Government To Subsidise Electric Car Purchases, Forget About Grid, Renewables, Battery Production…

The government has announced plans to give buyers of electric cars up to £5,000 towards their purchase, incentivising people to buy the pricey vehicles. It forms part of a £250m funding drive to bring the cars to the UK, including test-drive programs and the setting up of charging points.

Gordon Brown said last year that he wants all British vehicles to be hybrid or electric by 2020, and the announcement comes as various major car manufacturers outline their plans for electric cars. Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn was talking up his company’s prospects yesterday: ”Somebody’s got to invest massively and bring to the market zero emission cars, and we think we can do it”, he said, before slagging off GM’s Chevy Volt for being, at $40,000, way too expensive. Chrysler is developing the Dodge Circuit, an electric sports car, to be the first of five electric or hybrid models to be out by 2012 (that’s if it can negotiate a deal with Fiat to manufacture them). Mitsubishi have recently been showing off the i-Miev, a tiny car that looks like a cheerful robotic hamster storing food in its cheeks, and plans to launch it in 2010. Then there’s the adorably happy little gentleman pictured above, the Peapod, who can only go at 25mph and is designed as a “neighbourhood” vehicle, but which is so goshdarned cute I could just eat it all up.

This month’s Fortune magazine features Warren Buffett alongside the Chinese electric car company he’s invested in, BYD. Don’t underestimate the power of the Oracle - his slavish followers will be on the BYD waiting list before you know it. It only costs $22,000, and looks like a Saab if you squint hard enough, but does have its limitations - its 60-mile range is only good if you’re pootling along at 30mph, while lack of demand in China might be a stumbling block to expansion.

Vauxhall have announced the Ampera, which looks totally evil, the sort of thing the Terminator would take his kids to football practice in. Encouragingly though, it could be built at Ellesmere Port, helping the UK, as Boris Johnson potentially sees it, to be the “electric car capital of Europe”. Ah, and therein lies the rub.

£250m is a drop in the ocean in terms of the investment in infrastructure needed for electric cars to be feasible UK-wide. George Osbourne has described the plans as “fantasy”, highlighting the lack of preparation for charging points and no mention of a grid to deal with the extra electricity demands created by a nation of electric car drivers. And as John Sauven, chief exec of Greenpeace, told the Telegraph: “electric cars are only as green as the electricity they run on”.

The recent fails concerning renewable energy funding means these cars aren’t going to be running on wind or waves; it looks like Ed Miliband’s next generation of nuclear power plants is going to be sorting out energy in the medium term, but until they’re operational the UK is going to running on carbon-rich gas, right when the electric car revolution is meant to begin.

I scraped a B at GCSE, but let’s do some maths anyway. Assuming you charge your 25kWh car battery from a gas-fired power station emitting 400g of carbon per kilowatt hour, you’ll create 10,000g of carbon dioxide to charge an electric car for a day. An electric car like the Ampera or Volt can generally go about 64km on a charge. A 1.4l diesel Ford Fiesta generates 119g of CO2 per km, or 7616g over 64km; that’s 2,384g less carbon than the electric car, right? (Please tell me in the comments if I’ve really dropped the ball here). OK, so a diesel Fiesta has very low emissions compared with most vehicles, and this doesn’t take into account the carbon created by manufacturing the diesel, but even so, electric cars charged off gas-fired power stations (which aren’t even as bad as coal ones) can’t really claim to be cutting Britain’s carbon emissions substantially. And the above scenario doesn’t take into account the strain that fast-charging batteries will have on a power grid.

There’s also a huge shortfall in Hoon’s proposal in terms of allowing the UK to reap the benefits of the electric car. Sure, the Ampera might be built in the North West, but the batteries will be coming from China. If oil-producing nations were the beneficiaries of the internal combustion engine, then battery-producing nations are set to be richly rewarded in the electric car age - the market for lithium-ion batteries to be used in cars could reach $17bn by just 2012. To say, as Labour are, that your electric car plans are to merely subsidise people to buy them, rather than even attempting to tap into the revenue-generating potential they have, is pretty pathetic.

Obviously the government championing electric cars is a good thing, but they have to be powered by renewables, they have to involve British industry, and they have to have a supporting infrastructure that will stay in place for decades to come. Concentrating on the consumers should be the last on this list of priorities; Labour is currently putting it up at the top.

By Ben Beaumont-Thomas | April 17, 2009 12:13PM