On top of £28 billion in new taxes, we must more than double electricity generation in 15 years

sir – A £28 billion fuel-duty black hole (Philip Johnston, Comment, February 4) isn’t the half of it.

Petrol and diesel road vehicles in the United Kingdom currently consume about 453 TWH of energy each year. To put that in context, the total UK electrical energy production in 2018 was about 335TWH.

So Boris Johnson must be planning to more than double our electrical energy production. Mustn’t he? That means 20 Hinkley C power stations at a cost of £500 billon – or alternatives.

And double the grid capacity. And re-wire the streets. All in 15 years.

If it wasn’t for politicians, what would we do for entertainment? Nick Martinek

Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

sir – Is the Government’s aim, in banning fossil-fuel vehicles, to stop us from travelling?

I am on holiday in the French Alps. In the local village, diesel is considerably cheaper than petrol, and I have found no evidence of any facility to charge electric vehicles.

Given that 15 years is a very short time in which to create the necessary infrastructure, what is required right now is a decision on whether vehicles should rely on battery power or hydrogen, if we are to avoid something like the VHS versus Betamax dispute over video recorders.

JPG Bolton

Bishops Lydeard, Somerset

sir – Peter Forrest (Letters, February 6) is quite right that hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles need to play a very significant part in the future.

The way in which the hydrogen is produced also needs urgent consideration. You reported recently that wind-farm operators are paid – disgracefully and at our expense – for ceasing to feed electricity into the grid when in windy weather they produce more than the grid can accept.

They should, as part of their contracts, be made to install electrolysers so that when the grid is “full” the surplus is used to make hydrogen, either for use in fuel-cell transport (which might include trains on lines where electrification would be too expensive) or to feed into the gas mains to reduce the carbon emissions from our heating systems. Peter Chatham

New Arley, Warwickshire

sir – If he does not already know this, Warren East, the chief executive of Rolls-royce (Business comment, February 4), may be delighted to learn that one of the RR constituent companies, Armstrong Siddeley, demonstrated more than 50 years ago with its Sapphire engine that hydrogen fuel presented no significant difficulties to its “vaporiser” fuelinjection system, requiring only an appropriately sized tube to introduce the fuel into the same vaporiser as is used for liquid fuel.

As a former chief combustion engineer with Rolls-royce, I recall that after the merger with Bristol Aero Engines, the vaporiser was quickly introduced into the Pegasus (Harrier) engine and, not long after that, into the Concorde engine. Arthur Sotheran

Bristol

sir – With the announcement that no new petrol or diesel cars will be sold after 2035 and the previous edict that gas central heating is to be phased out, is now the time for parents to encourage their children to consider a career as an electrician rather than to embark on a university course with all the debt this often brings?

What a golden future beckons: rewiring of millions of houses and buildings across the country, not only for heating, but also to provide the power points for the new age of electric-only cars.

With restricted immigration from the EU, who knows what rates these individuals will be able to command?

More ominously, we householders had better start saving now, as it will not be cheap. Bruce Holland

Bushey, Hertfordshire