Make electric cars a capitalist Tory triumph
In 1911, Winston Churchill, the new First Lord of the Admiralty, began to switch the navy’s most powerful battleships from coal to oil power. He did so in the face of withering scepticism from the establishment. Just a few years before, Lord Selborne, a predecessor, had thundered that “the substitution of oil for coal is impossible, because oil does not exist in this world in sufficient quantities”.
Just over a hundred years later, many leading establishment figures are again dismissing the notion of an energy transition, in eerily similar words. Prominent Conservatives in particular seem to be fighting tooth and nail for the preservation of the technologies of the past, rather than embracing those of the future.
The electricity grid of the future will be centred on renewable energy, supplemented by natural gas, made flexible and resilient by power storage and digital control. Global coal consumption has peaked and begun to decline. Demand is plummeting in the US, beginning to fall in China and Europe, and has been all but eliminated in the UK.
It is now clear that switching to this decentralised, resilient, clean power supply of the future does not necessarily mean higher bills. The cost of renewable energy is falling fast, and the cost of dealing with intermittency is far from exorbitant. Since 2008, renewable energy has soared from 5 to over 25 per cent of the UK’S electricity supply, while average household energy bills fell by 9 per cent. Fact.
In the world of transportation, a similar revolution is starting. Modern electric vehicles already outperform internal combustion cars. The top end Tesla has better acceleration than a Bugatti Veyron but can carry three times as much luggage as a high-end Mercedes. All major manufacturers are racing to hit the sweet spot of a family car with a 300-mile range for under £25,000. There is no doubt they will succeed: the cost of batteries has halved in the last five years, just as their energy density has doubled.
As he fought to modernise the Royal Navy, Churchill knew the stakes: “better ships, better crews, higher economies, more intense forms of war power – in a word, mastery itself was the prize of the venture.” Today’s prize is no less valuable. The UK has a leading position in many of these technologies. The next decade will decide whether we are in the forefront of the revolution, or also-rans.
Environment Secretary Michael Gove gets it. While we don’t yet have all the required infrastructure for everyone to drive electric, his aim to phase out the sale of new diesel and petrol cars by 2040 is as lofty as Churchill’s to switch from coal to oil. But for every Gove, there is a Tory who cherry-picks facts to sow doubt about climate change. Even if they don’t officially speak for the Conservatives, these fossil-fuel-loving corporatists influence activists, inform policy and destroy the party’s brand.
Conservatism is all about preserving and building on the best of the country’s institutions and traditions, not about preserving its incumbent industries. Italian writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa has an important message: “if we want things to stay as they are, everything will have to change”.
For the Conservative Party to be relevant to urban professionals, to lure back young voters seduced by the false promises of Jeremy Corbyn’s Venezuela-style redistribution, it has to offer a radical, positive vision of the country’s economy, environment and role in the world. A vision powerful enough to carry us through Brexit and into sunlit uplands beyond. We must be Churchills, not Selbornes.
What could be a more powerful vision than to lead the world in creating a dynamic, high-performing, sustainable economy? Not to lead stupidly, in a centralised, statist way, via over-regulation and subsidies. Not by restricting choice, picking winners and wasting taxpayers’ money. We should lead by creating joined-up policies across tax, infrastructure, research, trade, and regional development. Policies which, taken together, encourage private capital formation and entrepreneurship. We can lead, in short, by unleashing the creativity of the people in pursuit of one of the greatest prizes of our time.
Michael Liebreich is founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance and a board member of Transport for London