Solar Powered Forecourts – This Electric Car Thing Is Going To Cost A Fortune, Isn’t It?

As you will know the official stance on climate change around here is the one that’s unpopular with absolutely everyone. Sure, let’s do something about it but let’s not do what the screaming mob seems to desire. That is, we’ve, at worst, a minor technological problem that can be solved with minor adjustments to incentives, globalised capitalism can not just continue but is the solution – that actually being what the IPCC reports themselves tell us – but it is also worth our doing something along the lines of a carbon tax. As I say, managing to piss off everyone in the debate.

This doesn’t stop me noting when people are offering to do damn fool things about it all. Nor noting when things aren’t being mentioned. Take these electric cars for example. We’ve a law stating that all new cars should be electric by 2030, maybe 2040, whatever it is they said it should be. They’ve deliberately ruled out hybrids, which would be the cheap way to get to 80 to 90% of the emissions gains. Which is a pity because all electric cars are going to be fearsomely expensive:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] Ultra-fast electric vehicle forecourts will accelerate across UK motorways this year with the start of a billion-pound project to build 100 solar-powered sites. Taxis, buses and delivery vehicles will be able to charge up in under 30 minutes at forecourts equipped with their own solar panels and battery packs. Meanwhile passenger vehicles will be able to recharge in less than 10 minutes. The developer, Gridserve, plans to build around 24 charging bays at each forecourt, which will also come equipped with facilities including supermarkets and coffee shops so drivers can make the most of their time. [/perfectpullquote]

That’s going to be an interesting technical trick, juicing up 300 miles in a car battery in 10 minutes. But allow that they’ll be able to do this and think about costs. It’s £10 million a forecourt to be able to charge 24 cars. £400,000 per charging space that is.

Which is rather a lot, isn’t it? That cost having to come from somewhere and in the end it’ll come from the only place it can, an addition to the cost of the electricity being pumped into those batteries. This being a cost which isn’t currently in anyone’s spreadsheets of how much it’s going to cost to run an electric car. Meaning that all those spreadsheets are wrong.

But then that’s long been true of most of this talk about renewables and ‘leccie powered this and that. The calculations we’re presented with just aren’t including the price of the infrastructure necessary to deliver it. Say the cars all get charged at home – what’s the cost of upgrading the entire electrical grid to allow this? Even, the usual calculations of windmill prices don’t include the prices needed to connect them to any part of the grid.

There being only one way to ensure that all such costs are included of course. Which is to have the system driven by prices. Thus all the costs of any particular action are included in the sticker price that people must pay. One argument against this is that these technologies will be so expensive, seen to be what they are, in this manner that no one will use them. But then if that’s true then people shouldn’t be using them either.

You see, there is actually a disturbing truth at the bottom of all this. It’s possible – no, I don’t think it is but it’s possible – that averting climate change is so expensive that we really should be boiling Flipper in that last melting ice floe in 50 years time. That being what maximises human utility, the aim of the game. And the only way we can possibly find out whether this is true or not is to get prices right and let the market do its work.

Thus hang the bureaucrats and have a carbon tax. But then the first part of that is always the right answer, the second the correct one to this particular problem.