Matt Ridley: I'll be buying a brand new petrol car just before the 2030 ban
Britain’s electric vehicle transition and the ban on petrol car sales from 2030 are a slow-motion car crash. The technology is not ready, the cost will be vast, the logistics are forbidding, the reliance on China is worrying and the backlash from the public is likely to be harsh.
Worst of all, the benefits are derisory at best and may not even exist.
Yes, you read that right. It is possible that we could replace all of Britain’s cars and vans with electric vehicles and still find that carbon dioxide emissions are higher, not lower. Cost-benefit, hello?
First, though, consider the politics. Most electric-car batteries are being made in China and its hold on the market is growing thanks to huge investment in lithium and other minerals, low labour costs and a cheap, coal-fired grid. Chinese company BYD overtook Tesla as the biggest manufacturer of electric vehicles last year and, in a truly sinister development, has just agreed with Tesla to jointly promote ‘core socialist values’ while dominating the market and apparently fixing prices.
Switching transport to electric in a short timescale will inevitably mean buying Chinese. Are we really about to force ourselves to become even more reliant on a totalitarian regime that stamps out freedom in Hong Kong, commits genocide against the Uighurs, threatens war on Taiwan and refuses to be transparent about how a pandemic began near its leading virus laboratory?
To wean ourselves off China over the next seven years would require 100 times as much battery capacity as we have now, which is neither affordable nor feasible. To lure battery-makers to the UK, despite our sky-high energy prices (caused by the massive investment in wind power and the refusal to tap shale gas), the Government is having to throw armfuls of taxpayers’ money at battery and car manufacturers.
Britishvolt failed to build its ‘Gigafactory’ in Blyth for lack of taxpayer subsidies.
Lord (Zac) Goldsmith thinks we are falling behind in the race to subsidise ‘green’ energy. Yet handouts rarely make industries competitive. If America and the European Union want to spend a fortune trying — and probably failing — to catch up with the Chinese, why should we join in?
But don’t expect industry bosses to tell you the truth about the impossibility of this transition. Huge taxpayer subsidies to force consumers to switch products are just what they love, whether the plan makes sense or not.
To paraphrase Gulliver’s Travels, if you asked Rolls-Royce or Tata to devise a plan to make sunbeams from cucumbers, they would have a jolly good crack at it — and only tell you it was impossible after spending a couple of billion pounds of your money.
This raises the question: why are we doing this again? We’re deliberately killing a profitable British car industry for minimal benefit to please a few posh activists and crony capitalists.
There is no sign of ordinary people demanding this transition. Electric cars still cost almost double their petrol equivalent.
So, just as producers need taxpayer subsidies to supply electric cars, consumers need subsidies to buy them. An industry dependent on taxpayer support at both ends of the chain is not sustainable.
Nor can Britain’s electricity infrastructure be adapted easily or quickly to cope with the extra demand implied by the transition — without further subsidies.
Just to supply the extra electricity for a fully electric fleet would mean a near-doubling of the number of wind farms (plus necessary gas-fired back-up), or an equivalent new supply from nuclear, a technology that takes decades to build.
Then there’s the practicality of distributing that energy. On our current grid, people are struggling to get fast chargers installed at home because of lack of capacity in the wires and transformers. That will only get worse as that capacity is taken up with demand from heat pumps.
So, unless the Government throws yet more money at upgrading the network, after 2030 we will be faced with five-hour recharge times, compared with five-minute petrol or diesel refuels today.
As Andrew Montford of Net Zero Watch argues, upgrading the distribution grid on these timescales is impossible, so meeting the target will mean many people will be forced to forgo a car entirely.
These are practical reasons why the transition cannot and won’t happen. But would it even help if it did? Let’s do a simple sum. Suppose the UK does manage to shift all cars and vans to electric in the 2030s, banning petrol and diesel cars as it does so. Cars and vans generate about 70 per cent of transport emissions and transport is 25 per cent of all emissions.
Meanwhile, an optimistic estimate of the emissions savings of electric cars over petrol or diesel is 25 per cent per vehicle and the UK generates 1 per cent of worldwide emissions, then that means we will have reduced global emissions of carbon dioxide by — wait for it — [0.7 x 0.25 x 0.25 x 0.01 = 0.0004375 or] 0.044 per cent.
Less than one half of one tenth of one per cent. You would probably have more effect on the climate if you dropped a couple of ice cubes in the Thames once a week.
And that’s the best we can hope for. In reality the effect will be even smaller. The notion that switching from petrol to electric saves 25 per cent of emissions is, as I say, optimistic, perhaps wildly so. In fact, the number may actually be negative.
Here’s why. First, it requires a lot more carbon dioxide emissions in a lot of extractive industries to make an electric car than a petrol car. This is especially true for the battery.
As Mark Mills, an energy expert with the Manhattan Institute, explained in a recent article: ‘To match the energy stored in one pound of crude oil [from which petrol and diesel are produced] requires 15 pounds of lithium battery, which entails digging up about 7,000 pounds of rock and dirt to get the minerals needed — lithium, graphite, copper, nickel, aluminium, zinc, neodymium, manganese and so on.
‘Thus, fabricating a typical single half-ton EV battery requires mining and processing about 250 tons of materials.’
That requires a lot of diesel and electricity.
So there’s a huge up-front emissions disadvantage before an electric car even takes to the road. As Professor of Engineering Science at Oxford University Gautam Kalghatgi calculates, an electric car with a 60 kWh battery will start with a deficit of 7.5 tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions, before it has driven a single mile.
Even when running, an electric vehicle is not ‘zero-emission’ because Britain’s electric grid is powered by gas (which emits some carbon dioxide) and wind turbines (whose manufacture requires a lot of coal and which get replaced every 20 or 30 years). Even nuclear has a carbon footprint (all that concrete and steel), though it’s much the smallest.
Take all that into account and you can calculate how many miles an electric car has to drive before it has ‘broken even’ with a petrol car on emissions.
Many estimates of this number are not worth the paper they are written on, because they make absurdly unrealistic assumptions about the size of battery needed, the scale of the up-front emissions and other factors.
But some are a bit better. Volkswagen compared a diesel Golf with an electric Golf and estimated that the electric car has to be driven 80,000 miles before its emissions are lower than the diesel car in a typical European country.
In Germany, where the grid still depends partly on coal, it’s more like 125,000 miles. In China, you would never reach break even and electric cars might as well be called coal cars. This emperor has no clothes.
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Green Hydrogen Is No Miracle Solution for Carbon Free Energy
The Daily Caller (DCNF) recently posted an article by contributor John Hugh DeMastri describing significant issues likely to limit the effectiveness of the Biden administration’s plans to invest up to $1 billion in taxpayer dollars to “green hydrogen.” DCNF’s analysis correctly concludes that green hydrogen is expensive and adds complexity to power generation that makes little sense when other fuels are available.
The Department of Energy (DOE) says they will develop green hydrogen infrastructure with a “demand side support mechanism,” which they say will “provide multi-year support for clean hydrogen produced by competitively selected projects,” which are affiliated with the DOE-supported Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs.
Hydrogen fuel itself is not new, it can be made from natural gas or methane, but “green” hydrogen, as opposed to other methods of generating hydrogen, uses only renewables like wind or solar to convert water into hydrogen for fuel.
In the DCNF article, “Biden’s Billion Dollar Hydrogen Program Makes No ‘Economic Or Common Sense,’ Industry Experts Say,” various energy sector experts explain why, despite the technology’s long existence, it hasn’t found large scale commercial success.
From the post:
The process of manufacturing green hydrogen — known as electrolysis — converts water into hydrogen using renewable power, and the hydrogen it generates is nearly 14 times as expensive as natural gas to generate the same amount of power, Isaac Orr, a policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment told the DCNF.
While proponents of green hydrogen “envision massive facilities” using electrolysis, such facilities are not cost-effective, Jonathan Lesser, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute studying energy, told the DCNF. In addition, hydrogen is difficult to transport, because it can damage the steel used in existing oil and gas pipelines and has the potential to leak, creating an explosion risk, said Lesser.
Lesser told DCNF that there are no large-scale power plants that use green hydrogen because it is prohibitively expensive, and because hydrogen’s low density means it requires much more storage space than other fuels. In addition, electrolysis requires larges volumes of water.
Lesser is correct. While the calorific value (energy content) of hydrogen is high by mass, it is very low by volume because of the low density of the fuel. In fact, The Engineering Toolbox reports that hydrogen has a gross calorific value of only 341 BTU/ft3, compared to natural gas at 1090 BTU/ft3. In other words, natural gas by volume has three times the energy content of hydrogen.
This is a similar issue with biofuels like ethanol, or wood-pellet biomass, as explained in several Climate Realism posts, here and here, for instance, where their low energy density makes them poor substitutes for fuels like natural gas and coal.
Additionally, the pipeline issue has already become a stumbling block. The extent of existing hydrogen pipelines is limited and existing natural gas pipelines cannot, in their current state, carry hydrogen. The DOE’s Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies office describes a few issues with using existing natural gas pipelines:
Existing pipelines would need to be altered to accommodate widespread hydrogen use. The DOE says that while a mixed gas like methane + hydrogen would require only “modest” modifications, a pure green hydrogen pipeline “may require more substantial modifications.”
For example, since hydrogen is a much smaller molecule than methane, existing pipelines would likely suffer far more leaks carrying pure, pressurized hydrogen. Add that to the fact that hydrogen is highly explosive, and there is an added safety hazard with widespread hydrogen use.
Since hydrogen fuel is already so much more expensive than natural gas to make the same amount of power, these investments would substantially increase energy costs.
DCNF reports in the article that Energy Secretary Granholm said that the hundreds of millions of dollars in investment funds would clear up “market uncertainty” that “too often delays progress” on green hydrogen projects. That is, the government will use tax dollars to make sure it is implemented even though it makes no economic sense and is, in fact, a net economic loss. So much for waiting for demand to motivate green hydrogen adoption, its supply side all the way.
The Biden administration expects green hydrogen will be able to replace natural gas in home use and transportation, as well as provide backup electricity for when solar and wind fail.
Expanding green hydrogen to all those functions is unreasonable, because if land-hungry sources like wind and solar are used to power electrolysis to generate green hydrogen, and hydrogen power is supposed to provide backup electricity for when wind and solar don’t work, there would need to be a massive expansion of wind and solar. Expanding it to every home will require retrofitting the pipes into every home and to every appliance using the fuel.
Climate Realism has described the issues with just expanding wind for electricity generation on its own, here, here, and here, for example. If solar is used for the hydrogen generation, the best regions of the world for solar, like the American Southwest, also happen to be the ones that struggle with water issues, which green hydrogen production would surely exacerbate.
Hydrogen burns clean, with only water as its output, and is already widely used in industrial applications, but when it is made “green” it suffers from high costs, complex infrastructure, and limited usefulness, the same as other green tech. The Biden administration seems to be hoping that subsidizing the technology enough will make the issues disappear. However, like The Daily Caller correctly explains, there are more than just price tag issues holding mass expansion of green hydrogen use back.
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Wrong, Bloomberg, Climate Change is Not ‘Coming for Your Cabernet’
A recent article in Bloomberg, titled “Mother Nature Is Coming for Your Cabernet,” makes the oft-repeated claim that climate change is threatening wine production, in this case, focusing on South Africa. This claim, as always, is false. In reality, wine production in South Africa in particular has done well over the past decades of modest warming, with no sign of any looming disaster.
The writer and senior executive editor at Bloomberg, Timothy L. O’Brien, described a conversation he had with a vintner in South Africa during a recent trip. He notes that winemaking is “just another version of farming” and that it’s “hard, unpredictable work.” This is true. All agricultural production is subject to sometimes unpredictable weather patterns over both short- and long-term time periods. Weather disasters are occurring all around the world at all times, so somewhere, some produce is being impacted. This is not new, and is not indicative of long-term effects from climate change.
O’Brien goes on to declare that climate change may make some of the most famous regions for wine production “inhospitable to grape production.” This statement is protected by the use of the word “may,” but in the context of the article, is clearly meant to be taken seriously. The possibility of major producing regions becoming “inhospitable” amid warming is extremely low, especially since data indicate that despite the last hundred-plus years of warming, grape growing and winemaking have not suffered.
Indeed, the opposite is true, especially for South Africa. The available United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FA0) data on wine production in South Africa show that since FAO records began in 1961 both grape production and wine production have improved. The all-time record for wine production in South Africa occurred in 2014, and the all-time highest grape production was as recent as 2017.
Bad seasons will happen on occasion—they are all but guaranteed to for any agricultural business, but this is nothing new. As explained in almost a dozen previous Climate Realism posts on climate change and wine or grape production, winemakers and wine consumers are usually aware that some growing seasons produce better wines then others, hence the collecting of particular vintages from particular vineyards. It is the overall weather of the growing season that results in those differences from one vintage to the next, and for some wines it is more noticeable than others.
O’Brien made another puzzling comment, that grapes used for wine “require very specific conditions to grow,” and it’s certainly true that each grape variety prefers certain conditions, but the implication that wine all around the world is threatened because conditions may change is more alarmist than accurate. As O’Brien himself points out, major vineyards can be found all around the world in different climates and with different soil conditions, and the kinds of grapes that are selected for each growing region are based on what produces the best product for the region. There is no reason to suspect that vintners will stop selecting the most suitable grapes for their climate.
The owner of the South African vineyard O’Brien visited, Jean Engelbrecht, said that not only can weather patterns impact different regions in unpredictable ways, but nearby vineyards can see different weather as well. O’Brien explains that, while there was drought in South Africa that recently “sideswiped many of Jean’s local competitors,” in Jean’s area, “robust rainfalls plumped some of his recent harvests.”
This in itself indicates that local weather, not long-term climate change, is responsible any difficulties vintners face.
Bloomberg and O’Brien would do well to temper their impulse to attribute every weather-related seasonal, regional crop production decline to climate change, and instead look at the long-term data and trends to verify whether climate change might be playing a role. Concerns about wine and climate change are unsubstantiated by available data, history, and common agricultural knowledge.
https://climaterealism.com/2023/07/wrong-bloomberg-climate-change-is-not-coming-for-your-cabernet/
*************************************************Damaged electric cars ‘quarantined’ over fears they will explode
Electric cars that sustain minor bumps are being kept 15 meters apart in repair yards over fears they might explode, adding to insurance bills.
Government guidelines recommend electric vehicles with damaged batteries should be “quarantined” from other vehicles due to the risk of battery fires. Damaged batteries pose a risk of “thermal runaway” where the energy stored in the battery releases rapidly, creating temperatures of up to 400C.
But the practice threatens to increase costs for the insurance industry by more than £600m, costs which ultimately could be passed onto drivers in increased premiums, according to a report by automotive risk firm Thatcham Research.
It said insurers would need to spend an additional £900m a year on quarantine facilities for damaged cars as a result of the safety measures by 2035, as more battery-powered vehicles take to the roads. The extra costs risk adding £20 a year onto all car insurance premiums, rising to £28 by 2050 when there are expected to be some 360,000 electric cars on the road network.
Just two damaged electric cars can fit into the same space that would otherwise fit 100 petrol or diesel cars, under current the DVLA and Transport Department guidelines.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/insurance/car/damaged-electric-cars-quarantined-fears-explode/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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