Power-hungry electric cars pose a problem

Every time a ‘green’ advocate writes in to defend their mantra they never give any facts, only warped opinions.

Your correspondent Nigel Baker is typical, and sarcastically flippant.

I will leave it to your able correspondent Lyn Jenkins to give Mr Baker facts about wind turbines.

Can I give him, and your readers, some statistical facts about pure electric cars (not hybrids). The only easily available statistics for electric cars in the UK is for the Nissan Leaf. This is an average-size family car. It has a 40kWh (kilowatt hour) battery, giving it a 235-mile range. These figures will be used for the simple calculations.

The average UK car is driven 12,000 miles in a year. That would be 12,000 miles divided by 235 battery charges times 40 kWh per charge, which equals 2,040 kWh or 2.04MWh [mega-watt hours]. Let’s call it 2MWh for simplicity, for one Nissan Leaf for one year. There are 25 million cars in the UK. Let’s say that only 14 million are electric cars in the near future (a lot fewer than the politicians claim they want soon). Fourteen million cars at 2MWh each = 28,000,000 MWh to charge their batteries in a year.

This equals the massive new Hinkley Point C Nuclear Power station currently under construction (stuck in the planning inquiries and building system for 12 years already and costing £20 billion!). It has a maximum capacity of 3,200 MW.

To convert that to MWh you need to multiply that by 365 days by 24 hours. Here is the simple sum 3,200 X 365 X 24 = 28,032,000 MWh.

Of course, most electric cars will be charged overnight, when our power stations are not running at full capacity, but our politicians are quickly phasing out coal/carbonfuelled electric and trying to replace them with erratic, unreliable wind power (of course solar does not work at night). National Grid and local supply lines cannot cope with surges, and neither can our power stations (other than gas) cope with power surges. Just think how long the dithering has been over reliable tidal power in Swansea, with its peaks and troughs linked to gas power.

The demand for lithium-based batteries will rocket globally. Thank goodness one Swansea Canadian businessman is exploring for lithium reserves in the old Cornish tin mines! Nissan currently quote £4,200 for a replacement battery for its LEAF car – about the same as an internal combustion fuel fitted replacement engine.

Western Power has explained this on a website they have created called Electric Nation. I do support electric cars if they are sensibly thought through, and not just glibly promoted by innumerate ‘keen to be seen to be green’ politicians.

Ioan M Richard, Craigcefnparc, Swansea.