The British government should offer a rebate of £10,000 to drivers who buy electric cars, according to the Government advisory board, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC).
A subsidy of £5,000 will be available to those buying cars that run entirely on electricity. The scheme will run from 2011, but the government’s climate change committee has suggested that the grant should be £10,000 for at least the first 25,000 buyers of electric cars.
Will there be a wholesale change to electric cars?
A spokesperson for the Environmental Transport Association (ETA) said: “No one knows for certain. Petrol and diesel-engined cars become ever more efficient; the most recent Smart diesel car returns over 85mpg and we do not yet have a mass-produced electric car on the market with a performance or range to rival it.
Even when a suitable range of electric vehicles exists, it is questionable whether a subsidy alone will bring about the wholesale change to electric cars that the government desires.”
Unfortunately for most drivers, electric and hybrid cars remain an expensive and impractical alternative to petrol and diesel models.
How could a carbon tax help electric cars?
A wholesale move to electric cars will require more than a simple subsidy. The ETA believes a tax on carbon would make them far more attractive an option.
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 would struggle to 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 that 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.
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