain, manage and bill for) energy networks which
merely increase complexity. This introduces efficiency losses at each stage of
the process: extraction, transport, conversion , distribution, etc and adds administrative costs as the bureaucracy
of the systems involved each take their slice.
Drax power station in South Yorkshire converted to the ‘carbon
neutral’ wonder fuel known as biomass some years ago. Not only is this more
expensive, but it is ultimately more polluting, especially when you take into
account the supply chains and deforestation involved in the base fuel. Drax is built
pretty much on top of a massive source of coal, which it used to burn. If the
Chinese and the Germans are allowed to get away with coal-fired, why do we have
to pay for what they produce from afar when we have it right here?
Faced with rising costs, British consumers of electricity
have been economising and their adoption of more efficient devices, low energy
lighting and a bit of common sense is paying dividends. The electric car might
be a shiny carrot of a pseudo-incentive, but we have always responded quicker
to a beating and the big stick of electricity tariffs has been pushing our
usage down for years. It was reported this morning (BBC World Service news) that
we are now using less electricity in the UK than in the eighties and that our
thrift has been more influential in this than the combined ‘contribution’ of
both wind and solar power.
Plug into a nearby taxpayer's wallet and she's ready to go...
So, the experts’ solution to our future energy needs is
to increase our demand for electricity? And to do this they will add extra
taxes into your electricity bills? Doesn’t this sound rather like the sort of
things a drug baron might do - increase dependency, push up the price? Are
those in control really a part of the solution at all, or rather the largest
part of the problem? By all means buy an electric runabout today, but suggest
your kids look into coal, oil and gas for future careers... just in case.