Drawbacks to France’s electric car revolution

SIR – A French initiative hopes to get everyone in the country using electric vehicles (report, October 13).

France has an excess of generating capacity, largely from nuclear and hydroelectric sources, which we use to top up our own rather limited capacity. If this electric car revolution does take place in France – and I must say I have my doubts, given that a lot of French people live in apartments and will have difficulty charging a vehicle at home – then we in Britain will have a problem. That excess will no longer be available to us.

Some of us remember the lights going out in the Seventies. Perhaps we could see history repeat, as motorists on both sides of the Channel rush home on a cold, windless evening and plug in their new electric vehicles. Bernard Ideson Keighley, West Yorkshire

SIR – Last month, a reader asked why there was so much discussion of the merits of wind or solar or nuclear energy when a tidal lagoon was waiting to be built at Swansea.

However, a tidal lagoon’s generating systems only work for some 14 hours a day. During these hours, the output varies with the difference in height of the water. In addition, the differences in heights of the spring and neap tides will produce continuous variation in capacity throughout the lunar month.

The ever-burgeoning “smart” modifications to the grid, added in order to overcome the crippling intermittency of renewable sources such as tidal, wind and solar, will produce ever-increasing electricity bills and make the whole system more vulnerable to device failure, or even deliberate cyber attack. Richard Phillips Newbury, Berkshire

SIR – If the Prime Minister really wants to see reductions in energy prices (report, October 14), she should put an end to pointless virtue-signalling by repealing the Climate Change Act and derogating from the EU’S Large Combustion Plant Directive, to the huge benefit of domestic and industrial consumers alike. Max Sawyer Stamford, Lincolnshire