IT’LL COST BILLIONS AND YOU’LL BE DIGGING UP ROADS FOREVER
IDRIVE an electric car every day, and have done for the past seven years. But even as a hugely evangelical supporter of the EV revolution, I don’t believe Scotland will be ready for mass electrification by 2032 – and neither will England.
The SNP’s aim is entirely laudable but 15 years isn’t enough time to build the millions of charge points and create the green power sources needed to keep all those electric car and van batteries fully charged.
I know Scotland has done lots of good work already to establish a wider charging infrastructure but the country’s geography means that really covering the country will cost taxpayers literally billions.
How will you cover the Highlands and Islands, all those remote communities and wonderfully long, deserted roads? If anything, electrifying Scotland will be more difficult than England, requiring millions of rapid chargers at key sites connected to heavy-duty power supplies. You’ll be digging up the roads for years.
And you’ll need plenty of those rapid chargers to make the plan work, and each costs £40,000. A game-changer for the EV industry, the rapid charger can take a lithium ion battery from zero to 80 per cent charge in 30 minutes. Conventional street fast chargers take four hours and home charging takes six hours.
For Scotland to have a connected strategic electrified road network giving reliability and convenience to the millions of motoring consumers, you’ll need very deep pockets and should start digging right now.
Then there’s the issue of range. Unless you can afford a Tesla, the real-world range of affordable cars such as the Nissan Leaf and Renault Zoe is between 100 and 160 miles. I still can’t drive my EV the 120 miles from my home in Warwickshire to London without stopping half way to recharge, charging again in London, and then once more half way back. And that’s between two areas with an already dense charging infrastructure, and along a motorway with rapid chargers at every service station.
Other journeys without that infrastructure are impossible for me. Will Scottish motorists cope with such constraints?
AND let’s not forget the van economy. Electric vans have a range of 90 miles at best, so what about the post, couriers, deliveries, utility companies and the hundreds of other van dependent services? They’ll need dedicated charging hubs to make those 200-mile-plus round trips and satisfy the growing internet delivery economy that’s all van-based.
I know innovation isn’t linear and in the next 15 years we’ll see improvements in battery range lowering charging times, but its taken 100 years for the internal combustion engine to be as efficient as it is now. So I doubt we’ll see the seismic shift in battery density within 15 years to increase the range of batteries to the 350-mile point to make this plan possible within such a short timeframe.
So why the cliff edge? Why the self-imposed cut-off date? The European Commission and Green politicians (who nobody votes for) have terrified Westminster and it looks like Scotland is now cowering, too. Cleaning our urban air is a major imperative but we also need to look at industrial and domestic combustion, trains, buses, HGVs, ground-based machinery and shipping. Cars and vans, so easily demonised, produce less than 20 per cent of urban nitrogen oxides and particulates and I’m not hearing anything about reducing the 30 per cent of emissions from central heating, 20 per cent from trains and buses and the huge amount from shipping and ports that nobody’s been able to quantify accurately.
Even wood-burning Agas produce considerable amounts of ultra-fine particles in cities, and nobody’s talking about banning those.
If you concentrate on such a relatively narrow band of polluters as cars and vans, without reducing the emissions from other major sources, you risk blowing the entire GDP of a generation and making little significant difference to urban air quality. The Greens don’t like cars and they’ve singled out drivers as the major cause of poor air quality in cities. This just isn’t accurate.
We need proper world-class science to identify all the major sources of air pollution and not vilify car and van drivers who have no other choice. And that’s another problem Scotland has. Your geography makes you even more reliant on cars and vans than England. Banning sales of new petrol and diesel cars and vans will create deep social and economic problems and restrict personal mobility considerably.
WHEN the Greens talk about cycling, walking and a sustainable public transport system, remember this: if 10 per cent of road traffic switched to trains, you’d need a 50 per cent increase in rail capacity – and that won’t be any time soon. Scotland doesn’t have a national joined-up public transport system and cycling everywhere in your weather sounds a very bad trip.
So take this as the unimpeachable testimony of a man who now spends much of his life promoting electric cars – Scotland won’t be ready for mass electrification by 2032. Don’t ban the sales of conventional and affordable personal mobility – time and technology will change the landscape sooner than you think and consumers will then be able to make their own choice.
Scottish politicians should look at a far wider picture than cars and vans. Taking a politically correct lead from the Greens and demonising drivers is lazy and predictable. You may score political kudos but it won’t clean your urban air.
Banning new petrol and diesel car and van sales within 15 years will only scratch the surface and cost taxpayers hundreds of billions. Scotland deserves a better plan.