Chucking out the peanuts
Day after day our UK government is announcing this and that million pounds for peanut initiatives for the upheaval change we must make to move to Electric Vehicles. It's a new Transport System guys...
What about 2030, just 9 years away? Will there be 6m or 18m EVs on our roads? It varies depending which part of government you ask, BEIS/Dft or Ofgem. So what? It's just chicken and egg. And here most definitely the chargers come first, for without them along our strategic road network EVs will not come, people will not buy them.
We are faced by seemingly random government actions. "190,000 home/work chargers of 7kW power by ???" "25,000 chargers, unspecified, and without declared funding, by ???" Magnificent £1.3bn declared over 4 years, for what? Not defined, but turning out to be handouts to cowboys operations putting chargers in the wrong places like McDonalds or Chester Zoo, not along our roads. Lots of talk about "£950m for rapid chargers on our roads, 6000 by 2035" (far too few). Plus a miserable £20m for Local Authorities to divide their car parks and prevent fossil fuelled cars equal access to parking, oh, and some unspecified "street" charging in 2021 & maybe 2022...
Like I said, chaos.
Pools, chargers and points
And on top of this Boris's stated bold angelic vision of charger pools "every 30 miles along our Strategic Road Network". Which, when you work it out, means 2,300 miles of motorways needing 80 charge pools, at which at least 20 pools with 10 chargers each or 9,300 points. And even then 15m EVs will need up to 15m home/work fast charge points. We have to deliver the power, a mean of 1kW per EV by 2030 is the EU estimate for electricity suppliers.
But this is not the direction things are going. Is it? The government firmly believes in the approach of "the market will provide" (read: it's not our job, we are only the government). But the market will not. Today few of the chargers are finding their way to motorway pools and very few, if any, to "A" roads. They are being installed at local destinations, supermarkets, fast food outlets, in town car parks. The result of which will simply be huge traffic jams as people drive in and out to put energy in their cars. And as EV's fight ICEs for a parking place.
And again just think, EVs need a 45-60 minute charge (it is getting faster but not until better battery technology comes along) versus fossil fuels cars needing just a 10 minute stop. Or 6 times as long. And the range of the EV is, not as makers claim 200-250 miles, but a realistic 150 miles, or lower in cold weather, versus a fossil fuelled car of 500-600 miles. Or four times smaller. This means many more EV stops and many more chargers. It is obviously foolish to think of just replacing petrol stations with EV charging stations. A new architecture of a revolutionary Travel System is needed, only achieved by good top down thinking and planning.
This is where our government is failing us.
It seems the only company that knows this is Tesla, with its manufacture of batteries, cars, of navigation systems that route you to/via chargers and of an adequate national charger network.
Bad place
So where are we today? In a bad place. The useless national data base of chargers, on line as Zap Map, shows puddles of chargers. Except when you drill down to find one you need right now, right here, for example in East Anglia desert. There are more vast desserts when none can be found. Worse still are the fifty different "networks" run by 50 different cowboys, all given handouts by government to put chargers anywhere they want. All branding no substance.
No plan, no hope.
The government financing model of handouts to stimulate private initiatives will not provide a pan-national charging infrastructure. What it promotes is seed money promoting sharing of costs with destinations. You know, "come to McDonalds and eat as we provide Rapid EV charging"... In other words the focus of the private investment is shared with destinations. No destination, no chargers. And worse, the paltry sums handed out to Local Authorities most of whom have no idea what to do with it, who employ "consultants", more cowboys, then sprinkle their patch with useless EV only parking. Some even refusing to provide on-street points for those without a private drive.
