The Fool on the Hill: When does the charge start?

I've been skeptical about whether the replacement of all the world's motor vehicle fleet with equally heavy, equally powerful, electric vehicles in time to make any meaningful difference to climate change was practical for a while now. I don't think we've the resources to do it: I wrote Where's the steel? four years ago.

But just at present I'm working on preparing a 'Local Place Plan' for Auchencairn, and the grim absurdity of the idea is striking me even more forcefully.

Unless we achieve 'net zero' carbon emissions well before 2050, then the chances of sustaining a habitable planet are exactly that: zero. But 'net zero,' as we've already seen, is a scam: all the schemes which have so far been set up to sell carbon credits have by now been shown to be either absurdly over-optimistic, or actual deliberate fraud. Newly planted (and theoretically conserved) forests burn. We're not even replanting sufficient area of new forest to equal the area we're felling for timber, and young trees sequester much less carbon than mature ones.

Nor can we replace fossil fuels with biofuels at any scale at all. Biofuels need arable land to grow. What else needs arable land to grow? Why, food for humans. And the available area of arable land decreases sharply with global warming, both as a consequence of sea level rise and as a consequence of aridification and desertfication as temperatures rise across the tropics. How many deaths from starvation is your annual holiday in the sun worth?

So 'net zero' has to mean actual zero. Which means no fossil fuel powered cars, no fossil fuel powered trucks, no fossil fuel powered tractors or harvesters. At all. Within twenty five years. As I argued in Where's the steel?, we don't have and won't have sufficient zero carbon strategic materials — steel, principally, but also copper, lithium and rare earths — to replace all this equipment in twenty five years, but there's another issue I hadn't even thought about.

Auchencairn village has somewhere around two hundred and fifty dwellings, and it has on average more than one motor vehicle per dwelling. It needs to have — many essential services, such as a pharmacy or a doctor's surgery, are not provided in the village, and public transport is infrequent and less than perfectly reliable. It has in addition around forty diesel powered farm vehicles, mainly tractors (I have one).

So how many electric cars, vans and tractors does it now have? I believe, two. That's two out of at least four hundred, or 0.5%. How many public charging points for electric cars does it have? That would be none at all.

According to Ofgem, the average electricity consumption per dwelling house in the UK is around 8 kWh per day, which is to say on long term average about 350 watts. So for the about 250 dwellings in Auchencairn that's a long term average of about 87 kilowatts. Of course power supply has to cope with peaks, so the cabling and transformers supplying Auchencairn must be rated substantially higher, perhaps 500 kilowatts or half a megawatt, but we're just talking scaling here, and orders of magnitude.

Domestic car chargers are typically rated at seven kilowatts. So if four hundred electric vehicles are plugged into their chargers of an evening, that's 2.8 megawatts. Of course, typically not all vehicles will need to be recharged every evening, but very often very many of them will be, and so the electricity supply to Auchencairn village will need to be upgraded by at least a factor of four.

Which means, substantially larger transmission lines, probably at higher voltage, so probably on taller pylons. That isn't going to be popular and there will certainly be some NIMBY resistance. But also, it's going to be expensive.

Scotland is a rich country. It can afford to upgrade the electricity supply to one village, easily. But can it afford to upgrade the electricity supply to every community in the country, at the same time, by a factor of about four, while every other country in the world is buying up available copper, steel and aluminium to do exactly the same? I honestly hae ma doots.

And, of course, the later we delay starting this, the more compressed a time frame it all has to happen in, which means we'll have a desperate shortage of skilled workers as well as higher costs. We need to get working: we need to get charging on with this; or else, to look for other, lower energy (and material) cost solutions than two ton private cars.

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