General   (General discussion, talk about anything.)

Golden Bear

This whole thing comes down to infrastructure, electrical infrastructure.

For folk who keep their cars on the street, or anywhere where there are no charging points, then those people will have to visit charging points to charge their vehicle battery, and the speed at which the charge can be delivered, is down to the capacity of the battery in kWh and the power rating of the charge point in kW the higher the power of the charge point, the faster the charge, and the more the battery is depleted, then the longer it will take to fully charge, it's a highly logical sequence.

In practice folk will keep their cars fully charged, and I would imagine that in all 'commercial' car parks, every car parking space will have its own charge point, and when I say 'commercial' I mean car parks such as council car parks, private car parks, such as Euro Car Parks, supermarket car parks, shopping mall car parks, train station car parks, and they are going to be what is known as Cash Cows, the owners of those car parks will make a lot of easy money from charging vehicles.

Yoo will go to Asda and spend half an hour in there, so you get half an hour of charge, depending on the battery capacity, and power rating factors, in that half an hour of charge, yoo may get 50-100 miles of motoring, so for someone who just drives around town, or as we say now someone who as a low annual mileage figure, then having a car with ''NO'' home charging point, in an urban environment like Wigan, with plenty of charge points, then your quality of life will not be impacted adversely by having an electric vehicle, because wherever yoo go, you will be able to 'Top Up' your vehicle

BUT

And in my opinion there are an awful lot of 'buts' so many 'buts' that this whole idea of having all cars to be electric within a decade or two, if you include the phasing out of petrol and diesel vehicles, then that is going to be impossible to achieve.

Firstly there are driving practices, in that high mileage driving, whether that be someone who travels all over the country in their vehicles, as part of their job, then where are they going to get the time to charge their vehicles, in that if they drive 400miles, then they are going to have to have a big charge, which even with a mega speed charging point, that is going to take at least a couple of hours, not like now, taking five minutes filling up and paying for tank full of petrol, and less time if yoo pay by card at the pump, and that charging time for an electrical vehicle, is with future technology, so it will add hours to the working day of a such a driver.

Commercial vehicles, such as the haulage industry, think how much electricity they will need, in terms of battery capacity and charging point power, and that brings me to the next point.

If transportation is going to move from being powered by fossil fuels petrol and diesel, then think of the mega billions of extra kW of electricity production that will require, and as previously stated, we are almost at the limit of electrical power production capacity in this country now, because of the phasing out of coal fired power stations, and the closure of nuclear power station which have not been replaced, so there is just not going to be the electric available, and if most commercial car parks install charging points, then think of the electrical infrastructure which will be required to supply those charging points, in the form of sub stations and the extra high power transmission networks, so it does come down to infrastructure, many more power stations will be need to produce the extra electricity required, and many more pylons supporting the cabling to transport that electricity, and many more miles of underground power cables in towns to take the electricity to the charging points, and think of all the money that will cost the 'government' so in my opinion as a Wiganer, I will say that I think that it "Cawn't Be Done" in ten or twenty or even thirty years.

So if I don't think it can be done in the main population centres of this country, then how the hell will they doo it in the remote locations in this country?

Look at it this way, if you have a couple of petrol stations in the North of Scotland, supplying a remote area, and those two petrol stations, get two deliveries of fuel a week, of both petrol and diesel, then if a calculation is made of an average of how much fossil fuel vehicle energy is supplied by four fuel tankers, road tankers, the average per week, for that remote area, which includes all types and sizes of vehicles, cars, lorries, buses etc and convert that calculation to kWh if the vehicles were all replaced with electric vehicles, and then price up how much it would cost in the extra infrastructure to generate the extra electricity required, and transport that electricity by upgrading and increasing the National Grid electrical supply to that remote location, plus the addition of charging points, for folk who cannot charge their vehicles at home.

You probably wouldn't be talking millions of pounds, you might be talking billions of pounds, if an extra power station was required, compare that cost, to the cosy of four fuel tankers per week, it is just loodickerous, because throughout the country, you will need a lot of extra generating capacity from 'none' renewable energy sources, to guarantee the supply of electricity, because it is alright having wind farms all over the country and in the seas around this country, but yoo are buggered if the wind is not blowing, because no wind, no wind farm electricity, so you will still have to have gas and nuclear powered power stations, in reserve.

So in my opinion all vehicles converting to battery power, is a none starter (a flat battery)

Other technologies may work though, such has hybrid cars, with a fossil fuel engine for charging the vehicle battery in places where there are no charging points, and charging the battery whilst the vehicle is on the move and hydrogen cell powered vehicles