Running your car on windmills

As you know, the ETA has been saying for years that we ought to introduce a carbon tax. I thought I should say what would happen if we were to do so.

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 (being Britain more wind than solar).

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 could not cope). This could allow cities (should they have 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 encourage the motor industry to build cars that can perform 100-mile round trips without refuelling, and filling stations to offer rapid electrical charging.

This could all happen extraordinarily quickly – faster than past changes in informatics – from computers to telephones and high definition televisions. Faster than you can say “iPod” or “mobile phone”. The reason is this. The informatics industry is big – a few hundred billion pounds a year, but the energy industry is humungous – around three trillion pounds a year and demand for energy is growing rapidly. So 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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Carbon tax – why it makes sense