Vocal Voices

That spiralling oil costs and fuel pump prices are Good New for electric vehicle manufacturers. So the stock prices are rising as fast as they dropped.

Leech spivs making money from nothing while they can.

Will any of these technical geniuses step forward and tell us where the future electricity to power the battery cars will come from? Will they be "investing" in all the production facilities? Will they be solar, wind, unicorn breath or all the hot air from BEV zealots? Electric combined harvesters, tractors or excavators anyone?

No! The infrastructure will be paid for by transport, shop, factory, agricultural and care workers who will get the square root of sweet FA for their investment. Mind you the leeches will be quids in.

Reality is somewhat different, but don't let that ruin a good story...

Electricity production is the reality.... a dream yet to be achieved. It's just going to be there say the BEV fans.

If we all wore a mask with a propeller then every breath we took would produce electricity - in and out. It's a mad idea and useless, but technologically it is feasible, a bit like battery cars.

Any news yet on who will pay for the production? Asking for a few billion friends.

I've already said this more than once.

We generate approx 356TWh of energy per year.
We use approx 465TWh of fuel for vehicles per year.

However vehicles waste 65% (roughly), of the energy they consume and BEV are 90% efficient in the energy they use. So we need an additional 162.5 TWh a year for personal transport.

Even before we consider incoming changes with new generation, the grid generates roughly 45GW constantly during the day but only 20GW at night. So we have a night time window of, perhaps, 20% of our energy uplift to help with EV. This is entirely feasible even in winter.

That is 73TWh over a year.
Then we have the new Nuclear plant. That's 25TWh per year.
Then we have offshore wind. We have cut contracts to build 40GW of offshore wind. OK so what does that mean. Simple. 46% efficient on average, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, 161TWh of energy per year.

So we need 162. We have a potential for 259TW/h. This is without future nuclear plants. Without any increases in solar, onshore wind (currently on the cards again), tidal or other water based power.

Yes I've ignored the spin down of the older nuc plants. Also the gas plants have to go, but that will be defrayed with more biomass, more wind, more solar and more nuclear.

Then we have to consider that all the light and commercial vehicles are a power source. Weekend? All those HGV trucks sitting at depot's, not being used, available to bolster the grid. Able to suck out excess spin up on Sunday night ready for Monday morning.

The entire world of transport is going to change and the energy we need for it is already in the pipeline.

Then we have to look at the "possible" growth of EV. Even if magic happened and we suddenly got 2.5m EV per year and every vehicle displaced a FF vehicle every year, it would take 13 years to replace the 32m vehicles on the UK roads today. Giving a full 13 years to build in that 161TWh. But that's not going to happen. It is going to take a full decade, going flat out, to get to 2.5 million EV vehicles on sale every year (just meeting the 2035 cut off). Then it is going to take another 10 to 15 y years to replace the existing FF Stock.

Only after 20 to 25 years will we need that extra 161TWh. By which time the UK grid will be well able to cope with it.

Granted there are other issues. Home heating, business heating, business gas use for manufacturing. Yes that it going to take a lot of factoring in. But EV? It's a done deal.

Just run the numbers. You realise that your doom and gloom unicorn theory is just that.