Can the UK Speed-Up it’s Conversion to All Electric Vehicles?

The UK Government has recently made several announcements about its intentions to encourage vehicle owners in the UK to speed up their switch to fully electric vehicles. With its original deadline of 2040 for the banning of sales of petrol and diesel vehicles being brought forward to 2035, the ban will now include hybrid vehicles and may well happen in 2032, with some bodies calling for it to be yet sooner. What are the implications of these measures, and can the UK achieve this?

Until February 2020, the UK’s timeline for stopping the sale of new petrol and diesel engine vehicles was 2040. This deadline was established following the publication of the Independent Committee on Climate Change (IPCC) report in January 2019 which ultimately formed the basis of the UK Government’s pledge to decarbonise the UK by 2050, in line with its undertakings associated with the Paris Climate Accord. The response from industry, the climate lobby and other observers was mixed. While the Society for Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) suggested many reasons as to why the 2040 deadline was overly ambitious, Friends of the Earth and other bodies within the environmental lobby urged the government to implement the ban in 2030 which the UK committee of Climate Change thinks is feasible. However, February 2020 has seen at least two announcements from official government sources, both of which make clear an intention to speed up the UK motorists need to make the switch to fully electric vehicles. What’s more, the ban now includes sales of new hybrid vehicles and there are clear indications that the government is ready to respond to the demands of the climate lobby and bring the ban yet further forward from 2035.

Regardless of anyone’s opinions on the need for change or the rate of change relating to our CO2 producing habits, one this is clear. Change is happening. Our news stories are dominated by headlines about the effect of climate change, and the focus of popular ‘natural world’ television shows has shifted from showing us Earth’s amazing natural habitats to forcing us to see the effects of our own habits on the environment in which other species are struggling to exist. Awards speeches at film and music events are now heavily dominated by the theme of our lack of response to the climate emergency. As our calendars and diaries turned over from 2019 to the new decade, we appear as a society to have woken up to the urgency required in terms of the need to change, and we appear to be ready to embrace the coming decade with the aim of mitigating our damage and where possible, reversing it. January for more people than ever became “Veganuary” and while we might have pondered the importance of making dramatic changes to our lifestyle, our televisions brought us unprecedented images of our planets response to our century of abuse in the form of unprecedented fires in the beautiful Australian bush.

Perhaps 2019 was the perfect Segway into this new era of environmental conscientiousness. The IPCC report of January ‘19 resulted in multiple nations declaring a “Climate Emergency”, a term which was new to us at the time but has now found its was into popular conversation. Interestingly, the first country to declare a climate emergency was Scotland on 28th April 2019, followed by Wales on the 29th April before the UK government followed suit on 1st May 2019. Since then, 25 countries have fully declared (as opposed to regions or areas) a climate emergency. So what do you do after you’ve declared a climate emergency? What follows is declaration of measures to be taken to mitigate climate change, and to be of any value, these measures must have a basis in science and fact. For the UK – that basis was the IPCC report of that year. It was that report which recommended, amongst other dramatic measures, sales of petrol and diesel engines should not be permitted beyond 2040. The thinking being that the last of those vehicles, accounting for a declining sales leading to the ban, would largely be off the road by 2050 which was seen as the “Decarbonisation” deadline.

In the space of less than one year, the 2040 ban on sales of new petrol and diesel engine vehicles has received criticism from all quarters. For the UK public, most of this criticism went largely unheard due to headlines being dominated by first Brexit and then the General Election of December 2019. However, when the Conservative government were returned power with a strong majority, with the issue of the UK’s exit agreement finalised, the political agenda quickly returned to other issues which included the battle against climate change. Another point which had gone largely unreported in preceding twelve months was the fact that the UK will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in November 2020 – known as COP26 (26th Conference of the Parties). While the actual event runs for ten days in November, hosting the event puts the UK firmly in the shop window in terms of its own commitment to the climate emergency and the measures the UK is taking to mitigate climate change. The launch event for COP26 was held on 4th February at London’s Science Museum, at which the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the UK would be bringing forward the ban on sales of petrol and diesel engine vehicles from 2040 to 2035 “at the least” and that the ban would now include hybrid vehicles. Just eight days later, in an interview on BBC Radio Five Live Transport Secretary Grant Snapps advised that the government was considering bringing the ban yet further forward to 2032 and that consultation on this would follow.

There appears to be a strong indication that the demands of the environmental lobby to bring the ban forward to 2030 have been heeded by government, and that the 2035 deadline is certainly here to stay as the new back-stop and that the ban will occur somewhere between 2030 and 2035. One of the key elements of the debate which has started surrounds the inclusion of the hybrid vehicles, raising a question about whether this might hinder momentum of change amongst drivers and car buyers as they make the migration from Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicle to Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV). Underpinning this debate is the question of the UK’s network of charging facilities and the capability of the UK Grid to sustain a vastly increased demand led network of vehicle charging points.

Possibly the first point to remember in this whole debate is that whenever the ban becomes effective, the ban relates to sales of new vehicles and not the driving of ICE or Hybrid vehicles. While no formal declaration of banning the use of these types of vehicles is in existence at the moment, it must be seen that decarbonisation of the UK by 2050 will effectively mean that CO2 emitting engines, other than those adapted in some fashion, will be outlawed at this time.

It is interesting to see how other nations are approaching the same challenge. Of the 25 nations who have officially declared a “Climate Emergency” only 13 nations have firm deadlines for the cessation of sales of petrol or diesel vehicles.

The debate around the move to full electric vehicles not only centres on when it should be done, but also if it could be done, and the fringes of the debate include the question as to whether it should be done.

Dealing firstly with the question of whether it should be done, the focus appears to be around the embodied energy and the methods associated with the production of the batteries required to support a fully electric global motoring market. This must be considered along with the need to supply other sectors such as housing, public transport and other sectors requiring battery technologies. Questions point to the environmental damage of mining for materials such as lithium and cobalt and the fact that, like the minerals we have depended upon before them, they are finite and require huge amounts of energy to extract from the earth. Much of the world’s lithium stock are held and obtained from North West Argentina, within the Andes region. Indigenous populations in the area are already declaring that the mining of lithium is a threat to their way of life and the natural habitat that they live in and survive off. While this is presently a low level debate, despite having strong parallels with previous well documented examples of exploitation at the cost of habitats, the mining corporations have themselves been unable to deny that 14,000 tonnes of lithium removed from this region in 2018 required in excess of 420 million litres of water – a resource which is extremely scarce in the region, and its monopolisation by mining inevitably threatens the sustainability farming and the populous in the area.

Turning to the question of whether is could be done, we have to acknowledge the fact that fully electric vehicles can only operate successfully as an alternative to petrol and diesel if the charging network is extensive and robust enough.

Presently, the total number of locations which have a public charging point installed is 10896, the number of devices at those locations is 17601 and the total number of connectors within these devices is 30546. Optimistically, it can be celebrated that in August 2019 the 9,300 electric vehicle charging locations for the first time exceeded the number of traditional fuel stations which numbers 8,400. However, the reality of the practicalities of owning a fully electric vehicle, or even a hybrid at this point, means that the comparison is no indicator that the network is sufficiently established.

To establish the scale of the UK charging network which is required is a challenge. We could speculate that the UK may require one charging point per home, or possibly one charging point per vehicle, and the difference between those two figures being vast as there are over 22 million homes in the UK and approximately 40 million vehicles. A case could be made that drivers and electric car owners will require a charging point at work and at the home place while charging points will also be required in high numbers at motorway service stations, supermarkets, multi-storey car parks and other such locations.

How big is this as a challenge? If we discount the 2035 target (as we can assume that many petrol, diesel and hybrid cars will remain on the road at that time) but assume that by the decarbonisation deadline of 2050 all of our 22 million homes will have just one charging point for a fully electric vehicle we will need to install 733,000 electrical charge points every year. This doesn’t account for any increase in population which is currently running at 0.6% annually, alternatively, it doesn’t account for any movement away from individual forms of transport and greater use of public transport or other form of lesser reliance on car ownership.

Aside from the scale of installing this number of vehicle charging points, we must consider if our national grid has the capacity to safely and reliably sustain 22 million additional vehicle charging points. It should be noted that a vehicle charging point is not equivalent to an additional 13 amp power socket in a home. Fast chargers, as opposed to rapid chargers which use three phase supply systems, require a 32 amp supply which can be installed from a standard domestic distribution board, provided there is suitably capacity in the board. A good many homes will not possess sufficient capacity in the board or the installation may not be achievable in terms of meeting the most recent legal safety frameworks in terms of earthing and other such technicalities which could discount the feasibility of installation and/or add significant cost to installation.

There is cause for optimism in the fact that UK power consumption in the time between 2000 and 2018 has dropped by some 9% as a result of our sectors becoming more efficient in the way they use power. This is especially commendable against a backdrop of population growth and a proliferation of electrical devices and appliances. Nonetheless, these consumption figures will highly likely be reversed significantly as the UK’s motoring public moves from petrol, diesel and hybrid to fully electric vehicles at a rate of 730,000 large capacity charging points every year. The implications for this are significant both in terms of central generation and more problematically the distribution of power.

Equally as we drive our vehicles to the fully electric solution, sourcing their power from the national grid, we must ultimately confront the realities of where the grid draws its power from. Currently renewable energy at generation accounts for 33% of all generation. Fossil fuel in the form of coal and gas accounts for 5.1% and 39.5% respectively. Substantial increases and elimination of fossil fuel from the UK’s generation sector must be at least undertaken at the same pace as the move to carbon free vehicles.

Each correctly installed and fully tested electric vehicle charge point is roughly one days for one fully trained, suitable experienced National Inspection Council for Electrical Installation Contracting (NICEIC) qualified electrician. The demand in terms of skilled labour for this scale of installation will be significant between now and 2050, aside from any earlier deadline, and the supply of this type of labour is not increasing.

There is a great deal of speculation about emerging technologies which will lessen the burden in terms of the move away from petrol, diesel and hybrid vehicles and therefore negate the extent of dependency that the UK might have on purely electric vehicles and the need for such a broad, comprehensive and accessible vehicle charging network. Such technologies include proximity charging methods whereby vehicles are automatically charged as they travel over induction loops located in the highway. Also, Hydrogen Vehicles could yet be the generation beyond pure electric vehicles and could possibly eliminate the issues associated with the production of batteries. However, neither of these technologies are in a ready-state position to allow their widescale implementation to be programmed into our ultimate solution timeline.

Another element to this debate surrounds the taxation around how we purchase cars, and the types of cars we are choosing to buy. Excise duty on new cars is designed quite logically to present higher taxes on vehicles which pollute the most, and this is most evident in the “first year rate” which varies between ￡0 for non-polluting vehicles up to ￡2,135 for the most polluting. However the rate of tax for the second year onwards is pretty much flat along the entire range of polluting cars. The mild penalty for purchasing a heavily polluting car is further eroded by the way cars are sold and purchased. Very few cars are now bought outright and more commonly are purchased as part of a finance deal or a PCP or similar deal. The deterrent of the higher tax is therefore lost within this finance mechanism. Added to that, cars costing over ￡40,000 have an additional ￡320 pounds added to their excise bill over the first five years which directly impact low emission vehicle which in an emerging market tend to be in the higher price bracket.

As consumers, the UK motor market is currently making non-environmentally friendly choices when it comes to purchasing new cars, in that we are buying the wrong size and type of vehicle, preferring large Sports Utility Vehicles (SUV’s) over the size vehicle we actually need. In the last 4 years there were 1.8 millions sales of SUV’s compared to 47,000 sales of Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV’s) in the same period. While that might not be shocking, the polluting effect of these trends are significant and greater than one might expect. A buyer selecting a SUV over a medium sized petrol or diesel will typically result in 25% more pollution, while if that same buyer selects their SUV over a medium sized BEV the variance is more like 400%.

Electric vehicles are certainly society’s medium term solution to our transport needs of the next quarter-of-a-century until hydrogen or some other solution can be confidently implemented. However for purely electric vehicles to be a feasible solution the UK must invest heavily in its power distribution infrastructure, its network of vehicle charge points and the skill base necessary to install the network and upgrade the distribution systems.