UK: Subsidies for electric cars do not serve green goals

Hard facts and informed opinion have been the first casualties of the maelstrom of comment, debate and public relations generated by the government’s plan to provide a subsidy of up to
Whatever fuel is used in power stations – gas, oil, coal, nuclear or biomass – just over two-fifths of the available energy is captured as electricity by linking the turbine to dynamo. But, because of electrical transmission losses over miles of cabling, only 36 per cent of the available energy ends up as useful power. In charging and discharging the lithium-ion battery of an electric car, a further seventh is lost, leaving about 31 per cent of the original fuel’s energy available to the motor.

We can, therefore, draw the in-triguing conclusion that in the UK right now there are no compelling -energy-saving reasons for moving to electric cars.

The argument then switches to how much carbon dioxide is produced from different fuels for the same energy. A rough rule of thumb is that, compared with natural gas, petrol and diesel produce 1.4 times as much carbon, oil 1.5 times and coal double – against zero for nuclear and renewable energy.

As long as the mix of fuels generating the electricity does better on this ratio than petrol or diesel, there will be a reduction in emissions from replacing existing cars with electrical vehicles. This is why discontinuing the use of fossil fuels in power stations (or moving to carbon capture and storage) is so important for electric cars to be -effective, although gas provides some benefit.

The hypothetical, though absolutely relevant, question is: would it be worth spending