YOU DO THE MATHS

 In response to your Editorial in Car Mechanics March 2020, I feel I must make the following comments regarding the future use of electric vehicles (or rather their energy source if sales of cars with proper engines are to be banned by 2035).

From a few minutes’ Googling I obtained the following numbers and applied some schoolboy maths to these figures.

In 2018 the DVLA reported that there were 38,200,000 cars registered on UK roads. Each car on average does 7600 miles a year. That means 290,320,000,000 miles are driven each year in the UK.

Say an electric car returns three miles for every 1 kwh of electrical energy stored in their batteries. Therefore in one year, if all the cars are powered by electricity, 96,773,333,333 kwh of electrical energy is needed just to move all the cars about. That is a big number so we’ll call that 96,773,333 MWH of electrical energy per year.

Now we need to have a think about electricity generation for a moment. Each of the UK’S nuclear reactors on average can generate 1000 MW of power. Say they run for 8500 hours a year, one nuclear reactor can provide 8,500,000 MWH of electrical energy per year.

By my maths, we need the equivalent power output of 11 nuclear reactors running all year just to provide the energy for all the electric cars. That is over and above the UK’S current energy requirements of other useful and somewhat essential things like schools, hospitals, fridges, washing machines, the railway, kettles and my Scalextric set.

Instead of building the new power stations, be they windmills, watermills or nuclear reactors to provide the necessary energy to move all the cars around, we have a government thinking about building a road bridge between Scotland and Ireland that, at a distance of 21 miles, may have a few electric car drivers suffering from range anxiety.

Oh the irony.

Andrew Rolland

Martyn Knowles responds: Andrew, I’m glad you have done the maths calculations here!

Good point about the Boris bridge. Maybe they will erect a hang-on-the-side services area for recharging halfway across! Or indeed, make the full 21 miles like a Scalextric track – charging en route?