Who pays in the end?
Hampshire County Council wants to install more charging points for electric vehicles and has put out a tender for a contract. The contract over 4 years purportedly worth £25m, or something over £6m per year. Really!
I have become increasingly confused as to firstly who is responsible for installing these charging points, and then who is paying for them.After all, I am not aware that HCC owns a filling station near me, so if they are not installing petrol pumps, why are they installing charging points? Why should the cost of installing such a system in order to benefit a small number of private individuals be borne out of public funds, or am I absolutely miles away from the answer?
Should the onus not be on the ‘energy suppliers’ or the car manufacturers to provide the facilities? We have already seen on television someone who is designing a ‘charging hub’ for an oil company. But hang on, a petrol station with eight petrol pumps could potentially serve 30-40 customers an hour, how many charge ups could be done in that space of time, and what would be the profit? Tells you all you need to know I think about the commercial aspect of charging electric cars; no profit, no facilities. It appears it is going to be back to the taxpayer to foot the bill whether you have a car or not. There are of course other questions around who supplies power to the charging point, how is that cost covered, and how is the price regulated nationwide?
But while the country is drowning in debt, not just from Covid, anarchy all but rules the streets, while all manner of subversion in schools, colleges and universities goes on daily, we will also be flogging ourselves silly to go green while China and India take us for mugs and continue to make money from us.
This is all on top of the £1.4 TRILLION it is estimated to get us from 1 per cent to zero in the pollution stakes, while elsewhere, so much of humanity daily struggles with just staying alive.
Say what you like but if we each had the most expensive and efficient equipment made of net zero everything to cook on, our monetary sacrifice and good intentions will all be rendered pointless by those in other parts of the planet still cooking on a wood fire. B Nevill Gosport