It’s absolute fantasy to think we can move to all electric cars without fossil fuels
July 30, 2017
A good summary from Booker on the electric car saga:
To the few of us who have long been trying to follow the Government’s woefully unreported plans for Britain’s energy future, the news of the switch in 2040 to electric cars was hardly a surprise. But the full implications of this drive to phase out virtually all use of fossil fuels in the coming decades have not yet begun to sink in. And there are many more shocks to come. Brushed aside in the daylong blizzard of propaganda to which we were treated in favour of all-electric cars, there are of course many practical reasons these have not caught on.
Despite hundreds of millions of pounds in taxpayer bribes to persuade motorists to buy them, they make up only 0.3 per cent of the 31.7 million cars on our roads. It didn’t take long for the crucial question to be asked: where is all the extra 30 gigawatts (GW) of electricity needed to charge these cars to come from, when this would add nearly 50 per cent to our current peak electricity demand, half of it still supplied by the fossil fuels the Government wants to eliminate?
The answer from Michael Gove, our Environment Secretary, was that it would come from wind and nuclear power. One estimate suggested that to provide 30GW from wind would require 10,000 new turbines, on top of the 7,613 we already have. But this was based on the familiar mistake of confusing the full capacity of these turbines with their actual output which, thanks to the wind’s intermittency, is less than a third as much. To achieve 30GW of output would thus require 100GW of capacity, bringing the necessary number of new turbines to 30-40,000, five times as many as now, each taking six months to install. And on windless days these could not charge the batteries of many electric cars.
Are we really going to more than double the number of wind turbines in Britain? Credit: Ashley Cooper/Alamy Stock Photo
As for nuclear, to produce 30GW would require us to spend a minimum of £200bn on nine more nuclear power stations the size of Hinkley Point, although this itself is unlikely to be built before 2030 (if ever); and no more are yet firmly in the pipeline. To say that Mr Gove and his colleagues are living in cloud- cuckoo land is the most generous of understatements.
But so is the most recent forecast by National Grid, which talks blithely of how by 2030 we will need 146GW of capacity to meet all our electricity needs, of which they claim nearly half will come from wind and solar, although this is based on the same confusion between capacity and actual output, which would be barely 14GW. Scraping around desperately to justify its 146GW figure, National Grid also assumes that by 2030 we will still need 18GW from gas-fired power stations to provide instantly available backup for when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
But this will be nothing like enough to close the gap when we have no more coal-fired power stations, and many fewer than now using gas. Amazingly, National Grid also anticipates that another 18GW will be supplied by interconnectors from other countries, six times more than now. But this will be at a time when every other European country is struggling to meet the EU’s target of a 60 per cent cut in CO2 emissions by 2040. I said there were many more shocks to come, not least the Government’s plan that, after 2030, we will not only be switching to electricity for our transport system but also for all our heating and cooking.
A Parliamentary report, based on an Imperial College study, estimates that this will boost our electricity needs to 350GW, nearly six times higher than our current peak demand. This is all such insanity that eventually the penny will drop that it is leading us to a complete national catastrophe. But as we saw from last week’s propaganda- fest, that day is still a long way off.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/29/absolute-fantasy-think-can-move-electric-cars-without-fossil/
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