Analysis: is the UK ready for an electrified vehicle future?

What about charging?

If ‘Road To Zero’ is anything, it’s clear in its implication: the intention is that most of these vehicle miles will be travelled using electric power.

There’ll be two ways of giving a car a 50-mile electric range: by on-board charging (using a drive engine, range- extending generator, or fuel cell); or by plugging in your vehicle to a power supply.

No hybrid car today with an electric-only range of less than a few miles can be plugged in, but if you’re fitting a battery big enough to do 50 miles, you might as well put a socket on it.

So the short of it is that every single car sold after 2040 will have a socket – or external charging of some kind – with the hope that you’ll use it most of the time. If it’s an EV, you’ll have to use it all the time.

Today, there are about 16,500 publicly available vehicle charge points, accounting for around only 20% of all vehicle charging, because 70% of electric vehicle charges happen at home and 10% on business premises.

The large number of home chargers means that “there are at least as many dedicated EV charging points in the UK as there are EVs in the UK at this moment in time; the charging market is keeping up with the car market”, according to Chargemaster, an electric vehicle charging company that has manufactured more than 50,000 chargers to date.

Chargemaster believes the number of charge points will continue to rise in line with the number of EVs or part-EVs on the road. And given that early EV adopters are those most likely to have the option to charge at home, the proportion of publicly available chargers will have to increase, for those (the National Grid estimates 43% of the population) who live in terraces, flats or places with no off-street charging. 

Not all of these chargers will be needed by 2040. That’s only the start of the 50-mile compulsion, and the average age of a car in the UK is eight years old. This means that it’ll be 2048, 30 years from now, before, effectively, every car in the country will need charging capacity. There will be exceptions, such as classics that can never be never plugged in and fuel cell vehicles, if many become available.

There could be fewer chargers than cars, or more, but Chargemaster is clear that the trend is for the number of charge points and EVs to match. If that trend does continue – and the necessity for more public charging and the fact that it takes longer, through most chargers, to add range than it actually does to use it – it means that by 2048, Britain will need a network of 31.2 million of them (unless most of our driving is still done by petrol or diesel power, which isn’t the point of the plan).

Assuming there are around 130,000 chargers today, then, that’s an increase of 23,846% for Britain to become fully electrically viable.

A charger built today, though, would likely not have a service life of 30 years, nor will commercial companies start building redundant chargers: it’s estimated that 200,000 EVs and PHEVs will be on the road this year, but that’s only a fraction of the vehicle parc. So there’ll surely need to be an exponential build-up to an immense installation programme in the 2030s, with hundreds of thousands of chargers being installed every week before the electric switchover, and new substations and high-current supplies to parking areas. Can it be done? There are private companies whose fortunes will be made on it.

The energy dilemma:

How much power, though, will this charge network deliver? This is trickier to calculate. Already electric cars are efficient – much more so than internally combusted vehicles. They’ll likely get more efficient again, but there’s the likelihood that vehicle miles and the number of cars will increase, too, so we’ll assume that consumption would be the same as electric cars would need to drive 253.7bn miles today.

Sampling the range and battery size of battery EVs on sale now, each kilowatt hour (kWh) of energy will carry you between three and six miles. If it’s fair to expect that cars will get more efficient (although don’t discount today’s best technology still being that offered on small, cheaper vehicles), we’ll assume that each kWh will take a driver six miles. Therefore 253.7bn vehicle miles will draw 42.1bn kilowatt hours – 42.1 terawatt hours – from the National Grid every year.

That’s 12.4% of additional demand on the UK, which generates 339.3TWh of its own energy every year and imports another 17.5TWh from overseas.

Charging overnight, which is currently a time of low demand, will become a period of sustained demand, if short- range batteries are trickle- charged, and that’s when the grid has surplus power: hence it can be cheaper to use domestic appliances overnight.

High-capacity chargers that can charge bigger batteries in less time, though, are the grid’s bigger concern. Because 43% of car owners who can’t charge at home, and because domestic supplies aren’t robust enough for high-current charging, the grid says that “if we want long-range vehicles that can be charged in minutes, home is not going to be the place to do it. And it certainly won’t be for nearly half of households.”

That’ll mean that daytime charging, perhaps between the beginning and end of the working day, when demand is already as its peak, will be a peak charging time, too, meaning that the UK will have to import even more of its electricity.

Who will foot the bill?

Finally, then, comes the issue of how this is all paid for. The bill for cars, chargers and electricity will be footed by the consumer, but with the concurrent drop in fuel duty – which alone has increased by 24% since 2000 – the Treasury stands to lose, in today’s numbers, a vast proportion of the £28bn it takes in fuel duty. That amounts to 4% of all tax revenues (not even including VAT on fuel) and is far higher than the amount that is spent on roads. Is it not reasonable to assume that, even though it is flagged as an environmental tax, the Treasury would like that back?

If so, the cost, presumably, cannot just go onto electricity, unless you can separate the energy people use to charge a vehicle from the energy they use in cooking or lighting or heating. Which is possible, but not simple, and would be open to abuse.

Alternatively, then, there would need to be a nationwide system of road charging, so you pay by the mile for the journeys you take by car. 

Every road, major and minor - every single mile of the 253bn miles we drive each year - would have to be monitored, logged and charged to the right individual. It could mean you get a tag in your windscreen or it could mean a data-logger in your car, recording your every step.

Either way, that’s why establishing a big enough charge network is critical, because the alternative for half of the population is that they’d be faced with either waiting to charge, or making essential journeys on fossil fuel power. It’s a set-up that penalises the least wealthy drivers. Not only could car choice be reduced and costs increased, but those who can’t charge at home could also have to pay fuel duty plus a per-mile road charge if they can’t find public charging. While the goal of zero tailpipe emissions remains admirable, then, the path towards it is arguably the rockiest in vehicle history.

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