Will switch to electric cars require 10 nuclear power stations?

The Royal Academy of Engineering has calculated that ten nuclear power stations would need to be built if Britain’s cars were to switch from petrol to electricity.

An earlier report by European transport lobby group, T&E, found that the environmental benefits to be had from a switch to electric vehicles were dependent not only on changes in the way electricity was generated, but the way energy was taxed and CO2 emissions regulated.

Catch twenty-two for electric cars

A spokesperson for the Environmental Transport Association (ETA) said: “Changes to the power network so that it is greener and has greater capacity are regarded as a prerequisite for a swap to electric cars, but they are unlikely to happen before electric vehicles sell in numbers high enough to create a demand in the first place – a catch twenty-two that must not be allowed to delay the decarbonisation of road transport.”

“The fledgling electric car and renewable energy industries have a major part to play in helping to tackle climate change, but only a tax on carbon at source will foster the conditions necessary to achieve meaningful reductions in our emissions at work, in the home and on the road.”

How would a carbon tax help electric cars?

At the moment producing electricity from coal costs around 3p a kilowatt per hour (3p/kW/h). This is cheaper than burning natural gas or oil and that is why most power stations still use coal to generate electricity. Renewables cannot produce electricity this cheaply as electricity from wind turbines costs 4p/kW/h and the latest solar technology also costs 4p/kW/h.

However, once the Carbon Tax Commission sets its rate for a carbon tax the cost of producing electricity from coal fired power stations would cost more than renewables. From that moment on almost all new “power stations” in this country would be wind or solar-based.

The nature of the national grid would change from the current hub and spokes system to a peer-to-peer network system. This would radically reduce the cost of power supply.

This in turn would enable cars to run on electricity (currently if all cars ran on electricity the national grid might struggle to cope). This could allow cities, should they have a wish to do so, to ban all vehicles that were not zero emission from all or part of their cities. The first bans could be on days and in places where local pollution is above World Health Organisation limits.

This will create a huge market for zero emission vehicles and any infrastructure necessary to service them.

This could all happen extraordinarily quickly – faster than you can say “iPod” or “mobile phone”. The reason is that whilst the informatics industry is big – a few hundred billion pounds a year – the energy industry worth around three trillion pounds a year with demand for energy growing rapidly. The opportunity for renewables is mind boggling – as soon as the price it right. Introduce a carbon tax and the price will be right – tomorrow.

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